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At a workshop I held last month in my living room with a handful of you folks, an attendee was looking at the subject lines I'd used over the years for my other mailing list, and couldn't help laughing at (what I admit is the somewhat over-the-top) "Ungrateful People Should Be Executed."
But ingratitude is surely one of the worst qualities a person can have -- first and foremost toward people who have loved and cared for them, but also toward benefactors and friends.
Beyond that: we should be grateful for the sacrifices that have been made to create the material prosperity that surrounds us. We have plenty to complain about, sure, and the regime has made us poorer than we should be, but there are miracles all around us and nobody even stops to consider them, or to understand the role of saving and capital accumulation in our standard of living.
Most people act as if the prosperity we experience is the default, or is somehow automatic. It is neither. It requires certain kinds of institutions and certain kinds of people.
I've always looked at what I have with amazement. As a little kid, my dad would read me the picture book “How Things Work.” I couldn't believe people had engineered things so complicated that I could turn a handle and clean water would come out, or heat would keep me cozy through a wooden vent on my floor in a blizzard.
There is nothing normal about having a toilet in your home, a refrigerator, or taking a flight on any airline. I feel unworthy of how much I inherited without having to understand or truly suffer for any of it. All day we interact with creature comforts few of us understand at all.
America once built bridges at a speed we now struggle to imagine, even with our billions in “funding,” because we have lost our spirit to build a great society.
That's why this growing culture of victimhood in Western countries frustrates me so much. We live in a tiny sliver of human history where ordinary people can enjoy comforts that kings couldn't dream up. Life can still be hard, and it is for many. But we have become so accustomed to what works for us that we barely acknowledge it, while convincing ourselves we've been cheated out of something even better. We point to centuries of injustice without much desire to say thanks or ask what we can add before we leave this life.
We don't seem to admire people like Nikola Tesla or Ben Franklin anymore. We credit narcissists whose only job has been politics with the sunset, even when they have never added an ounce of prosperity to this world. Meanwhile, we dismiss great engineers and inventors as bigots from the past for not living up to today's “moral” standards.
We seem so willing to tear into the foundations of all of it because someone has persuaded us that the person who built a successful company is the reason another person is sleeping outside.
We have lost the courage to do good when it might cost us the appearance of being good. We let people destroy themselves with drugs on the sidewalk and call it compassion. We tolerate the people supplying them. We slap people on the wrist for horrific acts of violence and assault, sacrificing other people's safety and sometimes their lives for this faux empathy. We hand over enormous amounts of public money to organizations whose employees keep getting paid while the suffering they exist to address becomes permanent. And our only new solution seems to be more money, to the point that we brag about spending rather than results, whether it's education or homelessness.
We don't acknowledge the suffering that came before us. The brutality, hunger and disease that shaped life in every ethnicity and on every continent.
We've become so protective of our comfort that even having children and raising them can sound like an unreasonable interruption to our insatiable appetite for entertainment.
I'm afraid we'll keep consuming what we inherited until we no longer have the conviction to defend or maintain it. There are people who would happily take power over a society too divided and demoralized to believe it's worth preserving. We would miss our freedoms very quickly and long for our previous “oppressors.”
Lately, I think the impulse to have a family, and put your energy into the people you can actually be there for us the truest part of life. But I don't want a private refuge while things deteriorate. I want this to last. I really want us all to make it, and for good to beat evil.
I want us to care enough about what we have to build something our children and the world will be grateful to inherit. And not just tangible goods but a high trust society that has community.
To do that, we have to fight this constant teaching of ingratitude, this belief that grievances about the past have any possibility to save us.
I want our children to feel the amazement of humanity's achievements with deep gratitude. This could all fall if we don't do that.
Woods again: That's what makes "I, Pencil" a great essay: it encourages wonder and gratitude by describing the amazing latticework that is the capital structure, and how it works together without central direction. Julie Borowski's great children's book Nobody Knows How to Make a Pizza, which I read to Sarah and Elizabeth Woods when it came out in 2019, does likewise:
So the prosperity around us didn't fall from the sky. It exists because people saved, invested, and put their capital to work, often taking on considerable uncertainty in the process. Every pencil, pizza, and plumbing fixture traces back to someone who deferred consumption today in hopes of building something tomorrow.
We should be grateful for that system. Indeed, we should take part in it.
Most people don't. They may admire the marvels of the market from a distance, which is at least something, but when it comes to their own savings, they either leave everything sitting idle while inflation quietly eats away at it, or they hand it off to someone else and hope for the best. The financial markets feel like a foreign country to them, full of jargon and people shouting on cable TV.
For nearly two years I've told you about what I myself do, which involves a program called Low Stress Options, a conservative approach to options (it can even be done inside a custodial account for children, as I do for my kids, and those accounts don't allow crazy risky stuff).
It's designed for ordinary people, who haven't spent their lives doing stuff like this, but who want their capital working for them without turning into day traders glued to a screen and getting an ulcer. Nothing low stress about that. The program's testimonials on Trustpilot and in my email inbox are about as enthusiastic as any I’ve seen.
I'm doing calls with the creator of the program every weekday this week, including today, starting at 5pm Eastern (one hour from when you're receiving this).Click hereto reserve a spot for yourself, and I'll see you there.
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