Cracked.com's David Wong knocks it out of the park again

(Apologies if this is the wrong forum, I don't post much)

A happy Yanksgiving to all my neighbours to the south. We all have more to be thankful (and hopeful) for than we think!

www.cracked.com/blog/lets-briefly-stop-to-notice-things-that-arent-terrible

Taking a minute to notice the positive isn't about making ourselves feel better (though I suppose it can), it's about something else entirely.

Mainly, about not giving up.

...

The existence of mass media means you get to hear about the whole world's problems -- that part of your brain designed to say, "Focus on this, it's dangerous" is just stuck in the On position, all the time. That creates this exhausting, debilitating impression that the world is a string of successive disasters, the whole thing continuously flying apart at the seams.

That impression you're getting is objectively impossible, though. If society was just an endless string of mounting problems with no solutions, we wouldn't have advanced from grass huts to space stations. It would have been one step forward, ten thousand back. In reality, the ratio is closer to the opposite.

...

Well, if nothing else, some of you now know why you bother.

You bother because you have much to lose and the only way to keep that fixed in your mind is to occasionally stop and appreciate what you have. All of those boring little things that send you reeling if they're missing for just a day, the privileges you avoid acknowledging so much that it actually annoys you when someone brings them up. The freedoms you take as a universal constant, despite the fact that 95 percent of humans have lived without them.

...

At some point, every single person who has ever been involved in anything great has suffered at least one gut-punch of a setback, has felt like the sun has fallen out of the sky. Some people feel like that all day, every day. So, every now and then we make you stop and eat a big meal and listen to corny nonsense about things that happened in the past. It's supposed to reorient you, to remind you that we overcame bad **** back then and we'll overcome it this time, too.

Then we give the future something to be thankful for and, well, that's how all of this works.