Appreciating Pencils

This week I realized that we, as a society, don’t appreciate pencils enough and that we also aren’t very good at hiking.

Not literally (but also sort of literally).

We have gotten a bit too blasé about many of the incredible things that human ingenuity has made possible over an extremely short time span.

I’m sure you’re wondering what could possibly be so “ingenious” about pencils and what hiking has to do with human progress.

Let’s go for a ride.

I was listening to a podcast this week with Tim Urban, where he brought up a pretty interesting idea. He proposed that there isn’t a single person on earth who knows how to make an entire pencil from scratch. I’m not talking about just flipping some switch on some pencil-making machine. I’m talking about everything from harvesting the wood, waxing and staining the wood, creating and then mixing the chemicals that ultimately compose the paint, mining the aluminum and creating the glue used to secure the eraser, fashioning the rubber that ultimately becomes the eraser, mining the graphite…you get the point.

The thought experiment serves to demonstrate the incomprehensible complexity that characterizes the vast network of structures, people, and processes that culminate in the creation and distribution of something as simple as a pencil.

No single human possesses the knowledge and/or ability to create an entire pencil from scratch, yet over thirty-eight million are produced every day.

If you don’t find that to be even sort of amazing, you’ve probably never spent much time in a graphite mine.

Anyways.

The older I get, the more I seem to pick up on the many peculiar proclivities that humanity seems to have developed over the millennia. One of the most profound of which is our tendency to feel entitled to things that, only decades earlier, would not only have been considered luxuries but downright science fiction.

Imagine going back just fifty years to 1972 (a full year before the first cell phone call was ever made in 1973) and telling someone that in a mere five decades, over 90% of the population would own a 5x3 inch slab of glass and titanium that would allow them to communicate with friends, family, and strangers halfway across the world by simply tapping our fingers on the surface.

Imagine telling that same person that we could use the same device to order Beef Koobideh to our doorstep using the built-in face scanner that enabled Doordash to access our digital payment information that is stored in “the cloud.“

Imagine then telling that same person that the very beneficiaries of this incredible device (brought forth unto our ungrateful hands on the back of the human colossus of knowledge, accumulated over millions of years) would go on to mainly just complain about what is lacking from said device rather than marvel at its magnificence.

This is probably a good time to level set and make one thing abundantly clear.

I think most people (including myself, of course) default to fixating on flaws, but I don’t think it’s our fault. That is to say, I believe humanity’s collective proclivity to focus on insufficiency in the name of seeking improvement (often at the expense of our general contentment) is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t imagine it is a coincidence that the only humans alive today are the ones whose natural instincts are to seek out and fixate on anything and everything that is “wrong” with something while simultaneously failing to appreciate everything that is “right” with it.

The vast and diverse array of lineages that have led to the nearly eight billion humans roaming the earth today didn’t propagate themselves across millions of years despite being composed of generations of ungrateful perfectionists. They made it this far because they are composed of generations of ungrateful perfectionists.

Somewhere along the way, our almost-ancestors — the ones who were content when the fire was almost warm enough, when the spear tip was almost sharp enough, when the map was almost accurate enough, when the cave-dwelling was almost beyond the reach of hungry lions — met their untimely demises. In doing so, they simultaneously delivered humanity our greatest gift and our greatest curse — the disappearance of the “contentment gene”(if you’ll allow me to make such an oversimplification of genetics for the purpose of this essay).

The disappearance of the contentment gene is, on one hand, a wonderful gift. Living in a constant state of discontentment has undoubtedly driven humans to ascend the ranks of the jungle, navigating both a scarcity of resources and an abundance of danger (predators, disease, famine), with nothing more than our brains, our hands, and the creations that have since ensued.

The disappearance of the contentment gene is, on the other hand, a terrible curse. We sit here today in a world of abundant resources, relatively minimal danger (think not having to worry about getting eaten by a lion on a walk or dying from an infected blister rather than AI and nuclear weapons), and unbelievable technology, largely unable to enjoy it.

We curse our internet provider from the comfort of our leather couch in our air-conditioned apartment, caught up in a wild rage of indignance and self-pity when our favorite TV show is lagging, but (similar to when we hold a seemingly regular old pencil) we don’t take any time to ponder the sheer magnitude, complexity, and intricacy of everything that had to occur in order for us to get Season five, Episode four of Jersey Shore live-streamed to the sleek, sixty-inch piece of glass hanging on our living room wall in the first place. We don’t appreciate all of the dreamers and scientists who dedicated their existence to making minuscule progress over the course of hundreds of thousands of years — whose contributions have ultimately culminated in the technology we use today.

I am not on a crusade to make people grateful for Jersey Shore, iPhones, pencils, or any of the other incredible (or incredibly entertaining in the case of Jersey Shore) things that many of us likely have within arm’s reach at this very instant.

It’s deeper than that.

I am on a crusade to revive the spirit of optimism that we seem to have lost as a society. I’m sure many of you are wondering what pencils have to do with optimism. The short answer is, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know; if you know, you need only ask.” The longer and (slightly) less cryptic answer is as follows.

When we forego any feelings of gratitude for our current circumstance — access to creations such as pencils and iPhones — we tend to also forgo any feelings of gratitude for the progress that got us here. When we fail to recognize the human ingenuity that brought us from our lackluster, yet-to-discover-the-wheel, blood-letting-as-a-common-form-of-medical-practice, life-expectancy-below-thirty, thinking-the-sun-revolved-around-the-earth past to the utterly mind-blowing, brain-machine-interface-developing, electric-car-driving, mars-roving, [insert some other insanely awesome feat that teams of geniuses and dreamers have accomplished in the last decade] present, we can begin to lose hope for an even more amazing future.

So I’ll ask a question:

Why, when most proxies of material progress point to an unbelievable last century (skyrocketing literacy rates, plummeting infant mortality rates, plummeting poverty and hunger rates, skyrocketing life expectancy — the list goes on), does pessimism seem to be at an all-time high?

I’ll borrow another metaphor from Tim Urban (I’m a pretty big Tim Urban fan, if you couldn’t tell).

For the last few million years, humanity has been hiking a really, really tall mountain. We don’t know how high it actually goes, but the peak isn’t visible from where we are currently standing (hooray for human potential).

At our current juncture, we are faced with two options — two directions to look — the implications of which might dictate the very destiny of our species.

1. We can keep our eyes fixated forward and upward on the point on the horizon where the rocks meet the sky, painfully aware of all of the progress that is yet to be made before we can truly call Earth a Utopia. Or,
2. We can glance behind us, take stock of how far we have come, remind ourselves where we began our trek, and restore hope in mankind’s ability to not only overcome existential threats but thrive while doing so.

What they didn’t teach us in school (or tell us in mainstream media) is that the delicate art of hiking lies in striking a balance between the two.

If we spend all of our time looking forward, we might get discouraged by the sheer magnitude of the journey that lies ahead. Caught in the throes of our existential dread, we might then turn to cynicism, which will inevitably give way to pessimism (and, dare I say, even nihilism), causing us to just give up altogether.

If, alternatively, we spend all of our time looking backward, we might become complacent. We might decide that we have trekked far enough and that where we currently stand is a perfectly good place to pitch our tents and live out the rest of our days until mankind withers beneath the winds of mediocrity.

If, however, we can find a balance between the two as we toe the tightrope that is humanity’s trek to the promised land — if we can manage to focus on the way forward while regularly gazing down at all of the trails we have blazed — we might just stand a chance.

What got us “here” will not get us “there.”

Our ungrateful minds, all-too-prone-to-pessimism, have far too much material to latch onto today. If you’re looking for a reason to be hopeless, you’ll surely find one. Pessimism becomes attractive because it is much easier to criticize the path forward than it is to walk it. In that sense, pessimism is often fear parading as intelligence.

Any hope of incremental striving as a species will be built upon a strong foundation of gratitude for the sacrifices and achievements of our ancestors that brought us this far.

Gratitude is not simply an act. There is a reason why people say “practice gratitude” rather than “do gratitude.” Every time we slow down and recognize all of the effort and struggle that have delivered us to the world we live in today, we modify the wiring of our brain — we shape the lens through which we see the world.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Here’s an example. There is nothing inherently good about the current global life expectancy of 73 years. Compared to 29 years in 1800 or 32 years in 1900, it’s pretty awesome. But compared to 173 years or potentially 573 years a few centuries (or maybe even decades) down the road, it’s pretty terrible.

That is exactly the realm in which our choice lies.

We can choose whether we view the 73-year life expectancy as a reason to give up hope or as a reason to keep going.

The more we are able to do the latter — supercharge the cycle that allows us to see the world through a lens of gratitude — the more we can tip the often fickle but sometimes fair goddess of fate in our favor.

Gratitude begets optimism, optimism begets hope, hope begets action, action begets progress, progress begets more amazing things to be grateful for, and so the cycle continues.

I’ll admit that finding the right amount of gratitude — the right amount of recognition of progress and celebration of achievement — is a difficult balance to strike. If we throw ourselves too many parades, we might end up asleep at the wheel. And while that would certainly yield a suboptimal outcome for humanity, that is not the end that I fear.

There is another cycle, equal in its ability to self-propagate but far more sinister in its trajectory. It is the cycle we start when we choose cynicism over gratitude.

Cynicism begets pessimism, pessimism begets hopelessness, hopelessness begets indolence, indolence begets stagnation, stagnation begets more things to be cynical about, and so the cycle continues.

I fear that, as of late, we have failed to collectively glance backward and remember the roots of our humble beginnings. I fear that, as of late, we have decided it is okay to label optimism as naivete.

I fear that widespread pessimism may be humanity’s greatest existential threat.

So here is to appreciating pencils and mastering the art of hiking — not because we can or because we should — but because it’s our only chance for a better future.

In a world where we can be anything, here is to being grateful.

—

Click here to subscribe to my newsletter and receive my musings in your inbox every sometimes!