Technology is magic.

Take the radio, for instance. I push a button in my car and instantly hear music coming through the speakers.

If I were transported back to Victorian England, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to explain it. I might say, “You push this button and you hear NPR, and you push this button and you hear Fleet Foxes, and I think there are metal towers somewhere that send out waves through the air and the radio picks up the waves and plays sounds.”

The technology is more than one hundred years it’s still a total mystery to me.

It reminds me of the famous interview Conan O’Brien had with Louie CK, where he talks about how amazing technology is today. We can board a plane and get all the way across America in just a few hours. We have computers that fit in our pockets.

And yet we seem to still spend a large portion of our lives moping. As Louie CK says, we complain when we’re stuck on the runway for 20 minutes, and we complain when our phones take a moment to download a webpage. We’re surrounded by wonders and we don’t see them.

It’s a simple idea, but it’s the crux of gratitude. We’ve got to remember the context of what we interact with. Out of context, I whine that the heating bill costs too much. In context, I realize that for most of human history people just had to bear the cold each night, and so paying just a sliver of income for heat is amazing.

The same goes for every moment. If I compare things now to how they were 50, 200, or 4,000 years ago, I remember that pretty much everything is fantastic and there is very little worth complaining about.

Gratitiude is about remembering how awe-inducing the world is. We’re happier when we do.

This is part of a November series about gratitude. To read the October series, which is about death, click here. Or see the full list.

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