Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful (Part 1)

by Dynomight

Underrated reasons to be thankful:

That when cyanobacteria arose 2 billion years ago and filled the atmosphere with oxygen, which killed off most species, and also removed methane from the air so temperatures crashed and the entire planet was encased in ice, this didn’t quite extinguish all life, but eventually led to the rise of eukaryotes that turn oxygen back into carbon dioxide, and later those eukaryotes banded together into multicellular teams like you.
That for billions of years bacteria captured energy from the sun and then died and sank to the bottom of the ocean and were covered with sediment and cooked into hydrocarbons, and meanwhile it took a long time for humans to evolve, which is good because all that stored energy has made our lives much better and perhaps allowed us to bootstrap a technological civilization that would be otherwise impossible.
That if you stare at your own teeth long enough, they eventually resolve as a frightful array of mineral claws clustered around a food hole, bathed in recirculating bio-liquid and hidden behind quasi-prehensile skin flaps, which is good because it gives a glimpse of how we might look to aliens, and also because you’re under no obligation to do that.
That yeast.
That bleach.
That music, that certain patterns of sound spur deep emotional responses in us, why.
That hokey unfashionable techniques like practicing gratitude turn out to have strong scientific evidence behind them, and several countries happen to have a preexisting holiday that’s already, at least in theory, dedicated to this practice.
That the abstraction of “narratives” exists, allowing us to understand the world at least partially through this crazy messy process we’re undertaking right now rather than everything being a blind inscrutable evolution of the wavefunction, and also the world happens to be structured so that these “narratives” are powerful enough to actually partially explain at least some phenomena sometimes.

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