You are surrounded by miracles
From the mug on your desk to the large hadron collider, the modern world is so beautiful that it's a bona fide miracle.
Note: Much of the inspiration for this article comes from the wonderful essay I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read. The author recommends you read it and watch this video of it.
Have you ever stopped to think about how wonderful the real world is?
How miraculous, improbable, and captivating is even the simplest part of it? I recommend it.
What is the most basic thing you can see just now?
It might be a mug, a sheet of paper, or the button on your sleeve. You are surrounded, right now, by items that, if they broke, you wouldn’t think twice about replacing and wouldn’t notice if you lost.
But, try considering how these things came about.
From where I write this, I can see a milk bottle.
The glass is made of sand, soda ash, and limestone; brought together, heated up, and sculpted. Assembling these resources and making the bottle took expertise, of the kind that nobody sitting around this table has by themselves.
Could you make a bottle, if I gave you the ingredients? I don’t wish to be patronising, but I doubt it. I certainly couldn’t.
And about the milk? We know it comes from cows, mostly. But those cows are only there because they have been reared, cared for, fed, transported, and milked.
And even when you’ve got the stuff, it’s still not for drinking. It needs to be pasteurised, using tools and machinery made elsewhere.
The final part of the bottle is a thin lid made of flexible metal; cut and shaped so that it fits perfectly over the opening. This too is the product of the work and effort of countless others. Of people you don’t know and will probably never meet.
Maybe you’d like them? Maybe you wouldn’t?
The point is, it doesn’t matter.
You’ve worked together without being in the same room, through a process that has lifted generations of your predecessors out of squalor, filth, and ignorance.
By exchanging mere minutes, seconds even, of your effort, you can purchase this simple, beautiful, nutritious thing for a fraction of the time it took to make.
And that’s just the simplest thing I can think of right now. Think about your laptop, tablet, or car. Or the books in your bookcase; and then pause for a moment to reflect on just how many hours of work, thought, creativity, and education have gone into just one of them.
Even if you were immortal, you wouldn’t be able to make an iPad from scratch. But here you are with it, or something like it, in your hands.
If the rich men and women from history; Caesar, Cleopatra, Henry the Eighth, or Henry Ford, saw inside your fridge, they would be stunned by the plenty and the ease at which you have what you want, when you want it. If Christopher Columbus saw your spice rack, he would weep at its value to him.
However, even all this isn’t the most staggering part of the modern world.
There are two aspects that, if they did not surround you at all times, would blow your mind.
It has no director, planner, or mastermind. All these amazing things are in your life because of other people acting independently, individually, and making their own decisions for themselves. From the visionary designer to the part-time employee.
It’s only when someone does try to control this amazing process that things hit the skids. It’s happened time and time again.
Also, it’s constantly becoming better, more complex, and mind-boggling.
Diseases that we’re terrified of now will eventually be ghost stories.
Contraptions that are science fiction today, will be in each of our pockets tomorrow.
Your grandchildren will be bored by gizmos that will leave you dumbstruck.
It’s not all plain sailing, of course, there are still awful things. Weakness, ineptitude, mean-spiritedness, and violence are still with us.
But, compared to how things were in the past, they’re retreating; beaten back in their unwindable war against human genius.