Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully

I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago. Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities. I’ve previously described my favorite illustration of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn’t even have textiles yet, discovering a modern landfill. It would be an unimaginable sea of blessings: tools, materials, clothing, food, and ideas galore. The hundreds of circling seagulls alone would be a such a blessing they’d tell the story for generations. They’d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures. Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer’s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse — an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury…