Being Grateful for Even Laundry Soap
We have a lot of challenges. But this time period is also quite extraordinary too in so many respects. These previous couple of generations have access to more healthy food, medicines, recreational opportunities, learning, and life expectancy than any in human history. And that’s a thing worth being grateful for despite our current struggles.
I’m traveling for work these next couple of days—a think that I ordinarily do several times a year but for the last couple of years has been very limited due to the pandemic. It’s exciting to visit with coworkers in offices I haven’t been for several years and to meet folks who up until now I have only seen on computer screens.
When I was checking into my motel—a somewhat tired Super 8—I noticed a sign at the front desk that made me smile. It said “The world is under staffed. Be kind to those who showed up.” I try my best to be kind to most people and certainly service industry workers particularly. But reading that before stepping up to the desk was a really good reminder for me.
The people who stock our groceries, who clean our motel rooms, who prepare our Amazon orders, who welcome us at doctor’s offices, and so many other places, provide services which we most often don’t pay much attention to at all in a modern developed nation like the United States. So much so, in fact, that we take it as a given that our local grocery store has our preferred flavor of toothpaste and get somewhat annoyed if by any chance they might be out of stock.
The disruption to the supply chain of a lot of our consumer goods has had broad impacts including making a lot of things more expensive, and so I won’t minimize that impact. But the fact that we are noticing when things we normally disregard as a given are not available or cost 50% more or we might have to wait an extra week to arrive, I think is a good wake up call for us all.
So often when we interact with certain system frequently enough, they lose their sparkle. But I think the modern international market system is a thing just short of a miracle. Think of it: that bottle of laundry detergent that you pick up for maybe $12 could have had the chemical composition determined in India, the bottle make in China, the labels made in Korea, and shipped on a mega shipping vessel carrying thousands of cargo containers across the Pacific ocean. Then it was sorted and shipped from a distribution center using AI robots, and trucked out to your local grocery store being put out on the shelf by someone you don’t know at all but most likely lives right in your own community.
And the whole process takes just a number of days but is staggered in such way that the grocery stores’ databases can order generally just the right amount to meet the regular demand. Isn’t that mind boggling?! Dozens of people were involved in providing that bottle of detergent and it might be coming from the other side of the world.
The reality is that we have access to a variety of goods and services that kings from just a century ago could only have dreamed of. Of course, it’s a little silly to compare ourselves to humans a century ago because we always end up comparing ourselves not against people living before us but against the people we interact with—our friends, families, coworkers, etc. But I have to think that it might be good for us to remind ourselves from time to time just what a remarkable time it is to be alive.
We have a lot of challenges. That is for certain. But this time is also quite extraordinary too in so many respects. This and the previous generation or two have more access to healthy food, medicines, recreational opportunities, learning, and life expectancy than any in human history. And that’s a thing worth being grateful for despite our current struggles.