This week I realized that we, as a society, don’t appreciate pencils enough and that we also aren’t very good at hiking.

Not literally (but also sort of literally).

We have gotten a bit too blasé about many of the incredible things that human ingenuity has made possible over an extremely short time span.

I’m sure you’re wondering what could possibly be so “ingenious” about pencils and what hiking has to do with human progress.

Let’s go for a ride.

I was listening to a podcast this week with Tim Urban, where he brought up a pretty interesting idea. He proposed that there isn’t a single person on earth who knows how to make an entire pencil from scratch. I’m not talking about just flipping some switch on some pencil-making machine. I’m talking about everything from harvesting the wood, waxing and staining the wood, creating and then mixing the chemicals that ultimately compose the paint, mining the aluminum and creating the glue used to secure the eraser, fashioning the rubber that ultimately becomes the eraser, mining the graphite…you get the point.

The thought experiment serves to demonstrate the incomprehensible complexity that characterizes the vast network of structures, people, and processes that culminate in the creation and distribution of something as simple as a pencil.

No single human possesses the knowledge and/or ability to create an entire pencil from scratch, yet over thirty-eight million are produced every day.

If you don’t find that to be even sort of amazing, you’ve probably never spent much time in a graphite mine.

Anyways.

The older I get, the more I seem to pick up on the many peculiar proclivities that humanity seems to have developed over the millennia. One of the most profound of which is our tendency to feel entitled to things that, only decades earlier, would not only have been considered luxuries but downright science fiction.

Imagine going back just fifty years to 1972 (a full year before the first cell phone call was ever made in 1973) and telling someone that in a mere five decades, over 90% of the population would own a 5x3 inch slab of glass and titanium that would allow them to communicate with friends, family, and strangers halfway across the world by simply tapping our fingers on the surface.

Imagine telling that same person that we could use the same device to order Beef Koobideh to our doorstep using the built-in face scanner that enabled Doordash to access our digital payment information that is stored in “the cloud.“

Imagine then telling that same person that the very beneficiaries of this incredible device (brought forth unto our ungrateful hands on the back of the human colossus of knowledge, accumulated over millions of years) would go on to mainly just complain about what is lacking from said device rather than marvel at its magnificence.

This is probably a good time to level set and make one thing abundantly clear.

I think most people (including myself, of course) default to fixating on flaws, but I don’t think it’s our fault. That is to say, I believe humanity’s collective proclivity to focus on insufficiency in the name of seeking improvement (often at the expense of our general contentment) is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t imagine it is a coincidence that the only humans alive today are the ones whose natural instincts are to seek out and fixate on anything and everything that is “wrong” with something while simultaneously failing to appreciate everything that is “right” with it.

The vast and diverse array of lineages that have led to the nearly eight billion humans roaming the earth today didn’t propagate themselves across millions of years despite being composed of generations of ungrateful perfectionists. They made it this far because they are composed of generations of ungrateful perfectionists.

Somewhere along the way, our almost-ancestors — the ones who were content when the fire was almost warm enough, when the spear tip was almost sharp enough, when the map was almost accurate enough, when the cave-dwelling was almost beyond the reach of hungry lions — met their untimely demises. In doing so, they simultaneously delivered humanity our greatest gift and our greatest curse — the disappearance of the “contentment gene”(if you’ll allow me to make such an oversimplification of genetics for the purpose of this essay).