I am an optimist by nature. Even in severe hardship, my internal compass never wavers. Whenever my partner bemoans the half-empty glass, I see the half-full one. If she laments the rain, I remind her that without it, we would never savor the sun.

I do have moments of sadness or anger, no doubt, but I have never seen the point in drowning. If there’s a river ahead, my wife thinks of obstacle and danger while I normally wonder if fishing or swimming is permitted. So, torrents of tears never were my style.

And yet, standing firm in that optimism is precisely what allows me to see the ingratitude of others with such clarity. Because when you spend your life looking for the ‘half-full’ part, you start to notice when people are staring into an empty glass that is, in fact, overflowing.

And I genuinely don’t understand people who spend time doom-scrolling through bad news, complaining about slow Wi-Fi, and feeling victimized by the mundane frictions of daily life.

Take my godfather Michael, for example — a good friend and former college buddy. His family owns a 400-square-meter house, three cars, and two dogs. For over twenty years, he has managed a domestic division of a German corporation. His office is less than 400 meters away. By any metric, life is good, isn’t it?

By comparison, I have less than he does — and no dogs or cats.

Yet whenever I ask how work is going, he moans and groans: sales are down, growth prospects are grim, competition is tight. Fine — no more questions about work. How about your health? … Why can’t you sleep? What’s troubling you at night? Still worried about prices and expenses?

Ok, let’s change the subject again.

Me? I’m fine. Yes, still full of plans!

***

Look around. We are, by any objective measure of history, the luckiest creatures to have ever walked the Earth. Just think about it: we are the winners of a cosmic lottery so vast and improbable that its odds are effectively zero.

If humanity were capable of a moment of collective clarity, we would be silenced by the sheer weight of our own fortune. Instead, we are ungrateful. We are stupid. And it is this stupidity that allows us to take our existence for granted.

To understand the magnitude of our ingratitude, we must first trace the thread of luck that leads to any single human life today.

The cosmic invitation

Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, a yellow dwarf star — our Sun — formed in a nondescript corner of the Milky Way. Around it, debris coalesced into planets. Earth landed in the “Goldilocks Zone,” where temperatures were just right for liquid water. It possessed a magnetic field to shield it from solar radiation, and a large moon to stabilize its axial tilt.

For billions of years, this planet was a crucible of chemistry and biology, fostering life against the backdrop of a cold, dead universe.

The fact that you are breathing air and reading words is a testament to a star system that didn’t incinerate us, an atmosphere that didn’t poison us, and a geological history that didn’t wipe out our ancestors.

This is not a given; it is a privilege extended to a microscopic fraction of the matter in the vast cosmos.

This is a major factor indeed, but not the only one.

The winning lineage

Our existence is not merely the result of being born on a habitable rock; it is the result of being born into the dominant lineage of that rock. We are Homo sapiens.

For 300,000 years, our species fought, migrated, and out-competed other hominins. We survived ice ages, predators, and diseases without antibiotics or agriculture. Every single one of our direct ancestors — stretching back to the primordial ooze — survived long enough to reproduce.

They evaded the jaws of saber-toothed cats, survived famines, and escaped the swords of enemies. Their survival was not guaranteed; it was a continuous string of miracles that funneled genetic information forward to us. Luckily, we don’t have to repeat their experience.

To be human in the 21st century is to stand on the peak of this evolutionary pyramid. Yet, rather than marvel at the view, we obsess over the cracks in the pavement.

The accidental renaissance

But being human is not enough too. We could have been born in 1347, just in time for the Black Death. We could have been born in 1618, in the path of the Thirty Years’ War. Instead, we were born into the most extraordinary moment in the history of our species.

We live in an era where we have eradicated smallpox, where we can fly across oceans in hours, where the sum total of human knowledge is accessible from a device that fits in your pocket. We have harnessed electricity, peered into the quantum realm, and walked on the Moon. We have invented central heating, anesthesia, and soon will be able to cure cancer.

A toothache no longer has to kill you; a broken leg no longer means lifelong lameness.

This is not normal. This is a historical anomaly. For 99.9% of human existence, life was, in the words of Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Today, we live like pharaohs and complain that the air conditioning is too cold.

The final, microscopic lottery

Finally, we arrive at the most intimate and absurdly improbable detail: you, specifically you, exist because of a single spermatozoid.

The average male produces over 1,500 sperm cells per second. In a single ejaculation, there are between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm. You are the result of one of them finding its way to a healthy ovule at exactly the right moment.

Had a different cell arrived a fraction of a second earlier or later, you would not be here. A different consciousness — or none at all — would occupy your place at this table.

You beat a billion-to-one odds just to be conceived. And then you beat the odds of miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality. You survived childhood diseases without modern medicine in many cases. You are a statistical impossibility walking around in a meat suit.

These are just a few factors coming to my mind right now.

Just think about them for a moment.

The stupidity of ingratitude

So, we arrive at the present. We have won the cosmic lottery, inherited a beautiful planet, arrived at the peak of human comfort, and defied odds that are mathematically laughable. And what do we do with this gift?

We complain, again and again. We envy our neighbors. We manufacture anxiety over things that would have been incomprehensible luxuries to our ancestors. We have food in abundance, and we worry about macros. We have the ability to speak to anyone on earth instantly, and we worry about “likes.” We have defeated most plagues, and we worry about airport security lines.

This is the stupidity of ingratitude. It is a failure of perspective so profound that it borders on the pathological. To be given everything and act as though we have nothing is the hallmark of a fool.

We are not stupid because we lack intelligence; we are stupid because we lack awareness. We are ungrateful not because life is bad, but because we have forgotten how bad life used to be — and how easily it could have never existed at all. Or, worse, how fast we can lose everything. In a blink of an eye.

So, the next time you feel the world is against you, take a breath. Have a good fart. Remember the star that warms you, the ancestors who survived for you, the society that educated you, and the microscopic race that you won before you drew your first breath.

And remember: you are not entitled to this moment. You are lucky to have it. And wasting that luck on ingratitude is the ultimate human folly.

Enjoy every day of your shiny lives, my friends.

This piece was first published on my Medium page. The image was generated with AI.