This clip of comedian Louis C.K.’s appearance on Conan’s show is a funny, clear explanation of how we take so many amazing things for granted. Some of the things he touches on include: telephones, banking, internet, and transportation.

I LOVE his little story:

This is what people are like: they’ve got their phone [acts out dialing on a cell phone] and they’re like, “Ugghh!!… … [waiting for a connection] It won’t… … “ GIVE IT A SECOND!!! It’s going to SPACE! Can you give it a SECOND to get back from SPACE? Is the speed of light too slow for you?

Then, after relating another funny story of someone getting frustrated with the failure of some totally new service he point out the ingratitude by saying, “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?

Everything is Amazing, Nobody is Happy

We’re so quick to lose perspective.

As I wrote this I was reminded of an experience I had back in 1992. That was the year Intel released the 486DX2 which increased computer processing speed all the way up to 66MHz. (If my understanding is right, for comparison, current consumer-grade computers are frequently at least 45 times faster.) I was tasked with putting together a small ad to place in a national magazine.

A friend worked for one of the local mainframe computer companies. Their computers were among the best in the world for dealing with graphics - they had lots of memory, and were significantly faster than anything else out there.

Well, we had scanned in images of the album, and each of those images took up about 10-15 MB of memory. (Which at that time was an awful lot, given that one had a “lot” of storage if one’s hard drive could handle two or three of that size image.) We were trying out different layouts, and my friend was getting really frustrated and upset when it took the computer 10-20 seconds to process our changes. (At one point he was so frustrated, he yanked out one of the computer’s sheets of circuits and, using some tools, tweaked a few things before shoving it back into place.) Mind you, this was a machine that was valued at something well in excess of $100,000. And no other computer any of my friends had access to could have completed one of those processes in less than an hour. The computer’s processing was amazing but he wasn’t happy.

I was amazed… both with the computer and with my friend’s reaction. I wasn’t just content, I was very grateful. Today, I can’t honestly say that would be my gut reaction. Do you, like me, find yourself becoming less content and less grateful for the amazing things we are able to do?

Let’s work on developing a better sense of contentment and gratitude. First step: pay attention to the amazing, wonderful things in life.  Maybe even write out a list as a reminder.  What amazing things would you list that would help re-ignite your contentment if not gratitude?