I’ve had this probably naive thought before, that it’s good to experience some negative emotions sometimes to help set the context for the positive and enable gratitude. A little rain makes the sunshine that much more appreciated, that sort of thing.

Through rapid technological improvements and slow institutional ones, our lives have become better over time. In the rich world, people’s lives are easier than ever before. It seems we’ve come to expect things to be easy, or painless, or simple.

So when things do go wrong, we can utilize that instance as a rallying point, a reminder of how far we’ve come, due to others’ sacrifices and hard work, and how comparatively good we have it.

Because at the end of it all… we are alive. We inhabit the most wondrous planet ever discovered. We get to enjoy, in this brief spec of time we call life, the mysteries of the universe.