Trial and Error

I have a lot of free time just to think, and I occasionally will think about why my life is as awesome it is. This exercise of counting my blessings has led me to be extremely grateful that I was born into the era I was born into. I mean, with all of the technology that we have and the comforts we enjoy, we have it easy. This video explains pretty well how I feel about life:

Life is awesome. I often think about how terrible it would be for me to have been born in a different era. I watched the movie 17 Miracles and realized how grumpy I get when I have to walk to the Ricks building at school when it is snowing, yet these people spent all day wading back and forth through a frozen river with only a quarter of a bowl of nasty oatmeal stuff in their stomachs. I skip breakfast and say "I'm STARVING!" and as I stare into my fridge and cupboard at the vast amounts of food I complain about how there is nothing to eat.

I think the point of history class is to show people how miserable it would have been to live in the past. Everyone knows how much it would have sucked to have to live during the Bubonic Plague. People dying all around and those creepy crow doctors coming in to terrify you in your last moments of life.

Seriously, this was the last thing a lot of people saw before they died

What really freaks me out the most, however, are the eras that predate written language. I used to think being a caveman would have been awesome, but then I found out that there was no way that humans and dinosaurs interacted and my opinion changed. These eras that occured before we progressed enough to draw images to convey information to others must have been terrible. Everything they learned was through good old fashioned trial and error. Think about it for a while. I have always heard people joke around about who had the idea to eat eggs or who drank milk from a cows utter the first time. But seriously think about it. There was a time in human history where we had to figure out what was edible and what was not. Entire generations of people with no one to tell them from experience what was good for food and what wasn't. Presumably they just ran around sticking everything they could find in their mouths to see if it was good to eat. Then, once fire was invented and they figured out some things tasted different once cooked, they had to start all over again.

For every wheel or flame they discovered, there must have been thousands of failures and deaths trying things that seemed like a good idea at the time. These were eras before common sense was invented, and nature isn't always the best example. How many cavemen died trying to fly because they saw birds do it? I mean, people were dying trying to do that up to 150 years ago, long after thinking became popular.

Although I do make plenty of stupid mistakes, I am extremely grateful for those who came before me who made the stupidest mistakes. Those who gave their lives in the earliest pursuits of knowledge, so that I, hundreds of thousands of years later, can think back and laugh at how incredibly asinine they seem to me today.