One of the strangest things about living in America is that we’ve become so accustomed to extraordinary prosperity that we’ve mistaken it for normal. It isn’t. Not historically, not globally, and not even compared to the America our own grandparents and great-grandparents knew.

For almost all of human history, life was hard, short, uncertain, and largely outside your control. If the harvest failed, you might starve. If the king wanted your land, he took it. If disease came through town, you hoped for the best. If the government didn’t like what you said, there was a pretty good chance you learned to shut the hell up. That wasn’t some particularly horrible chapter of human history. That was the default human experience.

Then came the United States of America.

And yes, I know that sentence is going to make somebody roll their eyes. America isn’t perfect. America has done terrible things. America has problems today. We’ll get to that.

But first, look around.

I can pull a device out of my pocket that gives me instant access to more information than the greatest scholars in history could have accumulated in a lifetime. I can use that same device to have dinner brought to my house, summon a car, talk face-to-face with somebody on the other side of the planet, watch virtually any movie ever made, buy almost anything humanity manufactures, and have much of it sitting on my porch tomorrow.

And we call it a phone.

If I’m hungry, I generally don’t wonder where my next meal will come from. I wonder whether I feel like Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Thai, barbecue, sushi, pizza, or a cheeseburger. If I need medicine, I don’t trek three days to find a healer; I drive five minutes to Walgreens. If I want to learn quantum physics, woodworking, Korean, sailing, programming, or how to rebuild a Caterpillar diesel engine, nearly the entirety of accumulated human knowledge is sitting in my pocket waiting for me.

This is not normal. This is civilization operating at a level our ancestors would have mistaken for magic.

We Simply Don’t Appreciate Miracles We See Every Day

And we don’t even have to go back a thousand years to appreciate this. Go back one hundred.

In the 1920s, indoor plumbing and electricity were spreading rapidly through America, but they were nowhere near universal, particularly in rural areas. Plenty of American homes did not have the modern bathroom we now consider a basic requirement of civilized existence. Hot water didn’t magically come out of a wall whenever you turned a little chrome handle. Air conditioning in homes effectively wasn’t a thing. Refrigerators were only beginning to replace iceboxes. Antibiotics didn’t exist. Commercial television didn’t exist. Jet travel didn’t exist. Interstate highways didn’t exist.

Today, an ordinary middle-class American can stumble half-asleep into a climate-controlled bathroom, turn a knob, and stand under an essentially unlimited stream of clean, hot water.

We don’t even consider that a luxury.

We get pissed off if it takes thirty seconds to warm up.

That’s how absurdly wealthy we’ve become.

The next time you walk into a grocery store, stop and really look at the damn thing. Thousands upon thousands of products from every corner of the planet sit under one roof. Fresh fruit in the middle of winter. Coffee from South America. Spices from Asia. Chocolate from Africa. Seafood from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Beef, pork and chicken already butchered, cleaned, refrigerated and wrapped for you.

You push a wheeled cart through a brightly lit, air-conditioned building with polished floors while choosing between fifteen kinds of mustard.

Fifteen kinds of fucking mustard.

Kings didn’t live like this.

Seriously. Pick some emperor from 500 years ago. He might have owned a palace and commanded an army, but if he wanted strawberries in January, somebody couldn’t just wander over to aisle six and grab them. If his tooth became infected, his options were horrifying. If August got hot, there wasn’t a thermostat on the wall. If he wanted to speak with someone a thousand miles away, he sent a man on a horse and waited.

The average American today possesses capabilities that would have been indistinguishable from supernatural power to some of the richest human beings who ever lived.

And we’re bored.

Freedom Is Even Rarer Than Prosperity

Material wealth isn’t even the most remarkable part.

Liberty is.

I can criticize the President, Congress, governors, judges, billionaires, corporations, police departments, the military, the government itself, or America as a whole. I can publish those criticisms publicly and encourage other people to agree with me.

I can worship almost any religion or none at all. I can own property. I can start a company. I can move across the country without asking the government for permission. I can advocate changing our laws and replacing our elected leaders.

And almost uniquely in the world, Americans have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms—a right deliberately placed beyond ordinary political convenience and viewed by many Americans as the final safeguard should all the other safeguards fail.

Think about the combination we inherited here.

You have the right to complain about your government, the right to organize with other people who agree with you, the right to vote the bastards out, and ultimately the right to bear arms.

Human history does not hand out packages like that very often.

Comfort Creates Amnesia

And here’s where I think we’ve completely lost the plot.

The safer, richer and freer a society becomes, the easier it apparently becomes to imagine yourself oppressed.

People will sit inside an air-conditioned house, wearing clothes manufactured halfway around the planet, holding a thousand-dollar supercomputer connected wirelessly to essentially all human knowledge, eating food delivered by a stranger because they couldn’t be bothered to drive three miles, and use that device to announce to the world that they’re living under unbearable oppression in one of the worst countries on Earth.

There’s something almost beautiful about the absurdity.

The system is so oppressive that it provides you with a global communications network on which to explain, at length, how oppressed you are.

And yes, obviously America has problems. Real ones. We have crime, corruption, political dysfunction, homelessness, healthcare costs, failing schools, government waste, addiction, poverty and plenty of other things worth being furious about. I’ve written about a lot of them and I’ll continue writing about them.

But acknowledging problems is not the same thing as pretending we’re living in some dystopian hellscape.

A leaking faucet doesn’t mean your house is on fire.

And somewhere along the way, particularly on parts of the political left, criticism of America’s failures seems to have mutated into an almost reflexive contempt for America itself. Every flaw becomes evidence that the whole experiment is rotten. Every disparity becomes oppression. Every historical sin becomes an indictment of the country as it exists today.

That’s bullshit.

You can acknowledge America’s failures without pretending its accomplishments don’t exist. In fact, you should acknowledge both. That’s called having perspective.

The Rest of the World Is Not a Movie

There’s another strange contradiction buried in all of this.

We’re simultaneously told that America is a deeply oppressive, fundamentally broken society and that everyone who arrives here deserves immediate access to everything this supposedly horrible society provides.

Well… which is it?

Apparently America is an unbearable capitalist dystopia that people risk their lives crossing deserts, rivers and oceans to enter.

Maybe we should ponder that contradiction for a minute.

And don’t compare the United States to some imaginary country assembled from the best parts of Norway, Switzerland, Denmark and your last European vacation. Compare America with the actual world.

There are places where electricity isn’t reliable. Places where clean drinking water isn’t guaranteed. Places where corruption determines whether your business survives. Places where saying the wrong thing about the government gets you imprisoned. Places where women do not enjoy anything resembling American legal equality. Places where political opponents disappear, criminal organizations effectively control territory, children don’t receive meaningful education, and basic medical treatment remains inaccessible.

Those people don’t need a lecture explaining how terrible America is.

A lot of them are trying to get here.

Gratitude Isn’t Blind Patriotism

Loving your country doesn’t require believing it’s flawless. That’s childish.

America should be criticized when America deserves criticism. Government should be watched constantly because governments have an annoying historical tendency to become assholes when nobody is watching them. We should fix what’s broken, fight corruption, demand competent institutions, protect individual liberty and keep pushing this place toward the ideals it claims to represent.

But criticism without perspective eventually becomes cynicism, and cynicism becomes contempt.

We’ve inherited one of the most prosperous, technologically advanced and politically free societies humanity has ever produced, and somehow one of our favorite national hobbies has become explaining why it isn’t good enough.

Maybe that’s partly because we’re standing inside the miracle.

Fish don’t notice water.

Americans don’t notice America.

We don’t notice the clean water coming out of the wall because it has always been there. We don’t notice the electricity because the lights usually turn on. We don’t notice the supermarket overflowing with food because we’ve never seen an empty one. We don’t notice the freedom to call the President an idiot because nobody kicks down the door afterward. We don’t notice the incredible machine surrounding us because we were born inside it.

And perhaps that’s the real danger of prosperity: eventually you stop seeing prosperity and start seeing only its imperfections.

America isn’t heaven. Obviously.

But compared with the lives available to almost every human being who came before us—and billions of people alive today?

It’s pretty fucking close.

And maybe before we tear the place apart because it hasn’t delivered us paradise, we ought to spend five goddamn minutes appreciating just how close we already got.