But this isn't just about politics, which is important to remember because this matters just as much in between elections. This is about remembering why you get up in the morning, why you want to always learn new things, to keep taking those tiny boring steps forward that don't seem like much in isolation, in the sense that the Sistine Chapel wouldn't seem like much if you only watched Michelangelo paint Adam's tiny dick.

Michelangelo

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So, yeah, be thankful, because the entire earth is a hive of busy humans working on stuff that will make tomorrow better than today. Stuff like the recent discovery that we may massively cut greenhouse gases just by adding seaweed to animal feed (cows produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and seaweed breaks it down). The price of solar power is dropping so fast that it doesn't matter what the U.S. government thinks of it -- it's going to win on economics alone. And so on.

At some point, every single person who has ever been involved in anything great has suffered at least one gut-punch of a setback, has felt like the sun has fallen out of the sky. Some people feel like that all day, every day. So, every now and then we make you stop and eat a big meal and listen to corny nonsense about things that happened in the past. It's supposed to reorient you, to remind you that we overcame bad shit back then and we'll overcome it this time, too.

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Then we give the future something to be thankful for and, well, that's how all of this works.

David Wong is the Executive Editor of Cracked, his most recent novel is now in development as a TV series and just came out in paperback. Look at those customer review scores!

For more David Wong, check out Why Science Is Still Mystified About How Humans Work and Why Anxiety Is The Plague Of The Modern World.

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