Get Started on Venerating Your Ancestors Early

I wrote in “Luck is Other People’s Work” that a lot of what westerners call “luck” is actually the hard work of your forebearers.

I sometimes see people say things like “What did I do to deserve having such a good life? I have hot and cold running water, antibiotics, calories almost too cheap to meter, endless music on tap. But I don’t work any harder than anyone else in the world, and many of them are much worse off. How do I deserve this more than them?”

Any one person, individually, doesn’t deserve anything. Societies are the units of evaluation here, they are the entities large enough to manipulate the environment at the level that allows for prosperity and human flourishing. A human is too small to make a tractor. A society does that. So the entities that “deserve” and reap the rewards of their labor are societies. If you are a part of that society, you get a portion of those rewards (ideally in proportion to approximately how much you contribute to that society continuing to function/grow).

As an aside: If one takes a moment to observe the Earth, one sees that the most deserving societies are also the ones with billionaires. This is not a coincidence, those societies have a code of honor that encourages the formation of honorable wealth which also allows for the existence of honorable billionaires. But that’s a post for a previous day (which you can read here).

“But,” the Depressed Boy counters, “I didn’t create this society, I simply found myself within it! Just like everyone else in the world found themselves in their society! So I don’t deserve this joyous existence at all, it’s purely luck!”

That is true in a Chud-ish, myopic sense. The society you are in wasn’t created by a random number generator. It is the result of hard work and intense sacrifice by your forebearers. They worked for generations to make it what it is. They somehow navigated the pitfalls of corruption and lures of communism well enough to establish an engine of comfort that can be sustained with the input of 40/hr week of labor. Every bit of “luck” of being born into a high-functioning society in an industrialized, liberal country is traceable back to wise decisions and long hours put in by parents, grandparents, founders, and leaders. (Likewise, the loss of progress and failures of functioning can often be traced back to the same).

So if you find yourself thinking you are lucky and don’t deserve the life you have when others have it worse, maybe instead of feeling bad for having not done whatever is needed to “deserve” it, feel grateful that your ancestors did everything they did so that the society you are in is as functional and advanced as it is. The ancients venerated their ancestors. We should too. They created our luck, and it was not easy.

It’ll get worse, though. Very soon it’ll probably get much worse. People will be born into a world where they don’t have to work at all. Self-maintaining structures of code and machines will be able to provide anyone with a comfortable life just for being here. “What have I done to deserve this?” won’t even be answerable with “With my 40 hours/week I help maintain the engine that my ancestors created.” At that point all that will be left will be gratitude for the inheritance we were given.

And you know what? You don’t have to wait until that future comes to start being appreciative. We can look around us and see the people who are doing the work to make society richer, smarter, and better right now. There are people working to get us into space. People working on creating minds of limitless scientific advancement. People working on creating institutions and policy to wisely guide us from this world to one where toil and suffering are as rare as rickets is. We can venerate and publicly admire people for the work they do today, knowing that in the future they will be the ancestors who burst forth a fountain of luck into every life.

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