Something To Be Thankful For

Tomorrow will be the U.S. holiday called Thanksgiving.

But even if this isn’t your country or holiday, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a moment to give thanks for something, simply because being thankful for the good in your life is good for you.  Too often, we let our grievances and gripes crowd out our gratitude, not only from our mouths, but also our heads.

Of course, one can go overboard on this sentiment, and many Thanksgiving articles do just that.  It’s pretty unrealistic if not insane to expect people to say or think, “Thanks for the layoffs and stock losses and especially all those deaths of loved ones.”  But unless you’re a walking Armageddon, there’s something good in your life, maybe it’s minor, maybe it’s even tiny, but it’s still good and something worthy of thanks.      

Let me share with you one little moment I recently had.  I’ve been shopping for a few computer items lately, and it struck me how much cheaper these items were per X than they were when I first bought one.  I ordered a 32GB USB drive, and it will get to my house for less than $50.  That’s $1.50 a gigabyte, and it wasn’t long ago that  I was paying four or five times that for something smaller and slower, and much more for something even slower and smaller a couple years before that.  

I also have been shopping for a hard drive, a terabyte hard drive.  Right now, I’m a little reluctant to buy because the top models will cost me .13-.15 a gigabyte, I’d rather pay a dime per gig.  However, it then struck me that early in 1997, I paid about $300 for a 3.2GB hard drive, or about $100 a gig, a thousand times more per gig than I want to pay now, and as for speed, well, the USB drive is probably faster than it was.  Sure, I use a lot more space to do whatever now than I did back then, but not even mighty Microsoft joined by the rest of the software industry have managed to bloat much of a dent into this.    

But perhaps the greatest miracle of all is that the miracles will keep on coming.  I doubt you thought twice about my wanting to hold out for a dime a gigabyte, simply because you know just about as well as you know gravity will be out there next week and year that prices will hit that point sooner or later, probably sooner, and ten years from now, these prices will look horrendously expensive and tiny and slow compared to what they’ll be then.

Now that’s something to be thankful for!

Maybe you have your own little story like mine, too.  If you do, or have something else to be thankful for that people don’t normally think about, why don’t you pop it into our comments section?  Thanks! 

Ed