This is Thanksgiving week. No matter how it may have come about, with pilgrims, American Indians and turkeys and all, it has become a wholesome holiday meant to invoke a sense of thanks for what we have. On the other hand, it’s ironic that we have to have an annual holiday specifically meant to remind us to be thankful, which probably means that we are not usually thankful. We have to be reminded to be thankful for all we have, which is plenty, especially when we live in a highly developed country.

So, why are we such an ungrateful lot?

It probably has a lot to do with how our brain is essentially a threat-scanning machine meant to identify things that could potentially kill us. It’s all about the security of our tribe and our status within that tribe. We are especially sensitive to anything new or changes that seek to disrupt that status quo. We don’t like uncertainty. We want to know what’s going to happen day to day.

This obsession with security and survival means that we live in a perpetual state of anxiety over the future. And everything we do, to one extent or another, is an attempt to maximize that certainty by scanning the horizon for potential threats and actively mitigating........

© The Korea Times