"First World" Joys

It's become a common trope to refer to things as "first world problems," when they are things that seem petty. (Though I would observe - when you're nearly out of cope, a small issue can loom very large. I spent an annoying 10 minutes searching for my attendance sheet for one class - I had used it to submit the EAR reports we have to do, and then it got buried, and I needed it today to take attendance).

But there are also a lot of things a person has to stop and be grateful for. I realize these are not necessarily confined to the so-called First World, but they're things that didn't exist when I was a kid, or that were less common:

1. Being able to order stuff online. This makes living in a small town where the main retailer is Wal-Mart far more tolerable. (I probably wouldn't be nearly so avid a knitter if it weren't for being able to order yarn online)

2. The incredibly good notification systems some of the online catalogs have. I know where the box of teas I ordered from Adagio earlier in the week is; they send me updates every time the box arrives somewhere. (As of this morning, it had arrived in Hugo, which means I will probably have it this afternoon).

3. The better weather radar. I'm just old enough to remember the tornado outbreak that killed many people in 1974. The weather radar used then was just slightly better than WWII-era. Now, they can sometimes pinpoint what streets in a city are most at risk.

4. Better communications, both national and international. Stuff like satellite phones. People can go off to remote areas and they're not totally incommunicado if there's an emergency. You almost never get that warning any more that the phone lines are overloaded and to try again later - I remember a few Mother's Days when I was in college when that happened.

5. Improvements in medicine, especially improvements in chemotherapy. And improvements in cancer detection, which has saved a lot of lives. The fact that things like putting in stents and pacemakers are now fairly routine procedures. Transplant surgeries are much more common and much less risky than they used to be. Stuff like bone-marrow transplantation, which, when it works, is nothing short of miraculous.

6. The increase in recent years of small artisan producers of things like cheese. I don't always have access to it (I wish I did, I wish my area had better groceries) but it's nice that it exists.

7. Word processing. Not having to type stuff and either be a super-accurate typist, or use correction ribbons all the time. Being able to edit stuff without having to retype. (I still sometimes edit by printing the thing out, cutting it up, and moving sections around physically, because that's how I think, but you can also do all that virtually, on the screen).

8. Calculators. I learned a lot of basic math using pen and paper (calculators existed back then, but early on they were expensive - my dad talks about how his first desk calculator cost $100 and wasn't any more powerful than the cheap, virtually disposable solar-powered ones that he sometimes gets free as premiums for renewing journal subscriptions). I can still do a lot of stuff in my head, or at least get a decent estimate if it's something like a complex long division. But it's nice to have that calculator if you really need to know it fast and right.

I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of right now.