Guilty admission: I’ve seen most of the recent Marvel movies in the theater. What can I say? I like a good action-comedy movie.

If you are a fan then you probably know that they put two short teaser scenes at the end of each movie, one after the first credits and one after the full credits. So most people actually stay in the theater watching until the projection ends.

A couple of weeks ago, after seeing Black Panther, sitting there looking at the credits I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Thousands of people worked on the movie. Over $200 million dollars were spent. And I got to see it for $10. I got to see something that took thousands of hours of individuals’ work, and more money than everyone I know will make in their lifetime, all for less than what I make in an hour.

And we can go several steps further. Chadwick Boseman (the male lead) certainly had a teacher that encouraged him to pursue acting. Surely there are similar stories of good teachers and/or good parents for all of the thousands of people involved in the movie.

The black panther comic book was only created after the folks at Marvel realized the racism implicit in their all-white superhero’s. There are countless activists responsible for raising our consciousness of race. This relatively superficial example doesn’t mention the human suffering that has been avoided nor the fact that all of us of would certainly be more racest if not for brave work of these activists.

I can also be grateful to Joseph Niepece who invented the camera (which then took eight hours of exposure to take a picture), and the slew of people who improved upon it until it is the camera we know now. Furthermore, the camera could not be invented without lens technology, which in turn needs complex mathematics, which requires more foundational mathematics, the discovery of which didn’t happen without a measure of peace and stability, and so on.

You and I could spend hours tracing additional lines of gratitude that converge on this particular movie.

Isaac Newton (whose work in physics was needed to make the movie) said in 1675: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” which is a memorable way to encapsidate the point, but I’d argue it is much broader.

As I look around the room I’m in I see a door with a metal handle, the computer I’m typing on, a phone, a stapler, several books, a coffee maker, the English alphabet, a glass window, a bottle of lotion. At one point none of these things existed. Yet here we are enriched by all these inventions and so many more. Some given to us by people we consider giants, some by people we no longer remember.

If we took the appropriate perspective we would be overwhelmed by gratitude all the time.