Pronoia

QUOTE

Max Planck once said…

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

(German physicist)

CONCEPT

Pronoia

Pronoia is the belief that the world is conspiring in your favor—the opposite of paranoia.

Instead of assuming hidden forces are working against you, pronoia imagines that unseen threads are pulling events toward good outcomes, even when they don’t yet look that way.

STORY

Mary Had a Little … Thanksgiving?

In 1827, a magazine editor sat down to write a letter to the President of the United States, convinced that something good could happen for the country—if only someone would listen. Her name was Sarah Josepha Hale, and for 36 years she believed the nation was being nudged toward gratitude.

Hale was already a household name—she wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—but her life's mission was stranger and more ambitious: she wanted the U.S. to adopt a national Thanksgiving holiday.

At the time, Thanksgiving existed only as scattered regional celebrations. Some states observed it, others didn’t. No one agreed on the date. And the country—fractured by politics, slavery, expansion, and growing distrust—struggled to feel like a unified whole.

Hale believed a single, shared day of gratitude could knit the nation together.

She saw Thanksgiving not as a meal, but as a ritual of collective healing. So she wrote letters. Hundreds of them. To governors, senators, ministers, and presidents—including Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.

For decades, nothing happened. She was ignored, brushed aside, or politely thanked and dismissed. Yet Hale maintained a kind of civic pronoia: she believed forces of unity were quietly accumulating, and that one day, the country would be ready.

Then in 1863—in the middle of the Civil War—President Abraham Lincoln opened one of her letters. Moved by her plea for a ritual that might restore “the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, and union,” he issued a proclamation:

The last Thursday of November would become a national day of Thanksgiving.

What had failed for 36 years succeeded at the moment the nation seemed least capable of gratitude. Hale’s conviction that something benevolent was at work beneath chaos proved prescient. The holiday she envisioned—one meal to remind people of abundance in the midst of scarcity—became an American institution.