Gratitude

You start by pursuing a pair of shoes as a child. You need that pair. You save and save and you finally are able to buy them. Your parents take you to the store and you walk out in them. You baby those shoes with every fiber of your being. Ensuring that you respect every hard earned dollar spent on them. 

Then, you see another sweet pair. Time to repeat the process. 

Before you know it, you are an adult with a closet full of shoes, 80% of them deadstock (unworn) waiting for their chance to see the light of day. Watching you add more and more to your closet. 

What’s that? Suddenly watches are catching your interest and they are beginning to line your bathroom counter. 

Oh, now cologne? 

It seems like you are buying more and more faster and faster. 

Before long, you need a house to store all of your shoes, watches, and fragrances. 

Once you get that house it isn’t enough. 

You want a greenhouse so you don’t have to go grocery shopping as much. Now you need land. 

You know what, you need a farm? And what’s a farm without a cow - after all, you want cheese and dairy. 

Wait what - maybe instead of a farm, I want to move to the suburbs. My neighbor got a Porsche and I now want a BMW. One that’s nicer than their Porsche. Who wants to grow their own food anyway? 

And so the cycle goes and so the cycle persists. 

A recurring theme that I hear when listening to those who have achieved any modicum of success is the importance of gratefulness to not get trapped within the relentless cycle of hedonic adaptation. 

My view is that it is okay to want material items as long as you have the fundamental understanding that once you have a certain baseline level of living, these material items contribute to your well-being in limited ways. 

In comes the importance of gratefulness. 

By practicing gratitude, you acknowledge what you have in your life and appreciate where you are at and where you have been historically leading to where you are now. This can help you understand what you are pursuing in life and gain a better understanding of the potential impacts of achieving these pursuits. 

Those that don’t practice gratitude are doomed for a perpetual quest for more - never being satisfied with the life that they have or that they are living. 

I have heard the importance of gratitude for many years and have not always been the best about consciously practicing it, but I am not as bad as I thought. 

Any time I have gone a long drive in my adulthood, I have had a vision creep into my mind. Maybe it was too many hours spent fantasizing about getting to play the game Oregon Trail but I start to envision traveling west with a horse drawn carriage. 

I think about how we can travel distances in hours that would have taken humans days or weeks historically. 

This line of thinking isn’t limited to traveling. 

I think of how fortunate we are to live in a society where we can have air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter. 

How humans used to have many children to tend their farm and how the survival rate of those children was low. 

How we used to die of diseases as simple as colds because of how ill-equipped to handle them we were. 

I even take this line of thinking to think of how fortunate I am to be alive. All of the death in humanity and somehow all of my ancestors survived so I can have the luxury of distracting myself from reality by scrolling through Facebook to put off writing before posting content to the internet that could potentially change my life in a split-second. 

Then I realized that at some point along the road, I started subconsciously practicing gratitude. 

Pair that with me meeting my wife who is incredibly good at vocalizing her gratitude for me and our life together and I have been continually practicing and refining this skill. 

She has helped me realize that, although I want much, much more out of life, we could stagnate where we are for the rest of our lives and still live a very high quality life. 

We would have an objectively nice lifestyle with some luxuries that others don’t have and many luxuries that those that came before us could not have dreamed of having access to. 

While I will continue to practice this skill, I am grateful that it is not something that I will have to stumble upon after being trapped in a full sprint on the hedonic treadmill of wasting my life trying to chase ever more expensive luxuries. 

Practicing gratitude with a low degree of intentionality has enabled me to recognize that I am in a great position and that my pursuit of more is a choice because I want to find out what more is like. 

It makes my pursuits a choice, not a desperate chase to escape a reality that I hate. 

What would practicing gratitude do for you? You may live in great conditions like I do. Only experiencing the minor inconveniences of traffic, the internet going out, or the power temporarily going out. Those inconveniences can be frustrating - but what would it be like if you had to use a gas lamp for lighting everyday? What if you didn’t have a fridge for all of your groceries? 

You may have an objectively hard lifestyle. You live paycheck to paycheck, vying for your life. But you have the internet to view this. Regardless of whether it is at the library, on your neighbor’s WiFi - they really should change their password - you have the internet in your grasp. You can access information that just 100 years ago people couldn’t possibly imagine. 

You have the ability to find odd jobs to make ends meet. You have public transportation systems to help you get there. 

You can take this to extremes and the conclusion is continually that there is something to be grateful for. If you can’t find anything to be grateful for, it may be time to evaluate yourself. What have you been grateful for in your life? 

If you have nothing to be grateful for - you are approaching life through a flawed perspective. At the end of the day, if you can’t be grateful for anything - be grateful to experience the suffering in life. Without the suffering, you wouldn’t know the bliss of joy. 

I must admit, if I would have read the above paragraph at the wrong point in my life, I would have scoffed. 

What type of white-privilege bullshit is that? Be grateful for the suffering? Fuck you. Live like me for a week and see if you are grateful. 

That line of thinking is valid and I have admitted that I am at a good spot in my life. 

Yet, I haven’t always been here. I have found ways to practice gratitude in situations where I had negative money and I was trying to figure out how I was going to pay the $90 on my credit card on time. 

I encourage you to try it. You will need to do this for an extended period of time to see the real benefit - like most good practices in life. 

But if you are able to do this - you may just open your eyes to all there is to be grateful for in this life. This could lead to you seeing more opportunities, increasing the quality of life that you have - pushing you further and further from the depths with which you were entrenched. 

Making you realize the value of your gratefulness for suffering. 

If you haven’t done this before - pause to think about the food you are ending your hunger with. The water that you are quenching your thirst with. The shoes that protect your feet from the elements. The ability to think in life. Even if you are pissed off, you can be grateful for your ability to experience emotion. 

There is no scale too small to start at to begin making progress. The more you are able to intentionally check in and do this, the easier it will get to find something to be grateful for. Maybe you progress from your socks, to your shoes - before long, you are grateful for your clothes. Your ability to express yourself with those clothes. 

This is a material example but this can start internally. Maybe you are grateful to be able to use your arms. Your legs. Your fingers. Your ears. Your eyes. Maybe it’s that you are a kind person at heart. Maybe it is that you are able to solve problems creatively. 

We all have something to be grateful for.