An Overrated Virtue

Ungrateful

As a teenager living in one of the richest and most influential (probably a bit less after #Brexit) first-world countries, I have watched several slideshows underlining the virtue called “gratefulness”. How I as a bratty, hormonal, complaining youngster should be eternally thankful for the food on my table, water in my tap and shelter over my head, because a jarring majority of the world’s population don’t have the privileges that I do. They want me to walk out of the school assembly hall feeling content about my life and marvel complacently at the sheer miracle that are my circumstances. Their means to achieve this goal are unvaried and, dare I say, boring.

Every time, I am subjected to people suffering through one of many seemingly endless problems of this world: starvation, war, inequality and other derivatives of the same. Each time, I feel nothing more than distaste at the perpetrators and pity towards the sufferers. I do not feel remotely grateful for the life that has been bestowed upon me. Maybe it’s because of the generic nature of those slideshows. Maybe it’s lack of specificity and a heaping of generalisations.

 Maybe it’s the fact that we are supposed to feel grateful though the misfortune of others. No, it definitely is that. I bet, that if everyone had the same basic rights and amenities that every human being deserves, the virtue of gratefulness would become obsolete. As John Green rightfully wrote “without pain we wouldn’t know joy”

It’s an interesting thought that perhaps the world was orchestrated to allow for an extreme range of circumstances to be unceasingly created, endured and escaped. That true equality, not the communist kind, would always vie for imbalance.

But I digress… It’s perhaps valid criticism that my ungratefulness stems from me taking my life for granted. In my defence, that would only be true if I weren’t making use of my privileges.

I unabashedly proclaim that I enjoy my privileges. I use the food on my table to explore the cuisines of other cultures; I compartmentalise the garbage to maximise recycling; I enter school with the honest intention of wanting an education; I invest in technology that will enable my voice to be heard and provide an outlet for my creativity. I do everything to enjoy life, while trying to be a successful, ambitious human being. These factors prove that I am making use of the amenities that I was born with, amenities which I deserve.

I guess I’ve answered a question of my own. I believe that I deserve the privileges that I get. I am not certain about how this world conducts the lottery of who is born to whom, at what time and place, but my limited and warped consciousness believes that I am deserving of what I have.

I won’t waste my opportunities; I want to be a person who enriches and improves the world by the work I do and the way I behave. I will be grateful for this life when I can bring change into the lives that don’t have what they deserve.

I am not grateful for what I have because I believe that everyone deserves the same privileges that I have. I do feel incredibly lucky for my relatively solid place in the Universe, but there’s good and bad luck so I guess I’ll never truly know for sure.


What I do know, is that it should be nothing special to drink water or have three meals a day or to feel safe in your home. Teaching a lesson about Being Grateful™ may seem like a good way to pass time before classes begin, but it sets a dangerous precedent. It could quite easily lead to people becoming complacent about their lives and constructing socio-economic bubbles, or worse… Walls.

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