Glance at your life. At your health, your wealth, your race. Were you born with immense privilege into a system that favors you for irrational reasons? No? Well, even if you can tell a story of disadvantage, do the opposite.
Assume you are being carried by a tailwind of good luck.
What has gone unreasonably, almost embarrassingly right in your life? In what ways are you strikingly lucky?
Here’s one way you’re lucky: Of the heaping billions who have ever lived, few could read. Most lived in extreme poverty. Even today, about half live under authoritarian regimes. But forget the numbers and sit with reality a moment. You have the time, resources, ability, and freedom to read this. Many do not. Most people have never been so obscenely fortunate as you.
Maybe you can also afford fresh, nutritious food. Maybe you can exercise. Maybe you have 20 minutes to fuck off and blissfully melt into a couch. These aren’t universal human rights.
If you can invest in the wellbeing of yourself or others, it’s because some advantage (physical, mental, financial, educational, etc.) affords you that freedom.
You are owed nothing. The universe does not give the slimmest of fucks about your expectations. Accept this perspective, and you can find gratitude, which is the cleanest reset button we have. Like mental floss, gratitude can get into those unseen crevices and scrape off the crust of entitlement, anxiety, jealousy, desire, and other crud that life quickly deposits. And like flossing, you should seek gratitude daily.
Shortcuts to gratitude:
- Imagine losing someone or something dear to you. Really go there. See a fire erase your home. Touch someone’s withering hand in a hospital bed. Feel the hurt in your gut, then snap back to now with gratitude. What you miss is still here. (This is called negative visualization.)
- Say three things you’re grateful for before you lie down at night. Be specific. Not just “my family” but “how she laughed at that tomato.”
- Write a thank you to someone (living or not) who helped you. Tell them what they did and how it changed you.
- Thank yourself, out loud, for something you’ve done to put yourself in a good position today. Don’t whisper.
Regardless of whether it’s true, lean into the idea that you were born on third base. That you deserve nothing yet somehow have so, so much. From there, you can base your self-esteem on your effort rather than unearned privileges.
Why does that matter? Because entitlement is like a wet, room-clearing fart. It reeks and lingers. We are repelled by people who whine (but don’t work) for things they think they deserve.
Wake up grateful, fall asleep grateful. Let gratitude fill the many cracks of life like water, and entitlement will slide right off. It’s all gravy.
“Sometimes in life the foundation upon which one stands will give a tilt, and everything one has previously believed and held dear will begin sliding about, and suddenly all things will seem strange and new.”
~George Saunders, Liberation Day (Book)
“Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.”
~Annie Proulx, Close Range (Book)
