WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FEEL GRATITUDE? by: HENRY MAKOW

https://www.henrymakow.com/

I've been meaning to write a few words about gratitude, and here it is Thanksgiving in the US.

What better time?

Have you noticed that no matter how poor people are, anywhere in the world, they are all engaged in a desperate scramble for survival?

No matter how bad their life is, they want more of it.

This survival instinct is mirrored by all people no matter their material status.

Life must be pretty good if people cling to it so tenaciously.

However, if we compare the time and energy we devote to ensuring our survival with the time and energy we spend feeling grateful for life; well, there's no comparison.

I doubt if we spend 1/10th of one percent of our energy feeling grateful for the thing we love some much that we dedicate the other 99.9% of our energy to maintain.

Part of the reason is that we don't know whom to thank because the Illuminati have stolen God. God is the power that gave us the gift of life.

Thank you God!

Not only do we not feel gratitude, we devote a ton of energy to being actively ungrateful.

I'm pretty comfortable but there is a hardly a day that goes by that I don't rue some investment decision I didn't made 20 years ago.
Enough is always a little more than what one has.

So I guess Thanksgiving is a time to think about the glass half-full rather than half-empty, a time to think of what's right instead of what's wrong.

And while many have been traumatized by the US election, we can be grateful that we still have democracy and a large measure of freedom. Let's not take that for granted either.

Related - Les Visible Gratitude

First Comment from Peter W

Usually because people have never been truly without. The ingrates are usually those with enough who want more. Having lived in Africa working with the poor out in the bush I have seen children make toys from coat hangers and shoe polish tins, rubber inner tubes and food tins while their mothers walked ten miles for well water. I never heard them complain. The men came out with an oft repeated "Mr Peter we are suffering" daily and they weren't doing more than stating a fact. As a 26 year old paid $30 a month they knew I was not Santa Claus but were pleased I was there.

Having to boil water always for drinking, catching Malaria and doing without phone or electrical devices, my bi weekly treck to the Capital in a Missionary's truck was a joy.

Later years saw me travel throughout the Middle East, north Africa and India and Pakistan. Deprivation? Go to Mumbai or Kolkota and ask if you would like to live under a plastic sheet on the roadside. So Henry it is easier to be thankful yet I too drift into the "I wish I had a newer car" syndrome.

2 years I tasked my youngest son to write a list of 100 things he was thankful for - he declared it impossible and once I explained, came up with a list within ten minutes. Give thanks to God every day for food and friends and home and shelter and electricity and shops with products in them (Romania didn't nor did post-Soviet Russia), internet shopping, freedom to worship, a job, warm clean water, a bed, sheets, white goods. The list is endless.

Once practiced daily the gratitude becomes normal. Do we have all we want? No. Do we have all we need to keep body and soul together? Yes. Did the poor complain in Africa and India? They begged and they sat in the dust but I have heard more complaining at Macy's on Sale Day than I have in the developing world. And the greatest thing to be thankful for is Salvation through Christ a free gift.

James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.

Happy Black Friday where Mammon rears its ugly head.

Comments for "Why is it so Hard to feel Gratitude? "

Robert K said (November 25, 2016):

Why should we feel gratitude when, as we are told incessantly, "There's no free lunch"? In other words, nothing in this life can come to us as a gift. We must expect to have to earn everything we get.

This is the most arrogant, false, abominable proposition ever devised by the demons among us. No primitive people has been so foolish as to advance it: they knew better because they were in touch with the real things of earth. It took the mad abstractionists--Marxists, Fabian Socialists, Money Men, etc.--to construct a matrix of perverse statistics that disarmed ordinary people against this assault on their common sense.

If I look at everything in my life, patently it has virtually all come to me freely, as a gift. Air is just there for me to breathe, water to drink, the abundance inherent in nature to eat, etc. Some power has given me a bunch of organs that not only perform miracles but work together to keep me alive. And what is this "being alive": I can hardly claim responsibility for that.

I have at my disposal a most fantastic array of technologies and products that have been inherited from previous generations. I never invented the wheel or the silicon chip, yet I have use of them.

I have the love of my family and friends, and my dog if I have one; I would be shattered to learn that this love had to be "earned" in accordance with some puritanical law of reciprocity. I have also freely had the benefit of the Incarnation that showed me my purpose and how I have been created to relate to others.

People do not feel gratitude as they should because they see things disconnected and out of proportion. They have had their egos stoked by delusions about their personal achievements and independence. If you took out of their lives everything to which they have contributed absolutely nothing, then they would be reduced to lifeless nonentities.

George said (November 25, 2016):

Another great and timely article.

Why do we find it hard to feel gratitude?

I suspect it is because we don't reflect enough about our precarious and very temporary situation
on this planet. This is likely due to our "not having enough time", being "too busy".

This in turn is most probably due to our ever-increasing paced "treadmill" geared by, primarily, the TV. (which
tells us, especially at this time frame, to go shopping, what to buy, what to do etc).

I find that those that fill the malls are shopping for happiness, acceptability, and find none.
It may well be that they are trying to fill the emptiness inside them, created by the false lifestyle foisted on us all.

Henry Makow received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982. He welcomes your comments at henry@henrymakow.com
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