This might be the most important blog I ever wrote. I think in this, I solved how to deal with grief, prevent wars, divorce, and ensure your rotten spoiled kid doesn’t grow up to be a tyrant and wants to volunteer time at a homeless shelter.

Yeah. Lots to unpack here folks. Today starts day 1 of my new philosophy on life.

Gratitude. I will make much better efforts in my daily life to show appreciation for what I have, for others, and things around me. This isn’t Thanksgiving doing this, it’s a video and a Tweet I saw, ON Thanksgiving, with the back drop of family – which created a shit storm of emotions and idea to write here.

The genesis

I watched a video last night and was kind of stunned how it made me feel. It was a video of a woman essentially being grateful to her husband for what he has given her. It didn’t click with me that it could have been a Thanksgiving video until this morning.

The video made me FEEL something. I’m a pretty stoic guy, but occasionally I’m human. The video made me feel an abundance of what gratitude feels like, and how one might sometimes feel if they are missing that in their lives. It was like a giant vacuum feeling. It’s hard to describe. Give the video a watch, and pretend she’s talking about you. Then, if you don’t feel you have that in your life – it creates a delta of sorts. That is what I’m referring to.

I then woke up to a thread on Twitter about gratitude and suddenly things started clicking for me. So much so that a million emotions must have hit me at once. Take 3 minutes to read that thread and come back to it. It’s pretty killer.

Thanksgiving

For my non-American friends, Thanksgiving is a time where fat Americans sit around a big table and eat a 42-pound turkey and then pass out on the couch watching American football. Well, that’s sort of what it morphed into. Of course, after the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade. In reality, the early settlers to what was the pre-USA had a lot of hardships. The Native Americans that were here helped them with food and taught them how to grow it. The holiday essentially is to then be thankful for food, and help from others. Then, of course, the grandchildren of these people then fought and took the land from those that helped their grandparents, but that’s a book or three for another day.

In my country, food security isn’t much of an issue. This leads to people taking things for granted with food. I grew up in a situation where food was always in the fridge, but we were always paycheck to paycheck. Years ago, the poverty level here was $19,000 a year, and the most my dad ever made in a year was $13,000 – and my mom spent most of the first 6 years of my life as a stay at home for me and my brother. Meaning, we scraped by. My dad would go through long periods of being laid off from the steel mill, and money was always tight.

But with that, today kids have everything. We all spoil our children, but the reality is today that kids, generally speaking, have way too much and aren’t very grateful for what they have. Money for most people means borrowing to pay for something, not saving. Our entire culture has been rotten to the core for 20+ years now and on the massive decline.

Grateful

This word here I believe can solve a lot. I think in many relationships, we take things for granted. Perhaps it’s a form of recency bias – that tomorrow will be fine because yesterday was fine. I think we should raise our children to say “thank you”, but also to appreciate the value of things.

This then morphed to me into what I’m grateful for today. There’s a lot of people in my life that I am grateful for, and don’t have the time in a day to thank all of them. This holiday should not necessarily be just to thank them and be grateful for them today, but to be a reminder to be grateful every day. I got a gift today for my birthday, which I was thankful for, but unnecessary. I’m at the time in my life where anything I actually want, I can buy. What can’t I buy? Time. Time with others. What can’t I purchase for someone? My time with them. So the holidays, we get together in person to spend time with others. I’m at my in-laws, and I’m one of the few who are lucky to love his in-laws – and with this, I’m grateful to have them in my life. I lost both of my parents – one in 2019, and one in 2005, and with this, I then started reflecting on them.

In some respects, I’m grateful for how they passed. Both with cancer, but one provided 11 months to say goodbye, and the other was 15 months. With that, I spent a lot of time with them. I gave them my time, as no gift is as precious as time with loved ones, but I also took time from them, so as part of my grieving process I was able to be thankful and reflect on the bonus time I had with them. Who I really feel terrible for are people who suffer loss traumatically – someone dropping over from a heart attack, hit by a car, etc. I am also pontificating that grateful here is an emotion that you should exercise when grieving. While acceptance may be the last established stage of grieving, one can argue that acceptance is where pain ends, but gratefulness allows you to reflect on the time with them and experience joy in the face of loss. That you had that time with them is amazing. I know someone close to me lost her mother when she was 4, and I could not imagine that. My grandmother was 9 when she lost her mother during the depression when she was then “farmed out” because the father had to go work on the turnpike project and he had 7 kids that needed a roof over their heads.

This then morphed to my 96 year old grandmother who is still alive. She is sitting alone, with no one. All of her friends have passed, she lost her daughter and grand daughter in 1976. She lost my father in 2005 and her husband in 2007. She still has me and my brother, but we are currently hundreds of miles from her. She likes the quiet. She likes to be alone. But when you watched her growing up, she used to re-use wrapping paper. Re-use aluminum foil. They had gardens, bought from farmers – they built a second property on their property and rented it out to pay their mortgage. They LIVED the Great Depression mindset, many years after the Great Depression ended. They were thankful for every meal. Religious.

They took nothing for granted. Both sets of my grandparents married in the 1940s and both were together their whole lives. Today, the divorce rate is 50%. What was the secret? Being madly in love? Maybe. But reflecting back, it was being grateful to each other. Grateful for children, for the home, for the affection, for the partnership.

Which then started me thinking about the bigger meaning of holidays, and how this ties back to gratefulness.

Thanksgiving – being grateful and thankful

Christmas – giving. And being grateful for gifts given to us. But again – what is the most precious gift? Time. More on that later.

Valentine’s Day – love. Grateful for our significant other

Memorial day – Grateful to those who gave their lives, for our freedom. I tend to watch Saving Private Ryan every year, along with other war movies.

Independence Day – freedom. Grateful for our Constitution and our freedoms.

Labor Day – we all see it as a day off. But let’s use my Depression-era grandparents here – they were grateful for WORK. Having been laid off due to bad economic conditions three times, I’m extremely grateful for work. Anyone who has worked with the younger generation today sees a generation that have never had economic setbacks, anyone to say no, and all got trophies – so they do not appear grateful for the opportunity to work.

Veteran’s Day – having worked in the US military complex for 15 years and now out of it, I’m grateful to all of those people who signed up for a thankless job to then spend months or years separated from loved ones to sacrifice their time for their country.

All of these holiday essentially fall around “grateful”.

Now, what to get me for Christmas? I kind of don’t want anyone to buy me anything from a catalog. Ever. It feels icky for me at this point of my life. Something someone cannot buy – are things related to time. On my birthday every year, my wife asks me what I want. For the past few, it’s “please make me meatballs and a chocolate cake with peanut butter icing”. I don’t want THINGS, but the TIME she uses to make something for me I highly value and appreciate. And, I’m very GRATEFUL for.

Gratefulness appears to be the magic emotion. Looking back on it – I think Thanksgiving is gratefulness for FOOD. Gratefulness and gratitude then seemed to be attached only to Thanksgiving, but I’d posit that every holiday is around a THEME + GRATEFULNESS.

Valentine’s Day – we do what. Buy roses to send to our wives, and then buy chocolates? Buy a necklace? To me, Valentine’s Day is too commercial. Many of these holidays turned me off over the years because I just see the corporate grab. So I use holidays really just as an excuse to see people and eat poorly.

Commercials – “buy this necklace!” for Valentine’s Day. “Buy this car!” for Christmas. I actually got a car for Christmas – it was a $1000 1967 For Mustang, and the gift came with a loan I had to pay back, but waking up to that Christmas morning was unbelievable. I had seen it at a local used car dealership every night on my way home on the late bus from wrestling, and I fell in love with it. Red. But the point here is that someone GAVE to me something I desired for Christmas.

But let’s look at gratefulness. As an 8-year-old, I WANTED legos. And when I would get the legos, it made me HAPPY! My parents would understand the asset/currency I wanted the most. Them giving it to me made them feel good. I was grateful! Perhaps with Christmas, we teach about giving, but it’s also teaching our children to be grateful for gifts? As a 16 year old, I was grateful because the car also allowed me to be productive with LABOR, allowed me to date with LOVE, and allowed me the FREEDOM to go where I wanted.

But as a 29 year old, the wants/desires changed. What I wanted with my dad was TIME. The last 11 months of his life, I saw him every weekend, as he lived an hour away. I brought him up around my friends and they met him. The last 15 months of my mom’s life, TIME was the most important currency and the only gift I wanted. She took my brother, me, and my son to a 5 day getaway in Virginia, while she could, to have a last vacation with us. The memories from it are forever burned into my soul.

I have a 3 year old. I’m a busy guy. Every day I try to be available to him from 4:30 to 7:30 and I get him ready for school every morning. I’m grateful for the time I have with him. But you also see him playing at times alone. He wants someone to play with. He wants your TIME. You put the phone down and give him a hug. Play catch with him. TIME is what they need. Not tons of toys. Tons of toys are good if you can provide them – but my boy destroys things. He has no VALUE on most of these toys that we VALUE at a price tag. He wants to run around. Play tag. Have you take him fishing. Take him to the baseball game. My 14 year old I have little time with. It broke my heart the whole time he has been alive, but I am so grateful he’s been in my life at all. I just love BEING with him. The face time is important, even if you are watching a game together.

Which then gets me back to gratefulness. Again.

Magic trick

I believe that is the magic emotion. Tell someone you are thankful for x, y, and z. Do it next week. You know, I took people out for my last day at work on my dime. Like 16 people. I wrote about it, and was grateful for everything they did over the years which not only helped me keep my job, but excel at it and be able to get to the next chapter of my life. Taking them out for this meal may have meant a lot to them – at least I hope. I gave them all a LOT of my time, whether it was teaching them something technical, career counseling, or being an ear to listen to what is going on at home. But they gave me back a LOT in their work product, professionalism, efforts, and friendship. And – I wanted to thank them. I wish I could have thanked all of them with a car, but they would have to settle for a meal from the Olive Tree in Aberdeen, MD.

The Tweet I shared opened pandora’s box.

I also felt like a polar opposite emotion of gratefulness was grief. I felt like gratefulness AFTER acceptance may be what people need to do to actually move on.

I lost a close friend from HS to suicide when he was 23. I have no idea what was going on with him, as we were hours apart and this was before the internet. I also didn’t hear about it until 4 months after the fact. That hurt. The loss was tough. But it was 25 years ago. I think of him often. I am grateful to him also for taking me to school all of those times, and being one of my first friends at my new school in 9th grade. When college happened, we mostly lost touch. But it then got me wondering about suicide – and the emotional state of someone to do this. Are they lonely? Do they not feel appreciated? Maybe we will never know. Maybe there’s nothing any of us can ever do.

But this then also begs the question of why so many suicides around the holidays? I know of some who never had children who desperately wanted them. Do they feel they have nothing to be grateful for? Some who got divorced or lost a spouse. The depression of being alone, perhaps? Perhaps the isolation removed them from people being grateful to them? Perhaps our online world today misses the point of human contact where we are grateful for the time of others, and our facial expressions which can convey that happiness and gratefulness?

Are people who never had a child, lost a child, or spouse – or jobs – or houses – is this grief able to be softened with gratefulness? Think about 100 years ago, when people had 15 kids and lost 5 before they were 18. The amount of grief, loss, and tragedy these people faced was unbearable. Yet they all continued on. Why??? What about the pain and desperation during the Great Depression? Are those people just built differently? What about the Greatest Generation, who all signed up to get shot at Normandy. Why?

I believe the culture 100 years ago taught gratefulness for what you DID have. A hot meal. A roof over your head. Good work. Transportation. A pet that loves you. A warm bed. A family. Love.

Holidays are not about commercialism. They should all be about gratefulness. Look around the table today and think about the time you are spending with someone, and see that as the greatest gift someone can give you, or you give them. That is, unless they are assholes. Then you might be miserably grateful.

New way of thinking?

I feel I’m going to start a new school of philosophy based around gratefulness. Not the cheese and fluff. But just walk the walk. Time is the best gift you can give someone, not some $300 toy. Gratefulness may be the best way to get through life to navigate all of the sorrow and hardships we face. I’m not a bible guy, but there’s a lot of sorrow in there. A lot of death. But these people lived more simply, and were grateful. With philosophy – I took a few of these classes in college. Up until this point, Kant’s Greatest Happiness Theory is sort of how I’ve structured my entire life. It’s a form of utilitarianism that Bentham and them came up with. In this – your best choice is made by evaluating the utility of each choice.

But where does that get you? Consider now Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Could I be reaching self-actualization? I’m not at the mountain top yet – but if you really think about utilitarianism, you have to have a desired end state. “Big house, nice car, family” – etc. Your choices you make need to satisfy that end state. But what happens if you get that, but it’s hollow? You have everything on paper, but you feel like a shell of a human? What happens if there’s an endless gluttony of STUFF that is desired? You will never reach the end state and be chasing the NEXT THING, never stopping to be grateful for what you do have. In today’s world, it’s just an endless cacophony of STUFF that you are told you need to acquire. This creates a situation where TIME is spent in production, to get STUFF, rather than spending time with loved ones. Someone works 18 hour days to get their kid in private school. Why? They want to provide a better life for the child – but what the child needs is time with them. Perhaps fancy schools aren’t the best thing for your child – but tools in how to love and appreciate and work with others might be far more important.

Utilitarianism can work for a lot of different things. For example, if you want to be president of the United States, you obviously have to be scandal-free. Perhaps you need lots of leadership experience. Law degrees. You make decisions to reach that end state, and this philosophy gets you there. I know it worked for me. Consider wanting to be an artist. You have to potentially go to art school, learn from masters, etc. The decisions you might have made would be different than the decisions I made.

So any 16 year old might need to try and understand and END STATE.

But a constant – a WAY of achieving those means cannot necessarily be Machiavellian. You need a form of ethics and manners in which you accomplish those means. The ends CANNOT justify the means. I did that at 24 once, and I still think about it weekly. It achieved a goal, but I sacrificed a friendship to do that. I learned how that felt internally, and vowed never to do it again. You learn lessons as you grow older.

Perhaps get wiser.

Am I going to recycle wrapping paper? Perhaps not. But we can take a lesson from those who had it hard, and kept on going. My 12 year old grandmother was farmed out, living in someone else’s house – cooking and cleaning for them for a hot meal and a bed. And she continued on, missing her family. She was grateful to be alive, cared for, a hot meal, and bed. And school.

Gratefulness may be the single best way to go through life. It can make the really good times shine so much brighter, and take some terrible sting off of the worst times of our lives to make them bearable and tack account what we DO have to be grateful for.

Time to walk the walk. This has been an enlightening two days for me. I’m not a perfect human being. I have serious flaws, but I try in earnest to be a better human every day. This might be my path. What good is the big house, the car, etc – unless you have TIME with others you care about, love, and the ability to not only TELL people you are grateful for them, but to HEAR the magical words and emotions of gratefulness that people tell you. That video of the woman talking about her husband was like some sort of elixir. How that emotionally made me feel that someone talked about their spouse like that. You know, you know someone 20 years, and you tend to take things for granted. That EMOTION you can share with someone, to be grateful to them, and hopefully you hear gratitude back – might be the key to preserving and growing all relationships.

There are books in this folks. I have just scratched the surface of this.

End of all wars?!

Part of this also I think explains the Fourth Turning generational theory. I believe this is perhaps the unifying emotion.

If you think about it – “good times create weak men” because they aren’t grateful for what they have, and take it for granted. IF you can teach gratitude, it can potentially break this generational cycle as well. Think about this as well – the weak men create hard times through war. IF you aren’t creating weak men, perhaps you can prevent war.