The world doesn't owe us a thing. When we are born, we are born naked and crying, with nothing at all. Everything and anything that happens to us, and everything we own and everyone we love are the happy gifts of the universe — one with zero obligation to give us what we want.
This fact underpins one of the most important lessons in ancient Stoicism: gratitude. For Epictetus, gratitude is a way to avoid being resentful and bitter. He asks us to imagine life as a banquet. The unhappy person is one who looks jealously at other plates or is angry that they are served last. They feel entitled to food, and their ego is so inflated that they feel they’re due the greatest portions. But Epictetus tells us to wait our turn and to be thankful for whatever our host provides, because it’s more than we had before.
Modern psychology places a lot of weight on these kinds of “gratitude exercises” because gratitude is what allows us to appreciate what we have more deeply, and to appreciate those who gave these things to us. Gratitude is what allows us to put things into perspective and to realize that things perhaps aren’t always that bad.
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