You Control What Is Enough
we are depleting our strategic gratitude reserves
Optimism is important, therefore…
Your kids will never thank you.
Your parents will never praise you.
Your spouse will never appreciate you.
Your friends will never respect you.
Your employer will never value your contributions.
Your society will never exalt your identity/culture.
The world will never give you happiness.
Wait, where’s the optimism? It’s in the word that is missing - which stops this just being a litany of denunciation - at the end of every one of those lines. The word is “enough.” And you control what is “enough.”
Don’t you dare post Ryan Gosling in Barbie. I said, “don’t you dare…. “
God damn it.
To go back to the first: if you are a parent, your kids will never appreciate you enough. What that means is, if you just wake up one morning, as if you were the protagonist in a movie, and took stock of everything your kids ever did to thank you, or show gratitude for everything you’ve done for them - just starting from the blank mental state with which you woke up - then it will definitely not be enough. It could never be enough, from that mind, to repay you for everything you did for them. For all the things you did for them that they didn’t even know about.
For the time you asked if they had all their stuff for their baseball game 10 times, and they got angry and said “stop yelling at me, I have all of it” and then you got to the field and they didn’t have their glove, so you had to drive home and get it for them. For a silly, irrelevant little league game. They don’t appreciate you enough. They never will. Hypothetically.
Everything I just said above? That’s poison, slow poison. If you let yourself think like this long enough, it will literally kill you worse than if you were dead. Of course, you’re right, all else held equal, it will never be enough. How could a child ever repay their parent for everything, on top of, literally creating you out of thin air? You did not exist, and then you did: because of them. Flowers on Mother’s Day ain’t gonna cut it. Nothing could cut it. You could sink the Titanic with that iceberg of ingratitude.
What you have to change is what you need. You have to be okay - you have to change your brain to be okay - with the idea that you will do things for them that are painful, expensive, hard, time-consuming: and they will actually never repay you. They will never be thankful enough. They may not even remember - may not be capable of remembering - what you did for them. You have to live knowing that it will never objectively be enough, and that you have to change your brain so that subjectively it is enough for you. So you can be happy. So you can live, happily, contentedly, without feeling that gnawing sense of injustice towards the most important people in your life.
Because every single meaningful thing that you do in the universe will be insufficiently appreciated. You must be okay with that. You have to be able to do the right thing - even hard, long, painful things - and then have literally no one, even the person you did it for, appreciate it (enough). You gotta be okay with smiling, walking on with life and knowing that in your head - the only goddamn place that matters - you know you did the right thing. Life is not a movie. The camera will never zoom in and show the audience how your act of selfless generosity reveals your character’s true inner virtue. There might even be people who think you’re an asshole because they don’t know you did it. No one might ever know. But you know.
The same thing happens when someone complains (inevitably online) about not finding the right job, or the right partner or the right level of respect from society or other people. You might think I’m going to argue with you, to say you’re wrong , but… you’re right. Starting from where your brain is right now, you’re right.
But you can change your brain.
You have to control your urge to get angry at this, to say “no, you’re blaming the victim - me! - you aren’t respecting me, you don’t understand what I’m going through, you don’t get that it’s other people’s fault.”
Because it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is. What matters is that if it’s really making you unhappy, then something needs to change - and since you can’t change other people, then the only solution is changing yourself. It doesn’t matter that it’s not your fault. It’s the only way. If some asshole runs you over and breaks your legs, that’s 100% his fault. Sue the crap out of him. But you are the one who will have to go to physical therapy and do the hard work to recover. There is no way to take enough from him to, by itself, fix you, to make it just like it was before. That’s not how the universe works. You have to go to do that painful hard thing that gets you the thing you want.
Even if every American agrees that he wronged you. Even if they let you sue him for ten trillion dollars. Even if they execute him for his crimes. Even if they pass a new Law called Steve’s Law that says anyone who gets run over gets the Medal of Honor. You still need to go to PT and work and hurt and learn to walk again. You don’t deserve it. It’s not punishment. That’s physics. That’s how things actually get better: you make your brain do the things that mechanically lead to things getting better. Other people, including the people who maybe made things worse, don’t matter.
That’s how you need to approach everything in life. With that optimism. Not the shallow, stupid, “the glass is half full” sort of optimism, but the real, powerful, self-fulfilling-prophecy of optimism that you will be sufficiently appreciated for doing the right thing, because even if no one else does, you will - enough - in your own head.