The Ungrateful: Why Thanksgiving is Dishonest

The Ungrateful

Thanksgiving long weekend just wrapped up. I may get in a lot of trouble from the Thanksgiving fanatics out there, but facts are facts. In a fast paced world of do’s and don’ts, a materialist driven culture with the mantra of How I want, when I want, a society that in a way values The I am so Busy mentality; We are all ungrateful. Yes, I said it. You and I, and the person standing next to you. We are all ungrateful. The value of life has become so perplexed that even though you say I am grateful, give it a minute and you will have forgotten what you are grateful for or what you should be grateful for.

Victim of Our Times

Putting the negative connotation aside, being ungrateful is not as horrible as it may seem. You are not a bad person for being ungrateful. Neither am I. You are just, human. A victim of our times. You are a human being driven with desires and thirst for the next best thing. How could you not be with the way things are evolving in our Western World where your accomplishments are just never enough? Where you need to have goals for each corner you turn, and God forbid you do not have your life planned out to a T. And even though Thanksgiving is bound to bring a reality check, an appreciation of all the blessings of the past year, a reflection of what you should be grateful for in your life, I have to say with a heavy burden in my heart we are all not being honest. Thanksgiving is a facade. A quick band-aid cover up to make ourselves feel better for being ungrateful during the rest of the year. It is hard not to be though when we are all caught up in a web of the modern world expectations.

The Epiphany Moment

Take a minute to think about it. Are you being honest with yourself? You know you should be grateful, but do you feel grateful? I could list a million things that I should be grateful, but do I deep down to my core truly feel blessed? Those are two different things that in my humble opinion we all struggle with.  Tomorrow will come and you will fall back into your daily routine, you will fall back to your old ways of not counting your blessings. But let’s face it. Really, who counts their blessings after all? Except when a tragedy hits the person next to you and then bam –  EPIPHANY! You say to yourself “I am never complaining about so and so again”. Well, a week later and you are complaining about your life again and so begins the vicious cycle again.

The Art of  Entitlement

The problem lies with the fact that you forget of how grateful you should be. As if your history never existed. A mere illusion in your mind. And so, you see your accomplishments as little specs of dust when in reality they are colossal considering how far you have come. But the more you have the more you want. And the more you want the more easily you forget. This is the era of entitlement. You feel entitled to things, and I say why not? Feel entitled, but with a dose of gratefulness. Not just on Thanksgiving day, but all year around.

So is There a Cure to Ungratefulness?

I am afraid not. There are people that are grateful but I do believe we are bound to be ungrateful and honestly it is hard not to. In the Western world, the picture-perfect-materialistic-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses world we all surround ourselves in, being ungrateful is just a part of life. As I previously said, nothing wrong with being ungrateful, but let’s at least stop pretending we are grateful. Real gratefulness exist all throughout the year.

What are your thoughts? Are we overall ungrateful?

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