The Ministry of Happiness

Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning. ~ Gza

The Importance of Kindness, Consideration and Gratitude

I am absolutely and existentially tired! Frankly, I’m tired of humanity, tired of people, tired of a world where people are only concerned with themselves and their immediate needs and desires regardless of the impact on anyone else. I guess one of my core philosophies has always been let people do what they want, but with one caveat, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Want to get drunk and drive a car in an enclosed space where the only person who can get hurt is you, go for it. But don’t drive drunk on a road where you might hurt other people. Same thing with taking drugs, having firearms, etc… the complication is of course, that if you live in a society, which we all do, it’s difficult for your actions not to impact others. So at the very least I believe others, and myself, should act in ways to limit the negative impacts of their/my actions on others.

It’s this core believe that leads me to have an environmentalist bent, that leads me to want universal healthcare and support social security and Medicare/Medicaid. It’s why I support the socialist institutions in American society, our police and fire services. When you dial 911, they don’t check to see if, or how much taxes you have paid before sending help, they just send help because it’s what’s best for all of us as a society.

I also support the idea of an individual earning and building their own success. I believe hard work should be rewarded, a meritocratic process if you will, again, as long as your success is not at the expense of others. It’s one of the reasons I’ve spent my career in a service industry (education), happily in my field, what my success often means is that I’ve done a good job at helping others, and more success means I’ve helped even larger numbers of people.

So this is my starting point, along with a natural level of misanthropy, that leads me to my current state of existential exhaustion. I find people ever increasingly to be more and more selfish. Now, every time I have that thought I take pause and I wonder if I’m having an old man, get off my lawn moment. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, a lot of time listening to others with the same complaints, and I just don’t think that’s what it is. I see the attitude constantly, just yesterday, while taking my walk, for part of it I was walking along the parking lot in the mall near Target. I notice the shopping carts, so many were just all over the parking lot. And I ended up doing a little math, 50% of them had some kind of half finished drink cup garbage in them as well. People don’t want to be inconvenienced, it’s less convenient to walk the cart back to the store or where they corral the carts. It ‘s less convenient to take your half finished drink into your car and bring it home to throw it out, or walk across the lot and throw it in the trash. So you just leave your cart wherever, leave your trash in the cart, then it’s no longer your problem. It shows a complete lack of consideration for the impact it will have on someone else. You see it most of all when driving. People will cut you off, if you let someone into a line of traffic they don’t acknowledge what you did. People will literally stop in traffic to check their map app to see if this where they should turn while holding up traffic or on a blind curve which is incredibly dangerous. If someone needs to exit, instead of slowing down and changing lanes behind you, they always speed up and cut over in front of you, which is far more disruptive to others but a half-second quicker for them.

This selfish attitude really gets to me. It’s the sort of thing when you hold the door for someone, or let them go in front of you in the line at the grocery store, people don’t react with gratitude but rather act as if you were just acknowledging their entitled privilege because they are more important than everyone else. People act as if they are the only people on earth, or at least, the only one that matters and it tires me.

I try really hard not to be a selfish person. I try and find ways to be kind to others, not for the gratitude, but just because it’s the right thing to do. In a way it is selfish, because a kinder more helpful society benefits all of us, including me in the end. It’s paying a little bit into the whole of society, not for immediate gratification and benefit, but because overall it makes our society a better place for all of us. Lately, and likely it has been getting to me more because of all of the other things piled up on me in my life, impending heart surgery and retirement, feeling for the first time in my life fairly lonely, the stress of work and many of the negative changes I see in the world, this has facilitated society’s selfishness getting to me a lot more.

I come back from my evenings and weekends, rested, recharged and with a positive attitude. But quickly, having people cut me off driving to work, being rude in the grocery store. Within minutes at work dealing with entitled people who are causing chaos, I quickly grow tired. By the end of the day I truly hate humanity and my frustration is at the boiling edge. It’s an unpleasant place to be and frankly I’m not sure how I can change it, and frankly I can’t, but WE can.

It takes all of us expressing and acting in three ways, acting with kindness, consideration and gratitude. If we all can show a little bit more of all of this, we would live in a much better world. Showing kindness to others by giving a little more grace to people’s actions, being more considerate of how our actions impact others and being grateful for the consideration and grace others show to us. And just a little further, expressing that gratitude when others are kind and courteous. If we could all just do this, it would be a better society and we’d all have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane