Saving My Gratitude

I saw this tweet recently, which made me reflect on the question, "What should we feel grateful for?"

1989: mr. burns is a dick.

2019: i would literally weep with relief if my boss offered me this kind of job security. pic.twitter.com/qqwLtRGHFf

— Ross Daniel Bullen (@BullenRoss) March 2, 2019

I've been thinking about this for a while at least in part due to watching Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. There are several scenes where the characters express, what seems to me like unreasonable levels of gratitude for very small things.

I mean, anything Kanna does is sweet and charming. And it fits in well with my preferred genre of television programming: soothing shows where people are praised for doing inconsequential things. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all be so grateful for small things? But something about it niggles. Why should we have to feel grateful for stuff?

Wouldn't it be better if we didn't need to feel grateful for little things? Wouldn't it be better if the little things were taken care of, so we could free up our gratitude muscles to feel grateful for really big things?

Of course, it's a truism that you don't know what you should feel grateful for (like health) until it's gone. But I want to save up all of my gratitude for when the Mueller report finally comes out.