I suspect gratitude isn’t a muscle that can be improved because it’s about reflection. Seeing things with more detail to see how connected things are.
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Gratitude is not just about the niceness of things but the “enoughness” of things. If it doesn’t make you stop wanting things you’re missing something.
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If you reallllly like steak for example you can be grateful for a delicious ribeye you ate but might add a “I hope to have it more often” that defeats the purpose of the gratitude.
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But... if your reflection brings up that youtube video about factory farming conditions and that one time you tried to go vegan for a day... then you might find yourself feeling “enoughness”.
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The problem is this often creates guilt rather than contentment. Which is why a bit of deviancy and rascality can be a virtue. You have to be able to enjoy things in order to be satiated by them. The inability to enjoy sth often manifests in some other form as a “perversion”.
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The most “virtuous” often have the darkest deviancies because they do not allow themselves enjoyment. (Priests and molestation come to mind)
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Gratitude at its core is about seeing how all the murder, rape, and other crap everyone’s ancestors did was stirred in a lot and created what IS. (Including the moral framework by which we judge the past.)
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It’s about enjoying existence without feeling guilt through recognition that although there’s plenty to feel guilty about, it’s this very inability to enjoy existence that creates this suffering in the first place.
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Life is suffering because suffering created your life. That suffering IS and always was life just as a winter barren tree bearing fruit in the spring IS and always was a fruit tree.
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End of conversation
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