Gratitude

Albin Olsson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We usually assume that things would have been better if we had taken the other option.  I often wonder whether I made the wrong, big choices in life, but that is a psychological error. It is by no means guaranteed that had we chosen differently things would have worked out better.  And actually, most of us have things pretty good.

Jimmy Carr is a British comedian, certainly controversial. often vulgar and aggressive who has also had insights into gratitude.  The contradictory sides of the man are puzzling and I wonder how he manages to live with those very different personas.

I think you would give me everything you own in 25 years time to be the age you are now and as healthy as you are right now. And I think it's a really interesting meditation to think about if you had a time machine, if you were 30 years in the future, if you could be this healthy and feel this good you'd give everything material that you own in 30 years' time to be back here. 

I think we suffer in the West a little bit from life dysmorphia. You hear a lot about body dysmorphia, gender dysmorphia. We've got life dysmorphia. A lot of people think their life is terrible because there's kind of the hedonic treadmill. You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago. Well, no one that you admire from 100 years ago had this simple pleasure in life. And when you look at the world that we live in there's been a hundred billion people ever, right? We are in the top, top percentile, in terms of the luck that we have had, the lives, the calorific intake that we just take for granted, the fact that our children don't die in the first year, the modern medicine and the entertainment that we get. We're living like kings. And yet, life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse.