A lot of people forget to be grateful for every little thing around them because they become numb to what it provides them. We start to believe that it will always be there and begin to desire more than what we already have. The only way for someone to restore that gratitude is by losing what they have, knowing someone who faced loss, or hearing about it. So by this, I hope I can learn to be grateful again and make someone remember to be grateful.

We always tend to reach for things we don’t have and forget how lucky we are to have what we already acquired. Many teenagers crave to have a better body, a bigger house, more money, and more friends, but we don’t realize that we already have a healthy body, the ability to see and hear, a place to call home, warmth, opportunities, a wonderful environment, and people who support them which some people do not get experience. Humans “don’t need much to live on”: shelter, food, health, a reason to live, but as we are given more, the more our greed grows and appreciation fades. 

For example, we ruin our environment, which works so hard to provide for us, to create amusement parks and factories. Humans will take advantage of their environment or other people for their own benefit and have no desire to give back.

This displays how humans damage what’s around them to get what they desire. Even in a new environment, humans will always be ready to destroy and try to take control because of their ability to reason and think beyond other animals. They take advantage of this ability to feel superior to other living things and for personal gain. Humans will always fail to remember how lucky they are because of their excessive greed.

In addition, lots of people take their body for granted. We want to be more skinny, we want to be more tall, we want to be more short, we want to have a body like the model on Instagram. We continuously degrade our healthy body because of something we noticed and didn’t have. However, if you take their healthy body away, they will regret that they took their perfect, healthy body for granted. We are blind to the fact that we have the ability to walk, run, use our limbs, and that some people don’t have those privileges. One “begins very early to dwarf their growth” by hating their body. When we get older, we desire our younger body. When we become even older, all we desire is the ability to have a healthy body that can function.

This is one of the many things we do as humans but not everyone is perfect- we live and learn from our mistakes. Forgetting to be grateful is something that is inevitable, but it is important to always go back and remember to be grateful for all the things that you were given.