Happy Thanksgiving!

One of my character flaws, historically at least, is self-pity, which is both a bad habit and a bad impulse. In effect, it's egotism inverted; the reason I pity myself is because I have some baseline assumption that everything ought to go well for me and that I deserve some sort of redress if it doesn't. Spiritually healthy people have gotten over that childish expectation. They can handle all manner of setbacks, deprivation, and misfortune with either equanimity or an appropriate response.

I've found you can stop self-pity in its tracks if you learn to recognize it. Myself, I was given a mini-mantra against it. It came from my late friend Loyle, a pool buddy who died at the age of 93 a year ago. Loyle was the man who never complained. (I tried to go a week without complaining, and found out it wasn't as easy as he made it look.) If someone around him complained, Loyle would put up with it for a while and then say, "oh, too bad!" I say that to myself a lot now. It helps me laugh at myself and stop feeling sorry for myself.

Gratitude works, too. Gratitude is incompatible with self-pity. So when I'm feeling sorry for myself, I try to start thinking about all the things I'm grateful for. These can include something as impermanent as a good mood, as natural as fresh air to breathe, or as trivial as a kindness offered to a stranger. If I really manage to genuinely feel grateful, self-pity disappears. Making a "gratitude list" is something I usually do in my head. However, I think I'll make a real one tonight, pencil to paper.

Oh, and that painting up above? Definitely a sign of the times we're in—first of all, I had to pay $3.99 for it on Etsy, and second—well, don't look too closely at the hand of the man on the lower left or of the woman on the lower right. And what exactly is that "dish" in the foreground? Ersatz, all ersatz.

Thank goodness our feelings are still real! I'll be grateful for that. Happy Thanksgiving to you—wherever you are, whomever you're with, and whether you're American, and celebrating our holiday, or not.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Vijay: "Gratitude lists are good ideas. Someone once gave me a trick to keep the daily list fresh, which was to keep it to 3 things experienced in the last 24 hours. Happy Thanksgiving!"

Mike replies: An excellent idea. A side benefit of a gratitude list is that it puts you on the lookout to identify more things in your life you might be grateful for.

gary bliss: "A sure cure for self pity is to spend 30 or 40 minutes in the waiting room of an oncologist. I spent my career in the national security and it has been my honor and privilege to work with men and women that are combat disabled or (earlier in my career) spent years of their young adulthood as honored guests of the Hanoi Hilton. There is never a peep from them; every last one of them i have known have always been focused on what can they contribute going forward. I love them all and even our vain-glorious and ill-advised politicians can do nothing to stain them in my heart."

Mike replies: Whenever Loyle said "oh, too bad," I always imagined it was what he heard as a child from his father whenever he whined or felt sorry for himself. Ignoring tantrums and not responding to gambits for pity is good parenting advice, remembering that we always need to distinguish it from the child's real needs for emotional support and sympathy. Loyle's father, Fred, served in the military for every day of both WWI and WWII—not just every day of US involvement, but the entire span of both wars anywhere—and Loyle himself managed to sign up just before WWII ended. He was a Navy man, and an electronics specialist. When the Korean war began, the military sought him out for his expertise, and he served then too.

Here's Loyle, as a giant and a midget. (Both pictures shot with the .5X lens on the iPhone.) I told the story about Loyle and the lawnmower somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can find it.

Rand Adams: "There’s a great cure for self-pity. Thirty years in the fire service. Whingeing on, in the fire station, is immediately followed by dimes flying at you from every corner of the room. Signifying, of course, 'Call someone who gives a damn.' This tends to put one’s pity-party in perspective."

Robert Fogt: "Oh, come on! The woman in the lower right merely has her hand stuffed up the, um, backside of her latest sock puppet. And that's what is making everyone smile. Photographers have employed this old trick forever!"

Comments

[Basil Steinle]

I imagine the dish in the foreground is a British-style pudding, but can’t make out what’s sticking out of it.

[Ken Bennett]

The fake smiles give it away as AI generated. (Not to mention all the, er, odd appendages.) People didn't smile like that, painters didn't paint people smiling like that, etc. It's an artifact of training AI with random (stolen) social media photos.

https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

[Dan Khong]

You wrote: Spiritually healthy people have gotten over that childish expectation.

You are right. Spiritually healthy people can relate that "godliness with contentment is great gain".

[Albert Smith]

Artist, huh? O.K., who ever came up with that
Rembrandt lighting thing.

[James Bullard]

Buddha said that all life was suffering. At least that is how the teaching is traditionally translated. I read a while ago that 'disappointment' would be a better translation. Looking at my own life I have to agree. Almost none of it turned out as I envisioned and therein lies the problem. We humans have expectations and our expectations are rarely met. Even when they are they are frequently not as satisfying as we thought they would be. The trick is to let go of the past and live in the moment. When we manage to do that, the present is pretty nice for most of us most of the time and it is ont there is the old saying "This too shall pass".

[Kye Wood]

I'm no expert. But surely that image is AI generated?

You've got a dusty dry sense of humour sometimes Mike. So I don't know if I'm being unkind. Or if I've totally missed the obvious joke here?

$3.99 on Etsy. I like extra hands, don't get me wrong. And dystopian faces don't upset me as much as they used to. But that image is wrong on at least 53 levels that I'm consciously aware of. And a few that I can't put my finger on.

Was there maybe an earlier draft of this, that had a pickpocket trying to steal his knife and fork? And it just sort of slipped by quality control...

If this is where AI is. I think we're okay for the moment.

[Yes, it's clearly generative AI. And I had to buy the rights to use it. --Mike]

[Robert Roaldi]

That's one scary scene.

[Vijay]

Gratitude lists are good ideas. Someone once gave me a trick to keep the daily list fresh, which was to keep it to 3 things experienced in the last 24 hours. Happy Thanksgiving!

[Christer Almqvist]

As often is the case, placing the cursor on the picture adds some additional information. Here it reads: "Thanksgivingai".

[Kirk]

Happiness is self-inflicted.

[David Comdico]

It’s funny that you had to pay for the rights to use the AI image but the AI didn’t have to pay for the right to steal from the images it trained on. Arbitrage at limitless scale.

[Stan B.]

Yeah, I'm big into the self pity party genre- and I know I have way lots more than I can even properly think of to be thankful for...

[Kye Wood]

Fourteen years ago, when my 15 year old daughter came to live with me, we agreed to two rules. And they were the glue that made the next years some of the best of my lifetime.

1. Before dinner, every day, we had to share three good things from that day. Even on the crappiest day we'd ever had.

2. We could never say sorry.

No. 2 was an entirely original thought on my part. If you can't use sorry, it makes you very mindful of not being unkind—because there's no way to 'wind it back.' It also made you forgive more quickly, because you were looking for the word written on the other's face. And if found, it would trigger forgiveness.

[Paul]

I'm glad he was a good friend to you but that seems like someone I would not like to be around. The way you describe him seems like someone who wasn't comfortable expressing any negativity and couldn't accept it from others. While I think it's a positive value to put a positive spin on the things that happen to you, to impose that on someone else, in expecting them not to complain about their circumstances, seems like the opposite of empathy, which to me is the chief human value.

I like to bellyache occasionally. Perhaps more than occasionally. But as a nurse I see people whose situations are oftentimes obviously terrible but who oftentimes seem to feel like they need to spin them positively. The other night I was putting an IV into a woman who had been paralyzed from her chest down in at ATV accident. She didn't bring it up but I asked her what happened. I was like "that (effing) sucks" and she smiled. I'm sure days go by where no one really acknowledged the gross suckitude of her essential situation.

I do meet patients, oftentimes those who are addicted to drugs and in particular, meth, which is absolutely awful stuff, who non stop complain and blame people. It gets old but I have no idea what happened to them prior. Raped by a priest? Grew up poor or in some awful foster situation? My life has been pretty great. I can stand to listen to them complain, even if sometimes it's nails on the blackboard. At least, I try.

The other part is that people's complaints are interesting. Why are most of the great songs about screwed up relationships? Because good ones are boring to hear about. Jesus. Tell me about how your relationship is going bad, please. That's a good story.

Anyway, I don't generally make friends with people who are averse to a little bellyaching. I'm up for hearing their bellyaching too. Life, even good life, can seriously blow chunks sometimes. I am not inclined to suffer in silence. I like people who are good listeners.

Just saying.

[David L.]

AI needs a good bit of improvement. It missed adding HCB with an M11 Monochrome and 35mm f0.01 lens.