We Are Living in a Gratitude Drought.

If you haven’t heard someone (including yourself) sometime in the past week say, “I hate Gen Z,” then you’re not participating in society. They are kind of the worst in a lot of ways– and I come by this criticism honestly, as a cusper born in the nebulous years heralding the end of the Millennials and the start of Generation Z. We suck.

I’ve spent most of the last three years working with teens who are Gen Z through and through, and through participant observation I’ve come to understand a lot about how their world has shaped them as humans. And before I can be misunderstood, let me make one thing very clear: I adore the kiddos I work with. They are savage little assholes for the most part, and I love them. Full stop.

Because even though they have a tremendous capacity to be absolute monsters, I know it’s not their fault. The blame falls on the environment in which they are growing up, which consists of manifold influences, almost all of which are failing them on some level. And in these past three years, I’ve come to realize that the biggest failure of all is that we, as society, have ceased to teach and value gratitude.

Gratitude is defined as “the quality of being thankful,” but it’s far more than that. It requires conscious consideration and forces at least a modicum of reflection upon ourselves and our place in the social network. Gratitude necessitates a level of humility, an acknowledgement that the positive experience we are receiving is not something we deserve.

There’s another key word: “deserve.” It’s the driving force behind entitlement, which is one of the biggest complaints out there about young people today. Everything from healthcare to the internet is now considered a human right; people are trashing restaurants over a charge on extra sauce because they believe they should just get whatever they want. And don’t even get me started on the bonkers degree to which youth feel entitled to other people’s respect. When we feel entitled to everything, we feel grateful for nothing. I don’t need to spell out how detrimental this becomes for society when all of us are seeing it unfold around us every day.

But it goes deeper than wanton expectations of total gratification. To look at the world is to see inequality, often on arbitrary lines: someone born in America has reliable access to clean water. Someone born in Somalia doesn’t. Humans need a way to understand and cope with this reality, and that used to be the role of gratitude. But when every good thing is something every human deserves by virtue of existing, we have to find some other way to rationalize why some people have and others have not. So we pivoted to privilege.

In its current social justice iteration, “privilege” refers to “certain social advantages, benefits, or degrees of prestige and respect that an individual has by virtue of belonging to certain social identity groups . . . who have historically occupied positions of dominance over others.” Understanding privilege this way necessarily pits some groups against others, which in turn makes it inherently negative. Privileged group = evil; unprivileged group = blameless.

We cannot be thankful for the advantages we have, because it came at someone else’s expense– or so the theory goes. To express gratitude for the circumstances over which I have no control, yet which have made my quality of life comfortable, is to simultaneously squash people without those circumstances further into their disadvantage. Under this intersectional concept of privilege, gratitude is not only inappropriate, it is actively oppressive.

We have got to say “enough” to this destructive bullsh*t. Not by arguing that privilege doesn’t exist, but by reframing it into something for which we should be grateful. We don’t have to pretend that every good thing we have came due to our own hard work– I had nothing to do with my dad working a grind for thirty years to provide for his family and allow my mom to stay at home and raise my sister and I, but I sure am grateful to both my parents for the upbringing they gave me. I didn’t choose to be born in the greatest country in the world, but man, am I grateful to be an American.

Gratitude makes us happier, healthier individuals. Happy, healthy individuals create a happy, healthy society. The dogma of progressivism, which demonizes gratitude and discourages humility, is making us miserable, which is setting our children up for failure. This has got to stop. We have got to be grateful.