Man has two legs and is…

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The first time I read that I worried he might be right. More precisely, I worried what it would mean if he were right. You could go through your entire life wanting many things you did not have, always dissatisfied, even when you get some of them. Many live this way.

Clearly being ungrateful is our default. If it wasn’t you would not need practice and training to feel gratitude. Many of us have to commit to a daily gratitude journal or deep meditation to override the natural response.

Like I said, I worried what it would mean if he were right. What problems facing humanity become much more intractable if we accept that people are not gracious for all that we have built here together?

But I now think this line from Dostoyevsky has buried in it one of the most optimistic thoughts I have ever encountered.

What does it mean to be ungrateful, practically?

It means something good has to have happened to you and then you got used to it. The warm feelings and genuine gratitude had a much shorter half-life than you may have expected. Maybe this good thing that will benefit you for months or years no longer felt special within hours or days.

So what does that mean, practically?

It means that you adapted. The fact your mind can so quickly adjust to its new circumstance is profoundly human.

The same can be said for people on the opposite end of life’s little games of chance. To lose things you once had, to be forced to start over, to clear the board and reset the pieces. Hereto many people are surprised at how quickly they get used to it.

I once met a man who told me about the feeling he had immediatly after he realized he had lost everything: “I was still me. That never goes away.” And then he got back out there.

We call that one resilience.

What if being ungrateful and being resilient come from the same place? Our adaptability.

How can something so beautiful and inspiring grow out of the same soil as something so ugly and bleak.

You could imagine how this mental adaptability would come in handy as our most ancient ancestors evolved. There was seasonal and sometime unpredictable variability in food supply, social connections, and much more. It is a real advantage to adjust your baseline expectations whenever your environment changes drastically.

Perhaps the best and the worst of humanity comes from the same places.

We have been talking about resilience and ungratefulness as if they were separate things but they are not. They are the same thing: our brain adjusting its baseline to meet our new circumstances. We just call it resilience when it adjusts down and ungratefulness when it adjusts up. But it’s the same functionality at play.

Perhaps then it is just humanity. Speaking of the direction of that humanity with words like best and worst is folly. The direction comes from the social context we ascribe to the situation but it is not really a part of the thing itself.

And if that is true for resilience and ungratefulness, might it be true for other aspects of our humanity as well?

I find all this very hopeful. The answer to our greatest problems can not be to change our human nature — that has always seemed like too large an ask to ever expect. But perhaps we do not need to go that far. Far short of changing our nature, perhaps we need only better direct it. And a practice as simple as writing in a journal each morning can get you started.