It’s always sort of bothered me when people claimed the glass to be half-full.
Sometimes, it’s easier to complain than to be positive and that’s a bad habit I think many of us make -- our generation more so than those before us.
From my experience, negativity is a contagious thing. Misery loves company, right? It’s easy to become cynical around someone who’s down on his or her luck.
But, luckily, I’ve also found that as long as a person isn’t too far down the road of pessimism, positivity is also infectious.
I’m not one of those people who believes statements like, “Well, if you have a bad attitude, you’ll do badly on that test.”
But, I do think it’s easier to accomplish more when you feel gratified with life in general, and even if I’m wrong, we have an infinite number of reasons to have a more-than-pleasant outlook living our day-to-day lives, anyway.
If you are reading this right now, you are inherently privileged because you have access to Internet. If the world was comprised solely of 100 people, only one of them would own a computer — as in, 1 percent.
It is something we possess and perpetually take for granted when we’re mindlessly surfing the web on our computers, phones, tablets, Nooks, Kindles, iPads, youPads, hePads, shePads and so on and so forth.
A lot of the time you’re online, it’s out of mechanical tendency; it’s habitual. With this familiarity comes casualty, and the more you use the Internet, the less appreciation you have for being able to use it.
But, it shouldn’t be that way. Instead, the opposite should happen; appreciation should happen. People should be more like, “Wow, I can get on the Internet 24/7; I’m so grateful I can do that.”
As well as that familiarity has caused our indifference to seemingly innate privileges like this; a sense of entitlement has also gradually matured within us. We, as a generation, are spoiled.
Sometimes, it gets redundant hearing about how your parents “walked five miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways,” and often, it goes in one ear and out the other.
But, in reality, can you imagine doing the things they did? Can you imagine if all women could do today was pick up the kids from school and vacuum the house in pearls, like June Cleaver?
Or, what if, as soon as you turned 18, you were off to the trenches? Or even if to write a research paper, you spent hours in the library, sifting through the Dewey Decimal System, just to find any information worth researching?
As a species, we have made amazing progress, especially technologically. The very goal behind most technological advances today is to make things better, faster and easier for the user.
If the field of consumerism aimed to cater to us, everything else should be handed to us on a silver platter, right? Wrong. Yet, this is how we often act. We complain about the amount of work we have when we are so lucky to be employed or in school at all.
We whimper about how many shots we get at the doctor (I’m guilty of this one) when we have access to medical care that ensures our health.
We wine about the two-hour-long lines we wait in at Disney World when so many people never get to have vacations.
In the grand scheme of things, based on having these opportunities alone, our lives are not hard. Yes, everyone has their issues, but guess what? They did 50 years ago, too, as well as those hundreds of years before them.
We are alive. We are literate, healthy, nourished, clothed and housed.
There are millions among our human race who can’t say the same. We have the ability to live better lives, to accomplish big things — things make our generation's legacy a positive one.
We must first realize how fortunate we already are.
