Ask HN: What are you grateful for? happy holidays everyone, it's hard not to look back on the year but what are you grateful for in this moment? i just visited my grandpa, and spent the afternoon going through old photos and hearing his stories. my grandma passed away this year and it's been pretty hard, but im grateful for today and for that moment with him. |
I am grateful that in the last year, due to a particularly insightful HN comment, I was able to kick a couple pretty nasty habits and my health and mental stability is improving greatly as a result.
Birth is pure luck of the draw and I’m grateful fortune favoured me. If I were religious I’d say blessed
It definitely feels less lonely when family is around. Exchanged some presents and will go watch a ice hockey game soonish.
Thankful that I get to spend time away from work and enjoy holidays.
I'm grateful for my wife and our wonderful child, and our family. (I am sorry for anyone out there who is lonely and/or has lost anyone recently.)
I'm grateful to be healthy enough to run an ordinary life. (I am sorry for those who suffer from disease or worry about their health.)
I'm incredibly grateful for being permitted to exercise my hobby as my profession, so I don't have to "work". (I wish everyone success in finding work, and finding meaning in what they do, who are currently unemployed or dread their jobs.)
I'm grateful for my education, which was free of charge and at the same time benefitted from top institutions and top teachers, despite not coming from a privileged background (well, relative to Western European standards). (I feel sorry for people who have to go into debt to get an education, or for whom an education is out of reach.)
I'm grateful for my personal library and HN to be able to read intellectually stimulating things. (I feel for all the people that have not had the chance to discover the pleasure of reading, or who have not yet discovered Hacker News.)
Just a thought: SOMEONE is grateful to SOMEONE for SOMETHING, it's a ternary predicate. The first slot is filled by you, the last slot is being polled here by this "Ask HN" request; since it's Christmas, think about that middle slot (to WHOM should you be grateful?).
I am grateful for my colleagues who covered for my diminished mental abilities (the trimestrial scans after a cancer recurrence are always nerve wreaking) and provided emotional support while we were awaiting the result of that scan. I wish I could properly thanks them instead of drowning in my feelings when I try to do so.
But still, I’m profoundly grateful for my friends, family and colleagues who have been there for my son and I in every sense of the word. Even in sadness and despair, i feel attuned to the light.
Most times, I think we can usually come up with something.
I knew a guy that used to say “If you’re having trouble feeling grateful, start by being grateful that you’re not on fire, and work your way up, from there.” This was a chap who had, at one time, been on fire (and had the scars to show it).
It was a difficult year, and people took to the streets all over the country. They were not as divided by all the polarizing shit on the Internet yet.
So, early in the morning, this guy goes up to city hall with a can of gas. Cops come up to him, ask what he's doing. He says he's gonna set himself on fire unless the protesters' demands are met. I think that included the mayor's resignation, and rescinding the extortionate utility bills that everyone got that winter.
So the cops poured his can of gas all over him and lit the match. By the time I got to the hospital to donate blood, he had already left this pathetic excuse for a world to its own devices.
Well, a world where this shit happens isn't getting any gratitude from me, that's for sure.
Gets weirder.
Both his first name, and his last name, were rooted in our language's word for "fire". "Nomen est omen", as they say. Was he perhaps a pyromaniac, or destined to die by fire? Or did he never exist in the first place, the whole story being an early artifact of political technology, disseminated in order to get the mayor to resign (so that a guy who was actually good at graft could be elected)?
A world where I can't even be sure this shit really happened or some ad guys made up his entire story out of whole cloth to influence public opinion, isn't getting any gratitude from me, either. And idk if anyone's noticed, but that's the kind of world we've all been living in for some time.
So, if I ever caught fire, I would be grateful if the people who came to pour more fuel would at least be honest with themselves about what they're doing. And not frantically try to get me to convince them that they're actually pouring water, or ask me to justify the undesirability of being on fire in the first place. Because I've noticed a lot of people tend to do exactly that, any time someone is experiencing any form of suffering less obvious than being literally on fire.
I'm grateful for Hacker News. I'm not that vocal here, but I've lost count of the times HN has become my oasis of peace, no matter how fleetingly, in the periods of high pressure and stress in 2023.
As someone said here, I'm extremely grateful for free quality higher education I have received in my home country. And I'm saddened that many are in student debts for decades.
I'm grateful to be in the best health I've been in last 10 years.
I'm grateful to myself for quitting alcohol more than a year ago and sticking with it.
I'm grateful, for the first time, to feel financially stable for many years to come.
I'm grateful to United States of America for being our home and safe harbor for the past 10 years, especially last 3, given the global instability.
ps: if you're hiring nodejs/ts, rust or golang in EU I put my email in the profile/about.
And you guys. You guys are pretty darn excellent.
What a beautiful thing.
I'm grateful that I have people in my life who care about me and whom I care deeply for.
I’m grateful that I made connections who jumped to help once I got over feeling like I shouldn’t, and I’m grateful that my time without work was blessedly short, compared to others.
I’m grateful that I’ll have the opportunity to pay it forward for a few people in January, and I hope that I can find other ways to help folks beyond that.
And I’m grateful that I won whatever genetic lottery left me with no chronic issues, with the ability to run fast, and heal quickly from injury.
I am grateful that I am able to live my life relatively free and in relative safety, without needing to be ashamed or hide who and what I am. That I can live completely and authentically me, and by doing so, can live my values and principles.
But really, in the absence of all of that, I am just happy to be alive and see my daughter grow into the beautiful young adult she is becoming.
Being a human is hard and there's misery in everything if you look! I'm a fan of Cornel West so if you ask me "what it means to be human" is precisely to eyes-wide-open lean into the DYING of everything.
So this is not about how great the US is. I'm grateful to have fallen into a language that caters to more people than not. And to be relatively safe insofar as this is just a huge fucking nation and it's hard to invade.
I'm also missing out on a lot of things. But i count my blessings just the same.
Grateful that I have a wife that loves me and I love what I do in this life.
My wife and I are "stuck home" this holiday, we normally travel to see our families, due to her recent injury. She is healing well and I'm so grateful to just be sitting here watching Lord of the Rings while she sleeps contently and our dogs eat their dinner.
Simple things are such a blessing. Bike helmets, a well fed dog, movies you love, cousins you grow up with. I love you Jeremiah.