Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Why we should always be grateful. It can seem glib and easy to just say that we should be grateful.

That family that's struggling to make ends meet, that kid that's being bullied at school,

that just got dumped by their boyfriend or cut from the soccer team, they're just supposed to be

grateful because it's Thanksgiving here in America? Well, yeah, actually.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the writer Plutarch and his family were deep in grief. They had just lost

a young child, work and life and responsibilities loom as they do for so many of us. Gratitude was the

furthest thing from their mind. But Plutarch caught himself. In a famous letter,

he composed on grief to his wife, he would write, as long as there are others who would gladly

choose your fate, even including our present state, meaning the loss that they had just suffered.

It is awful of us the bearer of that fate to complain and

grumble. In a sense, he was searching for a way to be grateful, a perspective that allowed him to

get outside the immediacy of his pain and anger and find a different way to see it. And as it happens,

thinking about other people is almost always the way to do that.

How many people would trade places with you in a second?

How many of them stay at wake at night, dreaming for just one day of the peace and privilege

you take for granted?

Yeah, it's tough having a teenager, but some parents will never get that. Yeah, your own parents or in-laws

are frustrating, but again, coming out of a pandemic, some people are sitting around deeply missing

that frustration. Think of the citizens of Ukraine, dodging missiles on the way to work or school.

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