I think appreciation is like investing; so is resentment. 🙌
You put in a little bit every day, and with compounding interest (it generates more of itself) you can end up with a fortune.
Everyone from yogis to Tony Robbins says stuff like this— “whatever you put your attention on grows.” Why? Some ideas: one thing that “generates interest” is our relational network. Expressing appreciation/resentment is usually reciprocated in feedback loops. Another is that experiences accumulate and build on each other through time. Unless we change the past—for example finding forgiveness for a resentment—there’s always whatever we had plus whatever continues to accumulate until we find forgiveness.
What keeps us from expressing gratitude, individually and collectively? Some ideas: Habit. Habits can change with awareness and commitment like my family’s pre-dinner gratitude ritual. Guilt over privilege? Self-defeating. Not a “deep” or “cutting edge” enough practice? The self-important commitment to always being on the edge is ironically age-old narcissism.
And what keeps us in resentment? Some ideas: Feeling justified by awful things that have happened to us and our ancestors. But we don’t honor the legitimacy of this pain through continuing to suffer. As they say in AA (not Buddha), “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Knowing this doesn’t always make it easy to let go of resentment. There’s always something it gives us, that we have to be willing to let go of in order to change. Sometimes it’s a mistake about how things work—e.g. maybe we accidentally conflate capacity to do something now with blame. But before I continue over-complexifying, back to a simple practice suggested in the title: small daily investments in gratitude. I believe that the wealth of heartbreaking thanks for everything eventually makes resentment too expensive, no matter what it’s giving us.