When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.
Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.
Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.
The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.
From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.
It's one of these funny things, where during adolescence, stuff like this sounds really cheesy (or "cringe"), but then gaining wisdom through life is largely a process of slowly figuring out: oh, this isn't cheesy at all; serious people have been thinking and talking and writing about this topic for millenia, because this stuff really is core to the human experience.
I’m sorry to hear that, it’s a really hard mindset to grasp and we all falter here and there.
I can’t speak for anyone else (I don’t know your particular situation and do not want to assume anything) but I found that doing something for the sake of doing it was one of they key things that helped me overcome a feeling of being used/unappreciated.
In my personal experience and with a lot of introspection I found that the reason I had that feeling was that I personally had painted a picture of what gratitude should look and feel like when, in reality, we all express gratitude in different ways.
By painting that picture I had essentially built up an expectation as to what the outcome of my actions would be, and when that expectation failed to materialise the negative feelings ensued.
Something which I found massively helped with limiting my expectation was to have a mantra which I could repeat in my mind as a sort of short circuit to break the chain of negative thoughts.
The mantra can be anything, I went with ‘thank you’ as it is hard to feel anything other than gratitude when you are thanking someone/something
When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.
Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.
Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.
The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.
From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.
Cheesy, I know