What Would My Gratitude Look Like If No One Else Was Suffering?

There’s a thought experiment I stumbled onto recently.

If you don’t know about other people’s pain - if you have no reference point, no news feed, no comparative suffering and someone gave you the choice to pick your life from a lineup, would you pick yours?

For me, the answer is an obvious yes.

Not that my life is without its shit things. It has plenty. But I wouldn’t want it any other way - less, maybe. More, definitely not. I know this place. I know its rooms, its limits, its weather. I’ve built things inside it. I’ve survived enough of it to feel some strange ownership over it.

But then the follow-up hit harder; there are people who would do anything to have it my way.

A woman under Taliban rule who hasn’t chosen her clothes, her words, or her movements in years. A man who has never seen colour, who doesn’t know what his sister’s face looks like in the light. Someone born into war. Someone born into hunger. Someone born into a body, country, family, or system that made freedom feel almost theoretical.

And the moment I held that thought, I felt two things at once: Lighter, because my problems suddenly weighed less. And heavier, because I had just used someone else’s suffering to feel better about my own life.

Which made me ask the question I couldn’t quite shake:

How much of my gratitude is actually pity, wearing a nicer coat?

But maybe the question is bigger than that.

Maybe this isn’t just about my private moral discomfort. Maybe a lot of what we call gratitude today is built this way. Not as direct appreciation, but as contrast. Not ‘this is precious’, but ‘this could have been worse’.

Has gratitude become less about loving what we have, and more about noticing that someone else has less?

So many of our most common gratitude reminders seem to arrive with a shadow person attached.

Be grateful you have a roof over your head.

Be grateful you can walk.

Be grateful you have food.

Be grateful you live in a country where you can speak.

Be grateful because someone, somewhere, has less.

The sentence almost always contains someone else standing behind your life to make it look brighter. Someone poorer. Less free. Less safe. Less able. Less loved. Less lucky.

And maybe that is where my discomfort begins.

Because if gratitude needs someone else’s deprivation to activate itself, then what is it really? Appreciation? Perspective? Or just a socially acceptable form of relief?

A lot of what we call gratitude is - if we are honest - contrast relief. It is the exhale of ‘it could have been worse’. Your heartbreak feels smaller when placed beside a war. Your career anxiety feels almost embarrassing next to someone fighting for the right to study. Your bad day looks different when held beside someone’s whole life being structurally denied.

And of course it works.

Of course it works.

Comparison is one of the quickest ways to change the weight of a problem. Place your inconvenience beside someone else’s devastation, and your inconvenience immediately shrinks. It becomes harder to complain. Harder to spiral. Harder to believe you have been uniquely wronged by the universe.

But that is exactly what makes gratitude uncomfortable.

Because it is not always about your life. Sometimes it is about the gap between your life and someone else’s. Remove the comparison, and you are left wondering what, exactly, you were grateful for.

Was I grateful for my freedom? Or was I relieved by her captivity?

Was I grateful for my sight? Or was I using his blindness to sharpen the value of my own eyes?

Was I grateful for my life? Or did someone else’s lack become the proof of my abundance?

That last question feels like the centre of it.

Someone else’s hunger proves my food matters. Someone else’s silence proves my voice is valuable. Someone else’s confinement proves my movement is freedom. Someone else’s grief makes my ordinary day feel blessed.

And I don’t think that is always bad. I don’t even think it is avoidable. We are comparative creatures. We understand our lives partly through other lives. Sometimes another person’s suffering does wake us up. Sometimes it breaks the narcissism of our own small problems. Sometimes perspective is necessary.

The problem is not that someone else’s suffering changes how I see my life. The problem is when a person becomes a measuring instrument. Then once they have served their purpose, they disappear. They become a background figure in my personal growth. A tragic example. A reminder to be grateful. A moment of perspective before I return to my coffee, my work, my messages, my mildly inconvenient life.

This is the part that feels morally slippery. Not the gratitude itself. Not even the comparison. But the way another person’s pain can pass through me and come out as comfort.

Susan Sontag wrote about this discomfort in Regarding the Pain of Others - the way suffering, when observed from a safe distance, can become something almost aesthetic. We look. We feel. We feel morally moved by the fact that we feel. Then we feel better. Then we close the tab.

I think gratitude can sometimes follow the same loop.

We witness pain. We feel humbled. We feel fortunate. We feel briefly cleansed of our complaints. And then the person whose pain created that feeling fades back into abstraction.

The woman under Taliban rule is no longer a woman with a specific laugh, temper, vanity, ambition, boredom, private jokes, and a life that should have been hers. She becomes “a woman under Taliban rule” - a moral reference point. The blind man is no longer a person with taste, memory, annoyance, desire, and a full inner world. He becomes “the man who cannot see” - a symbol against which I rediscover my own sight.

That is where gratitude starts becoming pity in disguise.

Pity is not always bad, but it builds distance. Pity looks down, even when it means well. Pity says, “poor them”. Gratitude, at its best, should not need someone beneath it.

This is why I keep wondering whether many of our inherited definitions of gratitude are already built around hierarchy. We are rarely taught to be grateful by looking directly at what we love. We are taught to be grateful by imagining its absence, and often that absence is not imaginary. It is someone else’s life.

You think your job is stressful? Some people are unemployed.

You think your parents are difficult? Some people don’t have parents.

You think your country is frustrating? Some people cannot speak at all.

The intention is usually good. The aim is perspective. But hidden inside that structure is a quiet cruelty: someone else’s worse life becomes the tool used to discipline your dissatisfaction.

It says: Don’t complain! Because someone else has less.

But gratitude born from silencing yourself is strange. It does not always create love for your life. Sometimes it only creates guilt for being unhappy inside a life other people would envy.

And guilt is not gratitude.

Guilt says, “I have no right to feel bad”.

Gratitude says, “Even with the bad, there is something here worth holding”.

These are not the same thing.

This is where moral luck makes everything even more uncomfortable.

Most of what we suffer, escape, inherit, or are denied comes down to things outside our control. I did not earn the country, body, family, language, class, passport, or era that made certain freedoms possible. Someone else did not earn the absence of them. The asymmetry is not justified by some deep internal logic. It is not that one person tried harder at being human. It is not a question of character or merit. It is most certainly not a virtue. It is just the random distribution of circumstance.

And this is why gratitude for circumstance carries a faint guilt of being grateful for things I did not earn; just as someone else is deprived of things they did not lose by choice.

The gap between us is not morally justified. Which means the relief I feel when I notice the gap is built on something that probably should not exist in the first place.

That is the feeling I keep returning to - light and heavy at the same time.

The lightness says, “My life is good”.

The heaviness says, “Why did I need her suffering to remember that?”

What makes this even more complicated is that noticing the mechanism does not automatically correct it. There is a small satisfaction in self-awareness too. At least I am not the kind of person who does this unconsciously. Even the interrogation of pity can become its own form of comfort.

I can feel grateful because someone else has less.

Then I can feel guilty for feeling grateful that way.

Then I can feel slightly reassured because at least I noticed the guilt.

Then I can wonder whether even that reassurance is just another version of moral self-soothing.

You can go several layers deep and find the same structure waiting for you.

Reflection does not automatically clean the act. Though I still think it matters.

There is a difference between using someone else’s suffering as emotional furniture and allowing it to disturb you properly. There is a difference between letting another person become a symbol and insisting on remembering that they are a full person, not a tool for contrast in your private philosophy.

Maybe gratitude becomes pity when the other person remains only a reference point and it becomes morally alive when it turns into specificity, reverence, or action.

Specificity means refusing to flatten people into examples. Reverence means not treating suffering as content for my own emotional regulation. Action means letting the discomfort cost me something, even if it is small - attention, money, effort, advocacy, restraint, a refusal to look away once the gratitude - high has passed.

But there is still another question underneath all of this. The most clarifying one I can find:

What would my gratitude look like if no one else was suffering?

If everyone had it equally okay, no reference points, no visible deprivation, no lives available to stand behind mine and make it look brighter - would I still feel grateful?

For what, specifically?

The coffee in the morning?

The exact shape of a friendship?

The fact that I can think, write, speak, leave, return, choose?

The particular stubbornness with which I have built a life that feels like mine?

The fact that despite everything I complain about, I would still pick this life from the lineup?

Those answers, if I can find them, feel different.

They are not based on someone else’s lack. They do not require another person to be hungry for my food to matter. They do not require another person to be silenced for my voice to feel meaningful. They do not require someone else’s darkness to prove that my light is real.

That is the kind of gratitude I want to know better.

Not because contrast-based gratitude is worthless. It is human. It functions. No one arrives at appreciation in some perfectly clean, morally untouched way. Maybe most gratitude begins with comparison because comparison is how humans locate themselves in the world.

But I do think gratitude has to mature past contrast.

It cannot stay forever at ‘Thank God it’s not me!’

At some point it has to become, “This is mine, and I love it without needing someone else to have less.”

That is harder.

It asks me to look at my life without placing anyone else beneath it and still find something worth loving. It asks for attention without hierarchy. Appreciation without an audience of suffering behind it. Love that does not require a worse alternative to justify itself.

I don’t want the best thing I can say about my life to be that it is not someone else’s.

I want to be able to say: this life is mine. Not perfect, not painless, not always graceful, but mine. I know this place. I have built things inside it. I have survived enough of it to recognize its shape. And even in a world where no one had less, even in a world where the woman under Taliban rule had everything she deserved, where the man could see his sister’s face in the light, where no one’s deprivation was available to sharpen my appreciation. I would still wake up and find something here worth holding.

So yes, some of my gratitude is probably pity. Maybe a lot of it.

The point is not to pretend otherwise but to notice when gratitude begins as relief and ask it to become something more honest.

Something that is less dependent on comparison.

That part of my gratitude, whatever size it turns out to be, is the part I want to keep.