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March 13, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
08:20
Gratitude is Essential for Happiness
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Time Text
Happiness Middle Ground 00:05:30
And can you be in a...
Because it would imply, if not being unhappy is not the same as happy, that it implies there's an intermediate state.
You're not happy, and you're not unhappy.
Would you claim to be in that intermediate state?
Sometimes I go up.
Right.
So sometimes you go above that state, but you're almost always in the middle.
I see you as happier than that.
I'm not joking.
Because, I'll tell you why, you have a profoundly meaningful life, which is huge.
You're healthy.
You have friends who love you.
You have a wife who loves you.
I mean, you've got a lot going for you, man.
You have an engineer who loves you.
How many people could say that?
Exactly.
Yeah.
If you ever go down, just think, I have an engineer who loves me.
Is that true, Triple G? You love, as you call him, Al?
Uncle Al.
Yes.
That is how you have it in your phone.
Okay, you can't get more loving than that.
You're not even his biological uncle, and he calls you uncle.
You didn't even raise him as a nephew.
All right, everybody, welcome to the Happiness Hour.
Wow, even if he disowned you.
Oh, wow.
Wow, you wrinkled my brow, man.
That is what I heard in my brain.
Wow.
Yeah, that's what I heard.
You just wrinkled my brain, man.
Oh, wrinkle my brain.
Yes, you wrinkled my brain, man.
That's right.
Yes, my friends, I am a believer in happiness.
And this is an example with the coronavirus where you just have to work at it.
That's exactly right.
But I have a big theme today, and I mentioned it in Hour One, which I almost never do.
But it's so pertinent.
It is so apt.
It is so relevant.
Give me another synonym for this.
Germaine.
Yes, thank you.
It is so germaine.
To the issue that I have to raise this I Really do live or what I preach on the happiness hour.
I really do in fact I Lived it and then preached it.
That's the interesting thing I Have so wanted to be happy all of my life because I was not happy as a young kid I so wanted to be happy That I worked a massive amount out.
And then I started speaking about it in my late 20s to college students.
So this has been a long time with me.
So I have worked it out.
In my case, with regard to happiness, I don't preach what I practice.
I practice what I preach.
Excuse me.
I preach.
That's right.
I do.
I preach what I practice.
I'm sorry.
I don't just practice what I preach.
I'm inverting the point.
I preach what I practice.
So I have realized so deeply that so much can go wrong in life and has for so vast a percentage of humanity that I am in almost permanent disbelief at how good I have it.
Now you'll say, well, you really do have it good.
I mean, you know, people will reel off the wonderful things in my life.
But there are people who have what I have and they're miserable.
And I hardly always had what I have.
I didn't always have a happy marriage, for example, I do now.
I didn't always have money, to say the least, because I never really pursued it.
I pursued influence.
I really do believe in what I advocate.
Anyway, it just doesn't work that way.
Oh, well.
You know how many miserable people there are who were successful and so on and so forth.
So that's not the reason.
The reason that I have been happy is that I have worked at it and I have realized, and this is the theme of the day, I've always realized how much can go wrong.
That's why when I have no patience, I truly, I mean, I act like I have patience because it's effective, but I have within me, I have no patience.
When students get up at the microphone after my speeches at college campuses, And a young woman gets up and says, oh, you know, as a woman, I'm oppressed.
Or a black student gets up as a black, I'm oppressed.
Missing Regular Shelves 00:03:04
And I go, oh my God, you have no clue what oppression is.
No clue.
Don't even, you don't, you shouldn't even be using that word.
It's a perversion of the word.
Yeah?
So now with the coronavirus and people realizing, whoa, you know, I really do miss getting together with friends.
I really do miss, you know, going to school or going to work or going to a sporting event or going to a movie, you know.
I do miss having regular shelves at the supermarket and not having 45-minute waits to check out because people are buying toilet paper for the apocalypse.
That's what we should title it, toilet paper for the apocalypse.
See, here's the question, my dear friends.
When this subsides, as it will, And people go back to normal.
For how long will they appreciate it?
Forget they.
For how long will you appreciate it?
You're asking, how does it even last a day?
Well, you have a darker view of humanity than I do, and mine is dark.
No, I think it will last a week.
But that's all it does.
It lasts a week.
My point is, it lasts forever.
I am unbelievably grateful for the supermarket.
It has never left me when I walk into a supermarket.
Oh, wow.
We are so lucky.
Maybe it's because at 21 I was in the Soviet Union where there were no supermarkets.
I started out life so early in life.
Going to places without supermarkets.
The supermarket, by the way, was the thing that most shocked people who got out of the Soviet Union.
I have spoken to so many of these people, because I've always been involved in the lives of Russian immigrants, and for them, the old Soviet Union, and I speak Russian, and so the thing that really...
Got them.
Was the supermarket.
So people will be back in the supermarket, back at baseball games, football.
Well, football's not canceled because it doesn't exist now.
It doesn't exist in March.
And then how long will you be grateful?
If nothing's horrific, life is terrific.
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