Fortunate Ones

If you have people you love and who love you, you're blessed. If you're not homeless or wondering where your next meal is coming from, you're blessed.

I saw this on LinkedIn today, and my first thought was: "That's a pretty low bar for being blessed."

I get where the writer was coming from. The piece as a whole was about taking some time this Christmas season to give something to people who were less well off. But I'm not sure about the attempt to position the reader as somehow doing well for themselves simply because they can routinely manage the basics. Part of it, I think is that it aims low. Most of the people I see from posts from on LinkedIn aren't in the millionaire class. (I suspect that those people have more effective networking tools than LinkedIn.) And I doubt that whatever genuinely wealthy people who are on LinkedIn see any of my posts. So it's middle-income people talking to middle income people. But it's really the wealthy people that one should be talking to, if one is looking for those who are "blessed," "privileged" or just fortunate.

Yes, I understand that by the standards of many people in the world, even those of us in the United States who feel that they're "just getting by" are living like kings. (Even if many Americans I meet are openly envious of the number of families in places like India or Indonesia who have household servants to manage the menial tasks.) But giving from the middle to the bottom doesn't strike me as a workable long-term solution.

If course, foregoing a nice dinner or a new item of some sort to give money to the poor is something that many people can do, and it's something that's easy to control. But it's also the lesser sacrifice. In the big picture, people changing their buying habits would do much more for other people. But, it would mean sacrificing low, low, prices when buying stuff, and people find that painful, rather than gratifying. Easier to count one's blessings.