Gratitude opposed to self-praise

By Lee Eung-tae

During last Sunday’s worship service, a few words from our minister profoundly impressed me: “The opposite of gratitude is not ungratefulness, but self-praise.”

At first hearing, it sounded like a play on words, but it is worth thinking about deeply. We are living in a society where one cannot cope without help from others, but we often take help for granted.

Every morning, after breakfast, we step out the door and get in the car. We drive along clean roads. Arriving at the office, we enjoy freshly brewed coffee. We seldom consider that we owe such pleasures to others. Before we woke up, our moms or wives were busy preparing the meal for us.

When we drive on clean streets with a feeling of well-being we owe our gratitude to the street sweepers who cleared all the litter and fallen leaves at dawn, even risking being hit by a car. A kind colleague brewed the coffee you enjoy. Rather than feeling grateful to those who do these things for us, we tend to indulge in self-praise.

Someone moved next door to me recently. He was said to be a retiree from a big company. The other day, I encountered him while I walked by his house. Rather abruptly, he invited me into his house. As soon as I sat on the sofa, he bombarded me with words of self-praise. After a long, flamboyant stint of boasting, he showed me his house. In fact, his intention was to show me his photos displayed on the walls.

Each picture showed celebrities posed with him. Disgusted by his self-praise, I feigned an excuse and left his house. Not long after, he visited our house with a bottle of beer and I had to endure his self-admiration for another hour. Even though this guy can be dismissed as a freak, we hear many people blowing their own horn.

Given that we are living in a competitive society, personal achievement may well deserve praise. However, we should bear in mind that our successes, however trivial, must be attributed to our loved ones, but most of us, me included, are oblivious to this.

The grade-obsessed school environment also produces many who are stingy with their gratitude. Amid the fierce competition to enter top colleges, most teenagers are misled into the belief that studying all the time is the best thing in the world they can do. To this end, many of them tend to take it for granted that their parents will support them. In their eyes, the virtue and morality necessary to be a good citizen are dwarfed compared with the achievement of high grades.

So, rather than express gratitude to their parents and teachers, they frown on whatever little advice they get about how to behave. How many times in a week have you heard your children say “Thank you, mom?” They would rather expect others to say, “You are great, you did a wonderful job,” referring to their academic success.

We can hardly blame our children as they are reflections of us. Are we not infected with the disease of being “the first class,” thereby leading our teenagers to value academic success over morality? What do you prefer your kids to say: “Mom, I am at the top of the class,” or “Thank you, mom”?

I think gratitude demands empathy, which means that we should walk in the shoes of others. Those absorbed in self-praise do not care about others, not their thoughts, feelings or perspectives. In extreme cases, they do not care about what will happen in the pursuit of achieving their goals, as in the shocking incident perpetrated by a couple of elementary schoolchildren that resulted in the death of a woman looking out for stray cats, hit by a brick they let fall from the top of their building.

This is not untypical. Lacking empathy, they focused on their own scientific project, expecting their parents to say: “You did splendidly.”

The writer is an English teacher at Miryang Girls' High School in South Gyeongsang Province. His email address is eungtae@gmail.com.