There was this one time I was on tiktok watching a compilation of a Christmas present opening video and on one of those videos was a kid whose parent had gotten him a gaming console but the kid wasn't happy because apparently, he wanted a ps5 and what his parents got for him wasn't a ps5.
This attitude from this little kid got me upset, so I decided to read through the comments to see if anyone felt that way or if I was just overreacting and sure enough, there were people there who were also upset about how ungrateful the kid was and some also talked about how good the game his parents had gotten for him was, but while I was scrolling down the comments, one comment in particular had caught my attention...some other kid had asked for those parents to send the game to him instead, as he wasn't given anything for Christmas and would love to have that game.
Reading that comment made me a bit emotionally because it showed me the two sides of the world, on one side was the rich spoilt kid who didn't know how to appreciate what he was given, while on the other side had the broke kid who would thank you for the rest of his life for doing something you probably thought wasn't a big deal.
It just made me realize how lucky some of us are to have what we have and yet we don't even know it.
The heartbreaking part of that Christmas video was the look on the kid parents face when he said he didn't want it, because they thought they had done something amazing for their child but the moment they realized that he was being ungrateful, the look on their faces went from being happy to being sad and then disappointment.
Sadly, that look reminded me of my mom and this one time where she got me a short that I wanted, but when I opened it up, it turned out it wasn't the exact one. But instead of me to appreciate her for going out of her way to actually get that short, I had opened my big dumb mouth and told her that that wasn't what I wanted, and that was when I saw it, the look on her face.
She had gotten upset and asked me to hand over the shorts to her but I refused and jokingly ran away with it. Luckily for me, about a week later, I had walked up to her and told her how much I loved the shorts because it turned out to be a really good shorts and she had looked at me with one of those African mothers eyes, the kind that translated to "Your head is not correct" and I had laughed about it.
Thinking back at it now, I'm happy I later appreciated it, even though it was a little bit late. I hope to do better in the future though, to learn to appreciate first because it's the thoughts that counts.