Lesson 3 of 6 · You are not being told your worth is your face
The other thing that gets said
Answer it in your head first.
Somebody tells you that if you were properly grateful you would not feel like this. What is wrong with that as advice?
It cannot fail a test. If you feel better, gratitude worked. If you do not, you were not grateful enough. So the feeling stops being a feeling and becomes evidence of a religious failing, which is exactly what keeps people quiet about it. Gratitude is real and it is good. It is not a treatment for a comparison loop, and offering it as one teaches people to hide. Al-Ghazali is more exact about this than the advice is. In the Ihya he says there is no blame on a person who dislikes his own falling behind in permissible things, and in the same breath he concedes the cost, that it detracts from the virtues and runs against zuhd and tawakkul and rida. What he does not say, and he is the one who would have said it, is that it is disobedience.