Walk the prices with me, because the point does not land as an idea. It lands as a list.
A luxury chocolate is two hours of your labor before tax. An iPhone is three or four weeks. A used Toyota Corolla, if you eat hay and drink water from the river and spend nothing else, is about three months of saving. And most Americans die without ever owning a paid-off house.
So everything has a cost. Your clothes, your shirt, the food in front of you, all of it has a price and you worked for every one of them. And start from further back than that. You did not exist a few years ago. Whatever account you think you are drawing on, you were not there when it was opened.
Now tell me what you paid for your heart. There is an organ sitting in your chest that pumps blood about a hundred thousand times a day, automatically, to keep you alive.
You worked two hours to deserve a chocolate. What did you do to deserve your heart?
Nothing. And not because you were lucky, but because it was never for sale and never could be. Can you remind me what you did to earn it? Did you work hard for it? Is it that you have a diploma from a good university, and that is why your heart works nicely? Then ask the same question about your liver, your kidneys, your lungs, your brain. Every one of them arrived free, runs without supervision, and is worth more than everything you have ever bought put together. Is that not something to be grateful for? I am not asking rhetorically. Gratitude is the only honest response to receiving something you could not have earned, and the size of what you received here is not a close call.