True Gratitude

It is very sad when a life ends without realizing that many—perhaps almost all—of the most important people and events in our existence chose us before we chose them. And that is when true gratitude begins.

by Luigino Bruni

Published in Il Messaggero di Sant'Antonio on September 2, 2026

There is no word more idolized in our time than the word “freedom,” particularly freedom of choice. It is the magic word of our economy and our capitalism. Mature—and therefore autonomous—men and women are those who freely choose their work, their partner (and today, even their gender), their friends, their vocation, their lifestyles, and the kind of life they love to lead. It is impossible to imagine a good and fulfilling life without this “freedom to.” Then someone goes to observe how real people actually live—those of flesh and blood, not the ones imagined by TV—and discovers something profoundly different.

First of all, one realizes that we do not choose the most important thing in life: coming into the world. We find ourselves catapulted onto this planet Earth, into a family (if we’re lucky), with parents we did not choose, sometimes with brothers and sisters we did not choose, and often with dogs and cats. These people—the most important ones in our lives—we did not choose: they just happened to be there; they are part of our lives. And our chromosomes depend on them, as do the fundamental aspects of our personality—those that take shape during childhood. So the scope of freedom shrinks significantly as soon as we compare it to those very simple words: “life” and “family.”

Then, that hypothetical observer begins to look at the choices partners—wives and husbands—make. And there, he hopes that we’ll finally enter the realm of free choice. Instead, if he looks closely, he realizes that even here, freedom is very limited. Of course, in the beginning there’s often a love story, falling in love, a mutual choice. In the early years, couples and families feel as though they are in a realm—at least this one—of free choices. Time passes, however, and we realize that the wife we chose has changed a great deal, and we have changed even more. And every now and then, the famous and dreadful phrase comes up: “You’re not the person I married anymore.” These words often lead to separations, because if we’ve convinced ourselves that we made a free choice yesterday, we think we can make a similar choice today—but in the opposite direction—to return to our original freedom. But these terrible phrases can also be the beginning of something truly new: blessed adult life. When, at last, we understand that a wife and a husband are not commodities to be bought at the market, nor are they the result of weighing various cost-benefit analyses.

The decisive encounter of a human life is not the result of our calculations or our economic rationality: it happens, it arrives, it finds us at the end of a mysterious path. The person who comes to us was already within us, but we didn’t know it. The encounter ignites it; it does not create it. Freedom? Very little. The rest is simply gratuitousness, grace, love, the innocence of the world. And even if one day we part ways—because that, too, happens—we come to realize, as we grow older, that the person who was already within us will accompany us forever, even against our will: I have seen women and men die, repeating among their last words the name of a husband or wife they left behind decades earlier.

Not to mention vocations: we think we freely say our “yes,” until, one day, we realize that it was the “yes” that chose us, and we ask ourselves: Was I truly free when I said “yes”? We’d like to say yes, but, if we’re honest, we know that the story is much more complex—that we are loved and watched over by life before we even look at it and love it.

Freedom is wonderful—we know that; we spend our whole lives chasing it, and woe to us if we didn’t. But how sad is a life that ends without realizing that many—perhaps almost all—of the most important people and events in our lives chose us before we chose them. And that is when true gratitude begins.