Learn to be pleased with everything, with wealth so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for; and with obscurity, for being unenvied.

Each situation has something in it you can use, whatever else it costs you. Money is worth having when it lets you be useful to people, a life with little to guard does at least demand less guarding, and being overlooked spares you a good deal of other people’s resentment. None of that makes hardship desirable, and it does mean you are rarely left with nothing to work with.

Wherever you are at the moment, name one thing your circumstances make possible that a different set would not. Use it this week. That is accurate accounting rather than consolation.