Uber Stories — April 15: My Neighbor, His Uncle, and What Gratitude Sounds Like

 I picked up a passenger while driving rideshare, and he turned out to be from my building since I was parked outside waiting for a ride.

We ended up talking about his uncle a lot. He said his uncle does a little bit of everything, wearing a lot of hats, working in real estate down in California, doing some TV reporting on the side, and juggling other gigs. It wasn’t just a job description—it came out like he was trying to map a whole personality through work, like that’s how you explain who someone is.

He said his uncle has kind of been a big influence on him. At one point, he kind of skimmed over it, like, “yeah, we were in shelters and different homes for a while.” He didn’t sit in it, just stated it and kept going, like it was something that already belonged in the past tense.

And he kept coming back to that idea. He even said he wrote his college essay at Saint Paul Tech about his uncle and how proud he was of him, and how grateful he is that college gave him the opportunity to put that into words and really reflect on it.

Now his uncle is doing well, even supporting him through college. And he kept coming back to that idea—how aware he is of it, how he doesn’t want to take that opportunity lightly or use it in the wrong way. It wasn’t performative, it was more like he was reminding himself out loud. Like gratitude as a way of staying oriented.

He also made a comment about how a lot of people my age tend to take things for granted, like they’re owed something. He said, “kids these days just think things are supposed to be handed to them,” and the way he said it wasn’t angry exactly, more like he’d noticed a pattern and decided it was true. Like there’s less appreciation for what people had to go through to get there.

And I told him, I used to have a millionaire friend too, but we’re not friends anymore. It’s something about them—these millionaires are just very direct, like they’ve lived in that world so long they act like they can tell anyone what to do, and nobody really questions it.

And he nodded at that, like he recognized it immediately, and said his uncle was the same way—just used to having that kind of control and presence in situations, like confidence had become a default setting rather than something they turned on