Thanks but No Thanks ~ On Taking Gratitude Too Far
With all this gratitude, is there room for anything else?
About ten years ago, people started talking about gratitude ALL THE TIME.
I greeted the flurry of “be grateful” talk with my characteristic skepticism. My eyes rolled so far back into my head that I could see the cynicism lighting up my brain like a Christmas tree. Then I argued with myself about it. How could gratitude be bad? What could possibly be wrong with encouraging appreciation of what we have?
Still, I felt lectured by the distressed wooden signs that commanded, “Be Grateful” — like I was sitting under the judgmental gaze of my paternal grandfather, who regularly delivered speeches that began, “Kids today don’t know the value of a dollar…” Speeches that seemed designed to undermine any complaint I might have.
Oh, your history class is boring, and you don’t think you’re learning anything? Be grateful you get to go to school. And that you have a chair to sit in. And that you have shoes to wear to school and a bus to get you there.
I was grateful for those things, but I didn’t (and still don’t) understand why appreciating my shoes meant I couldn’t speak out for a more engaging history education.
It turns out my suspicion of the gratitude hawkers had some merit.
In a Psychology Today article, Alfie Kohn points out that some of the biggest funders of gratitude research and promotion have a financial interest in keeping people focused on appreciating what they have:
In the last few years, the Templeton Foundation, long committed to religious and free-market causes, has given millions of dollars in grants to support the study and promotion of gratitude, including to the Greater Good Center at the University of California, Berkeley. (As Barbara Ehrenreich drily observed, "The foundation does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal, through efforts like these, to improve their attitudes.")
The article goes on to point out that the concept of gratitude has been used to maintain the status quo, taking attention away from reform-minded ideas and casting their proponents as negative contrarians. (My grandfather and I were a microcosm of this dynamic.) So if the peddlers of gratitude have ever struck you as a bit disingenuous, your intuition is correct.
In realizing all of this, I feel vindicated, perhaps even a little smug and — as always, when I’ve discovered the political machine is manipulating our emotions — indignant. But it has done something unexpected for me as well.
As I strip away what every article, meme and my grandfather all say that gratitude is supposed to be, as those external ideas disintegrate in the breeze, I am left with my own feelings.
A few months ago, without consciously trying, without even making a gratitude journal, I discovered it within. At the end of a run, I was walking up my street catching my breath when my house came into view around the corner. Suddenly I felt warm, the way you do when a smile starts on your face and spreads to your whole body.
I am so lucky to have my people in there waiting for me.
It was not gratitude imposed from the outside, foisted upon me by a patriarchal force or a needlepoint pillow. It arose authentically from my being. It was real, acute admiration for the fortuitousness of my own circumstances. It felt infinitely more fulfilling than writing “I am grateful for…” lists on hand-print turkeys in elementary school.
Of course I’m grateful for my family. I appreciate a lot of things — my health, my career, my awesome friends and neighbors. I don’t need someone to tell me that. I don’t need a journal to discover it. But there is more to life than gratitude. Some situations are sad, and some things should piss you off. Gratitude is not the universal answer it is sometimes billed to be.
In fact, gratitude for what you have can bolster you to acknowledge and weather the things that suck. It can give you a platform from which to work toward fixing inequality and injustice. Gratitude is valuable; it’s just not everything.
Sincerely,
Fundamental of the Week #2: LISTEN GENEROUSLY
Give others your full attention, be present and engaged and set aside your internal conversation as best you can. Let go of your need to agree, disagree or judge. Be empathetic, and listen for the needs of others. Use your curiosity to get all the facts, separating facts from interpretations.
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