On Being Grateful
A token of gratitude for writer Lesya Ukrainka, High Park, Toronto
Let us be the ones who are grateful for what we have;
who waste no thought on what we don’t need.
A staggering number of moral philosophers have positioned gratitude as the foundation of goodness, placing it as a prerequisite to things like tolerance, love, forgiveness, generosity, and all the things we universally think of as “good.”
Social scientists are getting in on the act, too, as there’s a great awareness that this prerequisite nature of gratitude isn’t just a logical argument; people who cultivate and practice gratitude report an array of physical and emotional health benefits, as well as more and better “warm human relationships” of the sort I frequently reference as being central to joyful thriving.
If you want to get in on the act, the place most people need to start is in strengthening and exercising the muscles of observing what it is you have to be grateful FOR.
If you stop and take a moment to let them in, you’ll see that joys abound.
When you begin looking into, listing, and living your joys, listlessness and lethargy retreat. That’s because you beat scarcity — the feeling you never have enough — with gratitude.
Research shows very clearly that people who engage in active gratitude, meaning reflection on their success and its sources, are less vulnerable to depression and more able to access empathy and connect to the people they lead, love, and live with.
The habit of keeping a gratitude list (an exercise built into the pages of Good Burdens) has innumerable benefits. Studies have shown that those who prioritize this practice have a relative absence of stress and depression (Woods et al., 2008), make progress towards important personal goals (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), report higher levels of determination and energy (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), feel closer in their relationships and desire to build stronger ones (Algoe and Haidt, 2009), and increase happiness by 25 percent (McCullough et al., 2002). Who wouldn’t want a quarter more happiness?
To grow in gratitude and its accompanying joys, you must resist one mighty enemy: the age-old vice of acedia. Acedia is a combination of apathy and boredom. To me, it means being checked out, not noticing, deadened, dull.
It’s resistance to the demands of love.
Resist acedia. Resist for your reward. Remember: the goal is aliveness, the purpose is love.
And love is a good burden.
Gratitude, then, is the measuring part in measurable. It’s about pausing to examine our well-being and successes — the elements of joy — to evaluate where they came from and celebrate them.
The expression and practice of gratitude can be - is - a spiritual thing. It’s no accident that virtually every religious tradition in the world includes some concept of gratitude- whether to God or the universe or other humans or all of the above- as an aspect of a healthy spiritual life.
Wrapped in being grateful is being appreciative- recognizing that the things you’ve received, one way or another, have value, and I think this is a big part of the unhappiness gap of our current times.
We’ve had our notions of value heavily disrupted, and they continue to be rewired on a daily basis as the people that are doing the rewiring have more and different ways of selling things to us. Value is now speed, convenience, and low cost (monetary or otherwise) above all else, even when this doesn’t make sense.
But here’s the problem- you can’t accurately measure the value of the vast majority of things in life this way. Most things of high value are costly- not just in currency, but in things like an investment of time, emotional commitment, hard work, sacrifice, and so on.
But we’ve come to apply the “choose a dog sweater to buy off Amazon” mental heuristic to a lot more than our most banal consumer grazing habits. Cheap, convenient, and easy is what we’re increasingly expecting of our relationships, our careers, our hobbies, our goals, and so on.
The notion of “entitlement” that makes some people roll their eyes and others enter into fierce ideological debate is, on some dimensions, antithetical to the cultivation of gratitude.
None of us is guaranteed anything, anything at all, including life, and if we were promised those things, they were false promises, albeit sometimes well-intended ones.
Being told, explicitly or implicitly, that you are “entitled to X” necessarily includes the proposition that you are not obliged- shouldn’t, in fact- be grateful for that thing, only indignant in its absence. Creeping entitlement can kill gratitude, and leave us cold to the fact that the vast majority of us are enjoying the highest quality of life of humans at any point in history.
Sometime during the writing Good Burdens, I saw a sign in front of a church that was another, powerful framing of gratitude:
What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you were grateful for today?
It may not happen that fast, but one way or another, you WILL lose the things you aren’t grateful for: you’ll neglect them until they fall away or break down, you won’t be prepared to fight to defend them when other people try to take them from you, and even more simply, you will become numb to the positive role they play in your existence, shutting yourself off to the source of joy they represent in the realization of what you’ve got.
Take a few minutes to consider and celebrate the good fortune, supportive families, friends, mentors, and natural talents it took to create the perfect storm for you to arrive at this moment, to have already achieved so much in so many ways. Because we’re wired for gratitude, just as we’re wired for joy.
Weave your web.
The goal is aliveness.
The purpose is love.
Take up the good burden of being grateful.
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This post originally appeared on my dedicated Medium blog.
