The Cult of Gratitude

And How to Break Free with your Soul Intact

Apparently, Substack Stock Photo search believes this little Brazilian monkey represents gratitude. His face is as confused as mine is about this conclusion. Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

At the end of the long, narrow hallway on the second story of my house (what I comically think of as The Children’s Wing), there is a small, waist-high door in the wall. My grandfather would have called it a portal to the mysterious realm of the Basement Fairy. Lifetime one-story dwellers might not recognize it at all. For those of us who grew up in multiple-story suburban Chicago, it is a magical contraption called the laundry chute. In the 70s and 80s, it meant hours of fun shouting messages back and forth, dropping down all manner of objects, and testing who was small enough to send plummeting onto a pile of dirty sheets below without getting caught or injured.

Today, ours barely gets used. My kids’ clothes are strewn across their floors like drying fettuccine, or languishing in laundry baskets, washed and folded weeks before. It’s a wonder they are ever clothed. When they were younger and more suggestible, I tried to draw attention to the chute with a framed, brightly-lettered poster that read, “You are here. Be Present.” A visual reminder for visual learners. And the double meaning as both way-finding and existential advice amused me. It was either there or over the toilet in the adults’ bathroom, but I decided my husband’s aim was a lost cause.

The poster was one of a number of attempts I made as a young, flailing parent to subliminally instill certain values in my kids without being a broken record. The Children’s Wing is covered in framed positivity and self-image boosters. My favorite one, still, is a 20x30 poster with white lettering on a plain turquoise blue field and these words from Conan O’Brien: “If you work hard and are kind, amazing things will happen.” It holds up. My kids have now remembered that one into their late teens and twenties. And in the late aughts, as it still is, such virtuous decor was ubiquitous across the marketplace of semi-affordable stuff.

Fifteen years later, I have no delusions of my kids having clean floors. They are happy in their filth and well-established senses of self. We all must choose our battles. The kids spend less time in TCW these days, and I am left pondering the messaging on these hangings as an almost-empty nester. Except for Conan’s sage advice, they all kind of annoy me. They feel like force-feeding a baby bird. They are presumptuous in a way I did not see when I was desperate to outsource some of my mental parental load.

Thankfully, in my middle years, I am also wiser. I am more secure in my knowledge of my children, my parenting, and how to handle the full range of human emotions and responses. As a result, I have developed quite a contentious relationship with cutesy, highly-marketed phrases that are all meant to snap us out of whatever unpleasant thoughts we might be having at any given moment. Lately, these phrases include, but are not limited to, “I Am Enough,” “You Got This,” “Practice Kindness,” and especially anything that simply advertises the word gratitude in fussy imperative fonts. Their commands require levels of forced resignation, cheerleading, or downright fakery that make me irritable.

The proliferation of these and similarly saccharin phrases on mugs, t-shirts, and home decor is nauseating. And the frequency with which they are discussed in popular media, mainstream news, and even academic journals creates a startling subset of American Anthropocene behavior that can only appropriately be called a Cult of Gratitude. The underlying message is social-emotional reductivism: Grateful (as a catch-all for marketed positivity) is the ultimate state of being. Anything else is less than human. Fix yourself.

With the rate that such items are flying off shelves and reappearing in new iterations, the message is providing some sort of twisted resonance. The goal may noble, but the execution method is flawed. And perhaps, as my teenage daughter would say, “It’t not that deep.” But what if this misconstruction of language, and its subsequent distribution, is, in fact, part and parcel of what ails us as a society?

A little history

Gratitude as a moral construct is a centuries-old pillar in all of the world’s major religions. It is a tool to differentiate right from wrong, good from evil. “Doing it right” is a sign of our better humanity, or so the ancients dictate.

As a pro-social function of the human brain, gratitude has only been a subject of focused clinical study since the early 2000s. A 2003 study by R.A. Emmons, et al., defines gratitude as a state resulting from acknowledgement of desirable opportunities, outcomes, and gifts contributed by external factors such as friends, parents, or luck. The definition is clunky and inwardly focused.

As a human thought process, an attitude of gratitude has shown in numerous clinical studies, tracked by the National Institutes of Health, to increase life satisfaction, happiness, healthy eating, high quality interpersonal ties, and overall positive emotions. (It should be noted that gratitude has to be induced in the lab, which seems inherently unreliable, and proves a larger point. One study forced subjects to imagine they were Holocaust victims who were helped to escape by strangers. Who wouldn’t be grateful in those extreme circumstances?) In its unforced state, gratitude can occur from a top-down perspective, as an adopted life outlook or innate personality trait, or from a bottom-up perspective, as a positive result of episodic personal interactions.

What the scientific literature is clear on is that there is little evidence that deliberate gratitude interventions by outside forces have significant impact on people’s psychological well-being. Gratitude practice alone is not the cure-all the empirical data might suggest. You can’t just say, “make it so,” and poof! all your problems are lessened. If you are grateful that you had a nice conversation, the gratitude itself does not reduce your depression or anxiety or loneliness, but the positive interpersonal interaction might. Feels more like a plug for community and relationship than just making a list of what’s going well.

Gratitude Gone Wrong

Still, with all the potentially positive personal and social impact gratitude can bring to the table, people are unhappier, lonelier, and more disconnected than ever. How did we manage to screw gratitude up to such an American-XXL-Turbo-Grande-Value-sized degree?

The short answer is clear on the walls of TCW at my house and in almost every aisle in Target: we took the good science and turned it into a misguided, competitively-driven commodity. What should be a process of earnest reflection and personal choice has been turned into a measure of personal worth added to the Superhuman List of Social Desirability right next to thin, healthy, able-bodied, happy, attractive, wealthy, and #blessed. It is one more outward trait that can be bought and projected onto a perfect social media existence or public persona, even if that is the polar opposite of how we actually feel. It is one more daily task to attempt and feel bad about when we fail, like eating enough fiber or planking for five minutes. “Hmm. I should probably get a coach for doing it right.” Cha-ching! In reality, you are doing it just fine, or at least just as badly as everyone else. You are being human. And is everyone else even doing it?

BOYD Interactive: See if you can count how many times a day you hear/read/say/think the word gratitude? Put answers in comments!

More importantly, constant striving for commodified gratitude can actually do more psychological harm than good. There is no human on this planet who can have something horrible or heartbreaking happen to them and thug it out by saying, “Well, it could be worse.” When a friend is having a crap day, and they say to me, “I know I should be grateful for xyz,” it takes a lot of personal strength to not want to throttle them right there for denying their more genuine emotions in that moment. What is the deal with our need as a culture to bury the negative parts of our selves? We all have them.

Managing our range of emotions by dismissing or invalidating the negative ones, like anger or fear or grief, in favor of “looking on the bright side,” or being “grateful for what we have,” shortchanges the healthier process of acknowledging and working through difficult emotions so that we can move forward. In essence, relentless gratitude may be expedient, but it is also a way to get emotionally stuck, fast. There will be negative consequences somewhere down the road. It’s called toxic positivity for a reason. The dung beetle’s journey is always uphill.

To be clear, I am not against the idea of being grateful. But the aforementioned commandments of the Cult of Gratitude that have gripped our box-checking society suggest an inherent contradiction in our quest for self-awareness (or at minimum, personal contentment), and perhaps a drawback in self-help as a field of practice more generally.

Modern commodified gratitude, like many self-help concepts, whether administered by daily journal entry, or guided manifestation, or hallway poster, is simultaneously devoid of personal agency AND entirely too obsessed with the self as a manic personal practice. On one hand, it is not self-driven because some outside force dictates how and when to do it right. On the other hand, its outward focus is lost because it requires perpetual focus on the self to keep up with the social force mandating it. It skews our ability to know when to trust our own intuition and resilience, and when we should seek the help of reliable outside sources for better self-knowledge and social understanding.

When we adopt trendy words and practices into our daily-reminder culture, as shorthand for doing the real work of self-exploration, we negate their benefits through our desire for efficiency and belonging. With marketed gratitude, the ultimate effect is a sense of pseudo-communal, self-indulgent isolationism that can read more as a tally of “what the world has done for me lately” than actual practice.

"There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage."

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

There is no Doing it Right

So what should gratitude look like? Should we even continue to use that word, despite its deep moral history? What does it mean in our increasingly secular society, or as so many organized religions stray from their founding tenets to serve other agendas? As language can over time, maybe the word itself no longer serves its original purpose, and it is naturally losing its functional meaning.

Perhaps a better question is: What should we call an everyday reflective practice that accommodates the full range of human emotions, while being ultimately hopeful about our ongoing existence both alone and in community?

For centuries, Buddhists have called it Mindfulness. While this word is approaching its own saturation point in the marketplace of misappropriated branding on TikTok and in self-help circles, its meaning offers more practical nuance than just saying “thanks.” True mindfulness practice requires cultivated awareness of one's internal states and external surroundings, and perpetual evaluation of both, without judgement. It can be challenging given the short and inherently-judgey attention spans of modern existence, but it has persevered for a reason.

The goal is a level of equanimity between the inner and outer worlds, and the positive and negative, in any given moment. Presence of mind is a component skill to be fostered and captured. It involves key principles of compassion, patience, kindness, and joy. And it allows for close examination of the thoughts and feelings that alter our capacity for these things. In short, it requires work. It does not require perfection. Total mastery is impossible. Gratitude is magically built in. The accessibility is in the expectation of failure. You have to get over yourself to begin, and then keep trying when it goes sideways, which it always does. There is no doing it right.**

When All Else Fails

If the idea of a mindfulness practice makes you want to hurl (as it did for me for some time), here’s another idea that I have subscribed to for over 30 years. In 1991, one of my college roommates introduced me to the concept of the Shit List Book. It is the anti-gratitude journal. It may unwittingly qualify as mindfulness-lite. It is immensely freeing in its lack of agenda, goals, or rules for doing anything right or well. The only requirement is honest words on the page. The Shit is whatever you want it to be.

Choose any utterly utilitarian notebook, the uglier the better. Or, ironically adorable works too. You do you. If you are a morning shit-lister, start the day by writing down anything that is on your mind — nagging work reminders, social stuff, chores, a tough conversation from yesterday, anything. See what comes up and how you feel about any of it, or predict how it might go when the time comes. Jot down those thoughts if you have time. If you are an evening shit-lister, take a few minutes at the end of your day, write down what happened, expected or not, and whatever impressions strike you about how things went. Or just list the Shit of your day, completely without reflection. There is no timer, no word count. Three minutes is as good as 30.

There is also no Dear Diary in this method. Eww. You are talking to no one but yourself in whatever King’s English or potty mouth feels right to the inside of your head. Sentences aren’t even necessary. Chronology is not required. Drawings and scribblings are great forward motions. Onomatopoeia is encouraged (blech, ewww, pphhhht, eek).

The Shit List Book is not polite. All-caps SHOUTING or teeny-tiny secret admissions can be part of the process. It is okay to name names in your book — the annoying neighbor, the deadbeat colleague, the crazy uncle (None of mine is crazy, but they do sometimes read this newsletter. J, J, M, I love you all.).

Naming emotions can be even better. Frustration, disappointment, comfort, joy, burnout, relief. Or, there may be a string of completely fragmented thoughts in succession, factual or editorial, that you just need to document. Nothing is off limits.

The Shit List Book is a brain purge. Brain purge alone can clear the way for emotional purge — to help sort the dead ideas from the viable ones, the impulse reactions from deeper feelings. In the light of day, seeing where your emotions land (aka, getting control of your Shit), positive and negative, can help you figure out how to address them in your own hierarchy of needs.

By not prescribing gratitude, and unleashing every other possible response, the Shit List Book allows you to be a whole human being, and ultimately find where the good stuff falls out. It is cathartic, if practiced in a rule-free zone. It is necessarily messy, like life. There is no doing it wrong.

One will make you question the validity of all your real feelings; one will set you free. Which is which? Also, fighting ink bleed is real. Bonus! (photos: Target.com)

And don’t overthink it. Start small and easy. The good stuff wilts if left pressed in the pages of the notebook, without real-time practice in the world around us. It is constant work, wrangling it from our other more complicated feelings and emotions. But the payoff is worth it. Share what you learn. If someone helps you ever, say thank you. (That’s just good manners.) If you like someone’s fierce new hairdo or brightly-colored outfit, tell them so. If someone at work is repeatedly stepping on your toes, find a way to express your frustration to them constructively. If someone stood by you through a difficult time, make sure they know (out loud) that you appreciate what they might have sacrificed to do that. Thank your children, or your parents, or your friends for being their wonderful selves in a difficult world.

It is not a box to check. No one is checking your work. You don’t need to post the pages on Facebook. (Please, DON’T!) It is personal work toward an outward way of being. That is the juice. It flows when we allow ourselves to acknowledge the good stuff as only one of many parts of being human.

A final important question is: What level of individual work are we willing to do to reap the real benefits of gratitude where the commodified version is lacking? Can we bring accountability to the idea of gratitude and release it as a performative practice? Can we make room for the feelings that are harder? The choice is highly personal.

You are here. Thanks for being present.

Have a great weekend.

-IWW

**If mindfulness feels like work you want to try, there are teachers, right here on Substack, who are modern-life pragmatists, without giving any of the icks of marketed spirituality. Jeff Warren and

Dan Harris

are two of my personal favorites. Lots of real science. No judgement, all trial and error, and humor in the process. Just listening counts as work. (Find them under Recommendations in the menu bar.) And Joseph Goldstein is the GOAT. His “Basics” course with Dan Harris can be found on the Happier app.