The Problem With Gratitude
You see, even the title of my essay is a problem. Just typing it induces guilt. Don’t I have a lot to be grateful for?
In recent years, the gratitude movement — as I will call it — has really taken off. At the top of the list for most life coaches is the gratitude journal. Record your daily gratitudes and that will shift you into a higher plane of thought.
This is all to the good. Who can argue with this?
But the fact is, everyone from the wealthiest tycoon to the woman who walks eight hours per day to get water for her family in sub-Saharan Africa experiences the blues once in a while. I mean, we’ve seen enough raging billionaires of late, haven’t we?
Mental health issues do not abide by class, although financial stresses can definitely add to stress and depression.
And so, the problem with gratitude is that if you are not feeling it, you’ve added guilt to your bad feelings. I have a job. I have a home. I live in a country where there are vast resources. How dare I complain about anything?
Recently, someone in my writing group brought up the idea of a Complaint Journal. I had never heard of that, but it made a lot of sense to me. Why not put all the bile on the page every day? Then it becomes like waste removal, allowing you to free up your mind and heart for more inspiring content.
Today, I might write something like the following:
I bought a house too late in life and the stresses of renovating a fixer-upper seem to never end. I’ll never pay off the mortgage in my lifetime. I miss the convenience, energy, diversity and culture of New York. I never reached my career goals. Did I actually have a career, or was it all hobby? Should I have made different choices? Work and career always came first and so I missed out on love. Now I have neither, and my new address doesn’t help me much with either. My day job doesn’t bring me fulfillment. My faith, always reliable, feels dry and lifeless.
These may seem like first world or white privilege problems and perhaps they are. But they bring real feelings of sadness with them. No one is immune from the blues. Let’s own those feelings. Let’s mine the regrets. Make sweet wine from the sour grapes.
A wise friend told me, “You are not what you accomplish or don’t. You are who you are on the inside.” This came as a mild shock to me. I’d been brought up to believe — and I did believe — that the accomplishment was primary. I mean, we can’t take our stuff with us when we pass, but our accomplishments can live on. Isn’t the American dream built on the virtue of accomplishment?
Has anything caused more damage to our psyches than the American dream? For all the wonderful success stories we hear about, think of the millions of folks sitting on their couches harboring regrets about unfulfilled dreams and wrong turns.
I think it’s safe to scapegoat social media, where we’re encouraged to share our “successes”; if they are relatively small potatoes, build them up with a good production for the viewing masses. These days, can we say something is a success if we don’t see the video of it? If posts of my music or writing don’t get enough likes, it’s hard not to feel invalidated. Especially when you compare it to some of the posts that are going viral. (A hamster eating a burrito has gotten over 12 million views.)
I do have very real things that I am grateful for. Morning sunshine and fresh water are not small things, for example. But I’m not going to list them here to satisfy the life coaches or to make my readers feel bad if they are not in a grateful space.
My advice today? Rip of the Band-Aid, which, metaphorically, is probably our everyday distractions that keeps us from going to the scary quiet place within us. Examine the wound. Have a good cry. Scream into your pillow. Life isn’t easy.
I believe the deepest gratitude will bloom from the roots of our deepest pain. Dig in.
