The Grittiness of gratitude: A Buddhist approach

Sometimes it feels to me like the encouragement to be grateful has evolved into an ever present, holier-than-thou mandate that ends up creating shame. For decades now, there have been pervasive urgings from all over the place that gratitude is the key to everything from financial success to cancer remission. The gratitude imperative has become so normalized that some may feel guilty or ashamed for their failure to succeed at it. I mean, what kind of a loser must I be if I can’t maintain an “attitude of gratitude” given the many advantages of my life? For some of us, then, the arising of ungrateful thoughts itself can be experienced as just one more aspect of our life for which we do not feel grateful.

I’ve long been put off by the consumerist gratitude schlock: the floral notebook where I’m supposed to record my gratitude lists, the hypnotic audiobooks designed to help me drown out my negative thoughts, the podcast interviews with bubbly new age authors who laud the power of appreciation. For sure, one reason I’ve tended to be suspicious of this sort of thing is because of its gendered implications. Is the gratitude mandate just another “mother’s little helper” foisted onto unhappy women, not so different from Valium and “wine o’clock”? Does it tempt individuals already socialized to be compliant to further rationalize their dissatisfactions and perceived injustices rather than seek tangible relief or collective remediation? I can only speculate, but such critiques lead me to conclude that my problem is not with gratitude per se, but with how cheaply it has so often been portrayed and purveyed, that is, as just one more version of positive thinking.

Since at least the mid-20th century or so there’s been a growing focus in the West on individual attitude as the driver of success and happiness. Indeed, the emphasis on “staying positive” in the face of illness, financial challenge, natural disaster, and tragedy in general has become so taken for granted that, even now, I hesitate to question its status as pure gospel. And “gratitude” is often positioned squarely within this framework. It’s probably also true that part of why this positive thinking philosophy has become so popular is because it sort of works. People who consistently hold positive thoughts — appreciation, optimism, gratitude, and the like — do seem to be happier than folks who ruminate critically, negatively, and pessimistically. Given the choice between running a negative, relentlessly critical mental tape and a more positive one, it seems like we’re generally better off choosing a more positive one.

But any proper rendering of gratitude must do justice to our supposedly negative thoughts, feelings, and experiences and not treat them as if they were somehow a mistake or unpleasant tangent. A holistic rendering of gratitude would not offer a shallow retreat from a difficult reality but would, instead, be rooted in an acceptance with plenty of room even for “negative” thoughts and feelings. From this perspective, gratitude would not be about speeding past or denying negativity as sometimes seems to be suggested by positive thinking prescriptions. Instead, it would be conceived as arising naturally from intimate presence with the sorrows and joys that give texture to our lives. It’s unfortunate that some shallow gratitude rhetoric emerges from a fear of the entire spectrum human feeling when, in fact, expansive consciousness can embrace even our most difficult feelings, those we typically think of as negative. A more Buddhist approach, then, would encourage us to relax into conscious awareness and discover what is actually there, beyond the positive and negative emotions that can so often either quickly attract or repel us.

Gratitude as a byproduct of embracing reality as it fundamentally is, then, is almost the opposite of gratitude as a self-hypnotic sanitation project. It’s a point that deserves emphasis since sometimes efforts to tame or banish resentful, unappreciative thoughts are an attempt to escape an unpleasant present reality for a supposedly better one. There may even be some implicit or explicit bargaining underlying the effort: If I could only get good enough at being grateful for what I’ve got, could I somehow magnetize or manifest greater health, wealth, and happiness?

To be honest, I’ve sometimes felt a little envious of folks who seem to be organically able to commit to an “attitude of gratitude,” those who seem to find consistent comfort through such positive thinking exercises and mantras. And I too have relied on such self-hypnosis tactics myself for short term relief in difficult times. But maybe because I sort of naturally incline toward skepticism, such strategies have never worked well for me for long. Even though I am not a very good “positive thinker,” though, inhaling sorrow and exhaling rainbows, I regularly dip my toes into the waters of profound, gritty gratitude. And like almost every other discovery on my stuttering contemplative path, it’s not what I thought it would be. Gratitude, it seems, is not about positive thinking. In fact, it turns out that it is not something that can be thought at all.

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