Recently, the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an essay criticising the fashionable notion of gratitude as a path to happiness. This prompted an amusing spectacle: the proponents of gratitude attempted to demolish her argument without seeming, well, ungrateful that she’d made it. Too often, Ehrenreich thinks, gratitude serves dubious ends. Should a Walmart worker really feel grateful for a $1 pay rise, when the Waltons are America’s wealthiest family? And isn’t it narcissistic for the well-off to focus on “feeling grateful” rather than, say, campaigning to improve the working conditions of the poorer people on whose labour they rely? Gratitude merely makes us feel less bad about injustice, Ehrenreich concluded, when what’s required is “a far more muscular impulse… solidarity – which may involve getting up off the yoga mat”.
I’ve long espoused the benefits of gratitude; cheesy as it sounds, the science behind keeping a gratitude journal seems solid. But Ehrenreich has a point, which echoes the one levelled at Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, a practice for developing compassion. (Unless you believe in some weird physics, your warm thoughts aren’t improving anyone’s lives, and may serve to substitute for real action.) The problem with this kind of criticism is that you can apply it to almost everything: it’s hard to think of any beneficial activity that can’t be twisted into narcissism, or co-opted by capitalism. Consultants and TED talkers now preach the benefits of mindfulness; or squeezing more value from your workforce by letting them get more sleep; or using compassion to get ahead.
But the lesson here isn’t that mindfulness, sleep, compassion or gratitude are bad; it’s that we don’t have the luxury of neatly dividing such practices into good or bad, so you can pick the good ones, discard the bad, then run life on autopilot. Instead, you have to make the call yourself, every time. Does keeping a gratitude journal make you more pro-social, or a complacent, status quo-supporting bastard? Only you can tell (and the answer might change). Does meditation make you a slightly better human, or are you using it to check out of life? And so on – for all alleged techniques of self-improvement.
One eye-opening exercise, from the Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori, is to try finding reasons to be grateful for anything that happens, however seemingly awful. Crucially, her point isn’t that you ought to feel grateful for terrible events, it’s that experimenting with the possibility is useful. It jolts you into realising how glibly we tend to assume that events “are of two distinct types – good or bad – and that this goodness or badness is determined by how welcome it feels when it happens”, as the blogger David Cain explains.
Yet doesn’t everyone have a tale of how an apparent setback (an illness, a job loss) proved their salvation? This kind of experimental gratitude enables you to question assumptions. I’d say that makes it radical. But as for whether gratitude per se is good or bad: how grateful are you for a piece of string?
