We Need to Talk About Gratitude
Before you tell me how dishearteningly stupid and terrifying the world is, I’m not about to recommend you buy a thankfulness journal or start/end your day by saying aloud people/places/things you’re grateful for in between nice, big deep breaths. I do those things and find they help with anxiety — not about, say, nuclear war or that we probably won’t have a livable planet by the time my generation’s kids are 50, but run-of-the-mill-things, like will I be homeless the next time my landlord raises the rent however much he wants with no regulation (welcome to “progressive” Seattle: good luck living here if you’re not a techie or techie worshipper) or why, even at 30+, I haven’t figured out what the hell to do with my life and don’t feel particularly hopeful about ever doing so — but I want to talk about a really disturbing trend.
I’ve read a lot of books about career, vocation, finding out what you want to do, etc. All of them have been dismally unhelpful for me — mostly because they appear to be written for people who already know what they want and have trouble getting it (the ones who claim to help us lost ones figure that out are demeaning and egotistical in my experience), but one thing that a lot of them encourage is to count your current blessings. Being grateful for what you do have is definitely good practice but the reason an alarming number of these career books, as well as ostensibly spiritual or inspirational literature, is this: You’ve got it way better than a lot of people.
If you’re housed, employed and fed in America, that’s true, though that’s increasingly fewer and fewer of us. Even if you’re poor in this country, the theory goes, you’re better off than two-thirds of the world’s population because at least you have access to resources. But being more fortunate than someone else, even when it’s true, is a disgusting reason to be grateful. It’s a thin disguise for the perpetuation of the comparison culture that is destroying so many of us, particularly women.
It’s judgmental, too: how are you proposing to judge who “has more or less” unless you’ve bought into the capitalistic idea that more stuff = more happiness, a theory disproved over and over again (buying more stuff actually makes you miserable)? Yes, there are people struggling to make ends meet. Yes, more and more people are out on the streets with the skyrocketing rents that can only be classified as greed. Yes, there are crippling illnesses and accidents and losses. But the only way you really know if you’re better off than someone is to know how THEY feel about their situation — which isn’t something you can theorize about. You’d actually have to go talk to — and LISTEN TO — people who you’re judging as less fortunate than you are. Is listening/building relationships something we do in this country anymore?
Being grateful because you’re better off than others is also selfish. Instead of going and down something about those who are legitimately less fortunate than you are, you’re using their plight to feel better about yourself. That’s worse than pity. There’s a lot of suffering in this world. A LOT. But the fact that someone is suffering more than you is not a reason for you to be grateful; it’s a reason for you to go do something that has been proven to lift mood, mitigate depression and help you feel grateful: HELP SOMEONE ELSE.
How should we be grateful? By looking at our own lives and acknowledging the things that bring us genuine joy. Let’s please stop theorizing about other people’s pain as a way to mitigate our own. The only appropriate way to “use” other people’s suffering to help us feel better is to motivate us to go do something concrete about it.
