Grateful, But Do We Need To Post About It?

I recently started a small ritual with my boyfriend where before we go to sleep, we list out three things that we are grateful for. Those three things need to be specific to that day or week, and can’t be generic things like “I’m grateful for my health” but should be more like, “I’m grateful to have gotten everything on my to-do list done” or “I’m grateful that I came home early from work and got to spend time with the dogs today”. We all know the statistics behind people who are more thankful and grateful, and how much more positive and optimistic they are. I figured that since I’m not a very optimistic person, I could trick my way into optimism with this small ritual.

When it comes to things like being positive, grateful and happy; all you have to do is scroll through Instagram to feel like everything you’ve ever said is a big fat cliché. No matter where you look you will find cheesy captions talking about how an Instagram model overcame a minor struggle to get to where she is today, or someone tooting his own horn about an achievement he most definitely did not get to all by himself. I think it’s great to share your success stories and happiness with the world, but when did it become so trendy to do so?

I was with a friend recently and we were doing a small meditation. The more you do it, the easier it gets and since I was meditating after quite a while, I expected my brain to be bombarded with things I was worried about, emails I wanted to write and to-do list reminders; but I found that I was surprisingly silent. When we chatted about this later, I told my friend how weird it felt to really not have anything to worry about. I feel like my life is at such a good point, with nothing going exceedingly badly or exceptionally well, that this static balance just felt so good and relaxing.

Unfortunately, with many people, if you aren’t armed with a barrage of issues, you are going to spend your evening listening to theirs. It’s become so fashionable to have multiple problems in your life (many of which are serious #firstworldproblems) that taking that topic off the table leaves quite a glaring gap in the conversation. We definitely enjoy talking about the negative much more than the positive but perhaps we need to switch the focus entirely. What if our conversations looked outward a little more, and centered around ourselves and our made up problems a little less? I think this would lead to more gratifying and meaningful exchanges where you leave feeling upbeat and enriched rather than trying to compete over who has spent more time stuck in traffic for that week.