I was doing gratitude wrong

Why I'm a gratitude convert

Grateful I live near this hill.

“People sometimes ask me, ‘If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?’ The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is really good.” – Derrick Jensen.¹

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I used to think gratitude was a load of shit.

This was most likely because I had come across the icky, kind of capitalist-tinted gratitude too many times. Buy this journal and write down five things you’re grateful for. Bring gratitude into your life to manifest more and more success. Be grateful for your food/toys/clothes/life when there are others who are ‘starving in Africa’.

Whenever I did try to create a habit of writing down five things I was grateful for I always struggled. I only ever managed a mix of the same handful of loose concepts. ‘Books’, ‘my boyfriend’, ‘my mom’, uhhhh ‘nature’? Then I would feel bad about my lack of gratitude and would quickly abandon the practice. This happened multiple times.

Until I realised I was doing gratitude wrong. Which is a funny sentence to write, because if this works for you then keep going(!), but I think I was approaching gratitude like it was a transition. If I’m grateful five times per day then I’ll become a better person, I’ll manifest good things for myself, I’ll be more able to do this or that.

Which is why it always felt like a guilt trip, I was writing about the things I had in my life and turning them against myself, lambasting myself that I had all this good in my life and I still wasn’t happy or content or successful or whateverthefuck I thought gratitude was going to bring me.

Now I’ve been approaching gratitude differently.² I haven’t set gratitude as a daily task I must tick off, ‘write down ten things you’re grateful for’ staring back at me from a never-ending to-do list. Instead, it’s a deep gratitude for the fact WE ARE ALIVE! On this incredible planet! Breathing air from plants! Part of a completely circular ecosystem! My gratitude is no longer dependent on external circumstances, my gratitude just is.

Once I started looking at it this way I couldn’t stop. Gratitude for my body which allows me to move and run and play, for tea made from water from the clouds and for incredibly complex tasting delicious foods. Gratitude for my loved ones around me, for conversation and laughter, and for the fact we are alive at the same point in history. Gratitude for expansive green natural spaces, for trees outside my walks and for plants growing up through the pavement cracks.

Then we begin to see gratitude in everything we do, in everything that keeps us alive. It’s not being grateful that I have food when others are starving, it's a gratitude that makes us feel in awe of being alive, in awe of the Earth we get the privilege of calling home.

Gratitude is radical. It’s antithetical to capitalist consumer society, which can’t function unless people are constantly feeling the urge to buy things.

Being grateful often means being satisfied with the things you already own, you suddenly no longer feel the need to buy buy buy to add meaning or fulfilment to your life.³ You appreciate and have love for the things you own, you take care of them and repair them, meaning you’re less likely to upgrade, and less likely to carelessly throw them away.

Refusing to play into the constant consumer cycle allows you to step out of the capitalist worldview. You’re more satisfied when you’re in gratitude. You’re more HAPPY when you’re in gratitude.

As Joanna Macy writes: “Thankfulness loosens the grip of the consumer society by contradicting its–hidden but pervasive message: that we are insufficient and inadequate. The forces of corporate capitalism continually tell us that we are needy–we need more stuff, more money, more approval, more comfort, more entertainment. The dissatisfaction it breeds is profound. It infects people with a compulsion to acquire that delivers them into the cruel bondage of debt. So gratitude is liberating. It builds a sense of sufficiency that is quite subversive to the consumer economy.”⁴

In my humble opinion, gratitude makes this Saving The World malarky a whole lot easier. Gratitude allows us to fully fall in love with our lives, with the world, and with humanity. Seeing the world with these new eyes creates a deep appreciation for everything around us and feeds into an unshakeable motivation to protect it.

Sometimes I bump up against feelings of guilt or confusion with gratitude when I consider those who are suffering. How can we be grateful for our situation when others are living in active warzones, are going hungry, are homeless, or any number of other sufferings? But I think these feelings aren’t exclusive, I can be both grateful and compassionate. I can be grateful for my privileged position and use this power to help alleviate the suffering of others. My suffering does not alleviate other’s sufferings, but my gratitude can put me in a stronger position to help others in need. 

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.

1. This is from the article Beyond Hope, but I originally came across this quote in Life After Doom by Brian McLaren.

2. To tell you the truth I’m not sure what sparked this. I think I read three books that spoke of gratitude, in some way, one after the other and it all came together. Those books were Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh, World as Lover, World as Self by Joanna Macy, and Life After Doom by Brian McLaren.

3. Obviously, I still want to buy things sometimes, but a lot less.

4. World as Lover, World as Self page 21.