Some fast crude thoughts on Graditude

Culled from a Facebook conversation with a colleague. 

I’m actually quite ambivalent on gratitude, but I haven’t reached the point where I can articulate my thoughts on it very well. Robert Emmons, who leads the gratitude research program in psych, wrote some tremendous work early in his career on religion, spirituality and mental health. I feel that his gratitude work is a really piss-weak distillation of a trope he found there into something you can easily run crude, empirical studies of for the academy and otherwise market to the American earnestness brigade. More generally, gratitude is part of the California ‘smile society’ of hedonic psychologists who are more interested in whether people feel happy than whether they are psychologically healthy. Just practice gratitude and all your worries will float away. This attitude, like the privilege movement and the tendency towards smiling and earnestness, strikes me as so god-awfully American.

Some random stuff on atheist ethics

A friend of mine had some follow up questions to my blog post about the existential meaning of life. They were, roughly:
1. Wouldn't things be easier if there was a cosmic moral order?
2. Have you come across the idea that we can be moral without God thanks to our genes?
3. Is atheism incompatible with moral absolutes? Does it restrict us to consequentialist morality?
4. How does one determine their 'authentic self'?

Here are my answers as written in an email: