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.

My concern with gratitude is again about agency. You can juxtapose hedonic psychology against self-determination theory and Ryff’s idea of psychological well-being to get an idea of the tension. Both SDT and PWB (and existential philosophy) emphasise that the route to robust mental health (defined more deeply than just positive affect) is through intrinsically motivated actions that satisfy human needs for autonomy, competence, purpose and personal growth, among other things. For this to work your conscious mind needs to be oriented around your self-determined and self-defining actions. Whether or not the initial conditions for that action were lucky or not is largely irrelevant, and fixating on whether you are advantaged obviates against the extent to which you can see your actions self-achieved (as opposed to just volitional).

Again, my thoughts here are very rough and doubtless bundled in with my irrational hatred of the earnest and those who smile incessantly, but I think there is something in my thoughts. On a very simple level, gratitude is really just the Californian version of Catholic Guilt, hence Emmons in the driver’s seat. You can recast that insidious pathology factory into a positive slogan, but it’s still irksome.  It’s about taking agency away from the individual and giving it to a higher power. F**k that. You are the captain of your soul.

Perhaps those people who say ‘I bought a house’ when actually they mean ‘my parents bought me a house I could never afford in Kirribili’ and then have all their friends say ‘congrats, so proud of you’ could do with a dose of gratitude, privilege checking and Buddhism, but I don’t know about the rest of us. The very word ‘gratitude’ and #grateful also make my skin crawl. How about just ‘keep a sense of proportion’. Not so pithy, but not so Disney either. 

I should mention that I have a shrine to Pan in the front yard where I stand and think about life whenever I eat pork belly or drink port. It’s not the practice of gratitude that I have a problem with it’s the culture around it.