Most gratitude practices are narcissism disguised as self-help
Sorry
As of late, the self-help literature seems to be bombarded with words and statements in manifestos around “gratitude.”
The idea is that we should take more time to appreciate the things we already have, rather than constantly ruminate about futures and possibilities that will never be. It is supposed to be a counteracting force against the envy and jealousy we naturally feel when we compare ourselves to the impossible standards presented to us through various streams of media.
As a concept, I have nothing against gratitude. It is an emotion that is both pro social and empathetic. The part that I find rather icky is the way that it’s being deployed. It’s ineffective and borderline sociopathic.
The practice of gratitude is approximately the following:
First, take some time out of your day to visualize or ponder some unfortunate/horrific circumstance (known in the self-help literature as a “downward counterfactual”).
Second, look around at your current life and realize how good you have it in comparison to this hypothetical circumstance.
Third, feel the ocean of gratitude welling up inside of you.
Fourth, become one with the universe.
[Pretend I put a picture of a levitating monk here. The caption underneath would be: 20 minutes a day writing in your journal and this could be you. ]
On the face of it, the logic is sound. If I’m constantly on Instagram, looking at pictures of beautiful people sipping martinis in their flying yachts, then I’m going to feel bad about working my regular 9-to-5 job; by contrast, if I spend a whole bunch of time visualizing a life without hands, then I’ll be more grateful for my current life — which includes hands.
But it doesn’t work for three reasons.
First, it’s short term. The human brain is designed at a biological level to become adapted to circumstances, whatever they may be. Evolutionarily speaking, to feel a profound sense of gratitude for the same thing over and over would require a disfunction equivalent to memory loss. It’s no different than listening to your favourite song; listen to them too much, and you’ll grow sick of them — and if you program your morning alarm to your favourite song, you’ll never want to hear it again.
Second, gratitude of this kind is just another flavour of toxic positivity. It’s a more passive aggressive way of telling people who have problems to “Keep your chin up, champ. Things could be worse.” Only now it’s couched in several layers of therapeutic language, meant to “reprogram your cognitive processes” so that you can “speak your truth” and “reclaim your inner power.”
Third, as the title of this article suggests, it promotes a sort of snobbery in disguise. This sort of practice inevitably leads to people comparing their own circumstances against those who are less fortunate than themselves. “Oh boy, I’m so grateful that I’m not like that ugly/poor/desperate loser over there.”
Think about if someone thought about your situation as the reason they should feel “grateful” — imagine how that would make you feel.
To be clear, I have nothing against the idea of gratitude as an emotion. I also understand that most therapists wouldn’t use this sort of practice in isolation; no doubt they would incorporate it into a broader suite of cognitive practices for their clients. My criticism comes from the way that it’s being deployed in the broader culture — how we are artificially generating gratitude for the purposes of pacification.
To summarize, if we compare ourselves to people doing “better” than us and feel envious/jealous as a result, then it doesn’t automatically follow that we should look at people who are doing “worse“ than us and feel better about ourselves. Over the long term, I would hypothesize that it only brings about a more narcissistic worldview. Instead, it is the act of comparison itself which is the issue.
It’s the thief of joy, so I’m told.
