Is there anything more touted as a cure-all for the anxiety, stress, depression, or general malaise of modern life than gratitude?
Being grateful is like a magic potion that will release us from the cycle of feeling bad and give us a whole new perspective on life. Gratitude is meant to work by counteracting our natural negativity bias (remembering and focusing more on the bad stuff) and directing our attention to our “blessings” instead.
Short circuiting the negativity loops in our heads is almost certainly a good thing. But what about when the invitation to “be grateful” morphs into a command, one that’s designed to discourage us from taking an honest look at our feelings, relationships, or jobs?
Author and therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab1 (
) addressed this on Instagram recently (@nedratawwab, May 28, 2023) with a short video on what she called “gratitude shaming.”Glover says, “Stop shaming people for wanting more, wanting something different, wanting to leave a situation.” Often, when people express dissatisfaction, describe problems, or share feelings of unhappiness, others respond by imploring them to “be grateful for what they have.”
But gratitude, says Tawwab, is not a solution. And genuine problems aren’t caused by someone “not being grateful enough.”
This attitude implies a) that someone’s problems aren’t real, and b) that their feelings or problems will go away if they just find more gratitude. As Tawwab clearly points out, this is a form of shaming and blaming by turning someone’s concerns back onto themselves.
It’s also a kind of dismissal and silencing. If you tell someone to be more grateful, you’re minimizing their concern and effectively saying that you don’t want to hear about it or help with it. The message sent is, “shut up, stop complaining, you don’t have it so bad anyways.”
As Tawwab suggests, there’s also an element to this that seems to be about keeping people small, stifling their dreams, and resisting change. Instead of letting people want more, gratitude shamers are implying that you already have enough, you’re taking it for granted, and that you shouldn’t try to change things.
I imagine that most people who give this “just be grateful” advice aren’t consciously trying to silence, shame, and stifle their friends and loved ones. Most probably think they’re being kind and helpful. Unfortunately, the impact is far different than the intention.
At a wider level, this seems connected to our obsession with happiness and feeling good, all of the time. When someone expresses unhappiness, our impulse is to direct them back to happiness as quickly as possible, with gratitude as a viable route. In this way, toxic gratitude is a facet of toxic positivity.
Similarly, this also reflects our inability, as a culture, to deal with grief, pain, loss, and sadness. Getting past, through, and over it are our cultural imperatives. We do not easily give (or take) time and space to feel some kind of way about life’s shittier moments. Whether this derives from other cultural forces, such as the need to be productive 100% of the time, or a stilted emotional intelligence that leaves us panicking when called to witness the tiniest unpleasant feeling in others, the effect is that we want ourselves and each other to move on as quickly as possible. We wield the cudgel of gratitude to make this happen.
What we might call “gratitude culture” is everywhere. My first memory of the self-help kind of gratitude is Oprah talking about how her daily gratitude journal had changed her life.2 She’d adopted the practice of writing a number of things she was grateful for in her diary every day. And of course, she was also selling gratitude journals on her website.
This was in the early aughts and I admit I was also eager for something to change my life. Struggling with graduate school, a baby, and a pretty unhappy relationship, I hoped a gratitude practice could turn things around. I suspect the gratitude shamers would claim I didn’t try hard enough, but suffice it to say, it did not in fact turn things around.
Social media, of course, took gratitude culture to new heights. Facebook and Twitter could be your online gratitude journals: “Feeling grateful for …”. Pinterest showed you how to decorate your house with messages of thanks, whether embroidered, silk screened, or painted on an old wooden board. And of course Instagram provided the perfect visuals to accompany #blessed moments. Why wait for Thanksgiving when you could be #thankful all year round?
There’s no shortage of gratitude-related advice in self-help books, either. A few titles include:
The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life
The Secret Gratitude Book (yes, that The Secret)
Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted
It’s no wonder that telling people to “be grateful” has become almost reflexive. It’s now accepted wisdom that gratitude is a balm when things are rocky.
Gratitude shaming is one outcome of gratitude run amok. Another, I think, is the tendency to suggest that we should—on a societal level—be grateful for the bare necessities with the implication that we shouldn’t ask for more.
A race to the bottom of the gratitude pit
When someone has a gripe about their job and you reply, “be grateful you have a job,” or someone notes a problem with their apartment and you tell them, “you should be grateful you have somewhere to live,” what are you really saying? Why do we do this?
Part of it seems to stem from the idea that there’s always someone, somewhere, who has it worse, or even that there are whole regions or nations where people would “give anything” to have your shitty job. As if this fact negates the problems with the actual conditions you’re facing.
While there’s a time and place for such broad comparisons (when lambasting the rich and their endless consumption, for example), they do nothing when it comes to helping family and friends through hard times. Moreover, these comparisons beget a “race to the bottom” wherein any attempt to improve life is discredited by pointing to those who have less. If we follow this logic, then no one can try to change anything until we all have nothing.
How low should our collective standards be? I’m reminded of comments like, “At least he doesn’t beat you,” directed at women desiring better relationships with men. Is that really the bar we want to set? Can we not, as Tawwab suggests, desire more, both individually and as a society?
We have a hard time seeing that raising the bar for some is part of raising the bar for all. Of course, on a global level, this means not forgetting about those who haven’t gained fair wages, human rights, etc. when we improve things for ourselves.
Gratitude shaming is brought out to push back against progressive movements. “Be grateful you have more rights than 2SLGBTQAA+ people in [insert country we want to feel superior to].” “Be thankful this isn’t [insert time period in the past] when things were much worse for people like you.” These kinds of comments are meant to keep people in their place, prevent them from asking for “too much,” or gaining any kind of power in society.
All of this contributes to a situation where those in power can convince us that even the bare minimum of social goods—basic health care, education, housing, food, water, clean air—are luxuries and privileges that we should feel grateful for. This means they keep clawing these things back and telling us that anything else we might demand is unaffordable and unrealistic. And we believe them, and recite our nightly gratitude mantras.
Be grateful this post is coming to a conclusion
On balance, isn’t gratitude a good thing, though? Sure, there’s always a place for appreciating what you have. It’s certainly important to acknowledge the people, places, things, and experiences that are special to us. If these start to become invisible or taken for granted, we’ll probably fall into the trap of amplifying life’s little annoyances, from the barista who gave us the wrong change to the spam call that interrupted our dinner. If we let these tiny miseries take over our thoughts, life becomes very unpleasant indeed.
However, let’s not use gratitude to deny ourselves and others the hope or the power to change circumstances for the better. Let’s not use gratitude to push away sadness, disappointment, anger, or grief when these emotions are part of life. Let’s not use gratitude to keep us all thankful for less than we need.
What I’m reading: Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey. I plan to write about rest in the next couple of weeks.
What I’m watching: The Days, a miniseries based on the events at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant following the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.
What I’m listening to: Liar Liar, a podcast about an Australian Ponzi scheme led by a woman who disappeared and is now presumed dead. I really enjoy learning about scams for some reason.
I really enjoyed her book Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself.
A lot of things have changed Oprah’s life over the years!
Oh yeah, gratitude as a form of spiritual and emotional bypassing. Not a fan. Thank you for addressing this.