I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 10.
Gratitude is a powerful tool for personal fulfilment. It regularly appears in the writings of Aristotle and most of the Stoics such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Jesus mentioned it once or twice. Buddha brings it up in his teachings. Muhammed tells us that we must render gratitude into real life actions. Aesop called it the sign of noble souls, and both Confucius and Lao Tzu (the father of Taoism) are quite aggressive in their application of it.
Great thinkers and theologians and scholars and prophets have been talking about gratitude since the Hellenistic philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, and it was likely mentioned well before that (it gets hazy trying to pinpoint the first time people brought up). I’m going to hazard a guess, then, and say that it’s probably something we should be paying attention to.
I think it’s safe to say that we all believe we understand what gratitude is, but do we really understand what it means to exercise gratitude? We all intuitively know that it’s a good thing. Yet are we applying it in a way that actually brings us fulfilment?
I’m sure we’ve all thanked someone for doing something for us, or for helping us out. I’m sure, because I know that I have applied gratitude in the context of “I’m glad it’s not raining today” or “Thank god I found a car parking space in the shopping centre this close to Christmas”.
This, however, is not exercising gratitude when we look at it from a historical sense. The Stoics, for example, described gratitude as a virtue and believed it to be key to the foundation of a successful civilisation. They saw it not so much as an emotion, but as a state of being.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes referred to gratitude in his book Leviathan as the fourth law of nature. He had a very interesting take on it – that whether someone was doing you a kindness because it made them feel good, or whether they were doing it because it benefited their own interests, kindness was always self-serving for the person exercising it. As a result, Hobbes saw gratitude as a form of social contract. We should only employ it to prevent others from regretting that they were kind to us in the first place.
I appreciate that you’ve likely seen a lot of articles or blogs or posts where people tell you that you need to have gratitude.
I also appreciate that this can probably sound a bit condescending, and you wish that people would get down off their podiums and shut up about being grateful because you know that being grateful is important and you try to do it as best you can and you’re tired of people preaching about it.
In all honesty, it grates me when I come across inspirational Instagram posts telling me to “be thankful that I woke up this morning” and that I should “watch in gratitude as the beauty of life unfolds before my eyes”. That’s not going to work if what I’m watching unfold is a friend of mine dying of cancer, or my relationship coming to an end because my partner feels it just isn’t working out.
It grates me because it feels superficial and naive. It doesn’t tell me anything about gratitude, it’s just an instruction, another should on my list of shoulds that I already resent. It doesn’t educate me or improve my understanding. What did help me to understand it was going back to the older writings of people like Seneca, and Buddha, and Confucius.
There’s an underlying theme to all of their work that binds gratitude to the present moment. That’s where I was going wrong, and it should come as no surprise when we go back to thinking about the world and the culture in which we are raised.
Our world demands that we hold ourselves up to an ambition. The problem with this is that ambition and gratitude don’t necessarily play well together. We think that if we’re content with what we have, then we’re not motivated to strive towards an objective. If we accept and are happy with what is, where’s our motivation to keep working for something greater?
It’s the game of ambition, achievement, success, and failure that we’re unconsciously playing. If we re-frame the idea of success, if we change the story that we tell ourselves about it, it may make it easier to understand gratitude from a deeper perspective.
Left unchecked, we have a tendency to constantly be focused on the next object of our desire. When we finally reach it, instead of being present with it in the moment, instead of experiencing gratitude for the new thing we have in our lives, we put it to one side and fix our gaze to the next object on the horizon.
It can be material, professional, personal – whatever we obtain will feed our hunger for a while, but soon we need to satiate ourselves once again. This behaviour is known as hedonic adaptation. It’s our innate nature as human beings to return to a baseline level of happiness when the excitement of a new possession or experience has dissipated.
We’re not entirely to blame for this. We’re bombarded with all the nice things that we could own and convinced by some clever marketeers that what they’re peddling us will be the cure to all our ills. We’re taught in school, and later in work, that performance is the key to happiness and success.
Now, I’m sure you’ve all experienced what it feels like when we get that promotion at work, or the excitement of the new car on the driveway. And I’m sure you’ve all experienced what happens when the excitement fades, and how everything feels all “back to normal”. So off you go again, as if nothing had ever happened in the first place.
I’m sure we’ve also all experienced the pitfalls of the comparable mind. “She has a nicer house than I do”, or “they’re more successful than I am”. In thinking like this, we are exercising judgement. We are saying to ourselves “if only I have all of these things, then I will be happy”. It is a false way of thinking, and one that we can change through gratitude.
Remember a few chapters ago where I replaced the word success with the word fulfilment? This is what we’re looking to change. Success and ambition are intrinsically linked, but fulfilment and ambition, not necessarily so.
Both success and fulfilment can be associated with happiness, though.
Where gratitude has real power is how it can change our story around failure. There’s a tendency for us to fixate on failure, to allow it to become us. When we make mistakes, our internal narrative can turn towards thoughts such as “I’m not good enough”, “I wasn’t brave enough”, or “I didn’t do all that I should have”.
This is where we have to look at the distinction between interpersonal gratitude, the sort that Thomas Hobbes talks about, versus individual gratitude. Going back to the Stoic ideas around gratitude, the fundamental bottom line is to recognise that we are alive.
This may seem a little bit “fluffy”, but having an appreciation for life creates value in life. It allows us to think of our time as a source of wealth. Wealth in experience, and wealth in the opportunities that we can create for ourselves.
It can instil in us the idea of our time being “ours” and can help us when we think about setting boundaries for ourselves and ensuring that we’re making time for our own needs. I know from experience that, when we don’t value our time, we can end up spending all of our energy trying to meet the needs of others and leaving little if anything left for ourselves. This, unsurprisingly, is not good for our mental health.
The Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer says that:
We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn’t working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all?
In Buddhism, the angle is a little different from the Stoics. Here, we’re talking about connectivity. There’s a fundamental idea in Buddhism that we are a part of nature, not apart from it. That all living things are connected in the whole of the system.
Taking this in mind, it enables us to zoom out from the self-centrist perspective of fulfilling our needs and those of the people that we care about, and to see a broader picture.
Buddhists see the world as a realm of belonging. When we take a moment to contemplate our lives with this kind of overview, it can engender an idea of gratitude to be a component of that, and makes those little things we’re worrying about seem smaller and less of a trial of our own individualism.
Both the Stoics and the Buddhists also talk about being grateful for the obstacles that are put in our way. Each tells us that it is adversity that enables us to grow. Instead of growing frustrated or angry at how the Universe appears to have plotted against us, we can take the opportunity to reframe the experience and change our narrative.
Let’s go back to Sam’s story again. Remember him? He saw his redundancy as a flaw in his character, that he had been judged by his employer and found wanting. His story defined his perception of the experience. The obstacle was his redundancy, and before it he found himself questioning his worth.
By approaching the obstacle as a moment of change and an opportunity for us to grow, we can be grateful for it. That gratitude, in turn, empowers us to find a resolution that will work in our interest. It gives us the strength to take action, and the knowledge that our life has value.
The obstacle is the way
There’s a distinct relationship between meaningful gratitude and mindfulness. Of looking at what exists in the present moment, and not the concerns of the past or the anxieties of the future. On its simplest level, where we focus our attention is where our energy goes. If we’re constantly focused on the future, on getting our next hedonistic fix, our energy goes there too. Off into the distance to a place that doesn’t exist yet, and may never do.
By being grateful for and focusing on the present, we help to cultivate more of the good things in our lives. We’re bringing our attention to bear upon them, becoming more aware, and more of the moment.
There is a quote from the American writer and author of “The Celestine Prophecy” James Redfield that I like, and it goes
Where attention goes, energy flows
If we focus our attention on the negative, i.e. those things that we’re not grateful for, then guess what? Our energy is going to flow in that direction.
When we focus on scarcity or negativity, then it’s going to narrow our perspective. We become fixated on problems. Our discontentment grows as we solely point our gaze towards unmet wants and desires, instead of witnessing all that we have in its glorious abundance.
Conversely, when we use gratitude as a lens through which to view life, we can totally reframe our experiences in a positive sense. Instead of focusing on the obstacles, we can witness our opportunity for growth. Instead of feeling envy towards others who we may deem as more successful than us, we can celebrate their achievements and learn from their journey.
The real power in this change of perspective is that it enables us to see opportunity, to approach life with a sense of the abundant possibilities. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Unfortunately, we all have this innate ability that tends us towards focusing on scarcity, and it’s very likely that you’ve come across it before. It’s called the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, and it essentially means how quickly we adapt to changing stimuli.
All of us have an emotional baseline - a consistent level of happiness that we gravitate back to once something good has happened.
Say someone wins the lottery. When they find out that they’ve got a few million winging its way into their bank account, they might dance around the room and spend way too much money on boats. Give it time, though, and that sense of elevation will eventually fall back to the baseline.
Their happiness does not last.
This is the same for most scenarios. Got a new job, woohoo, then back to baseline. New romantic partner. Boom boom, then back to baseline. Shiny new Porsche. Vroom vroom. Back to baseline.
I’m gonna use that Porsche to step through the process of hedonic adaptation. You buy it because you think it’s going to bring you pleasure. We call this stage hedonic consumption.
Now you’re driving around in it. You’ve rolled the sleeves up on your jacket and are blasting Jan Hammer out of the speakers at full volume. You’re loving it. That’s hedonic value.
After a while, though, you kind of get used to it. That sense of elation fades away and the joy that you got from driving it before just isn’t there. That’s hedonic adaptation. Back to baseline.
The issue arises once we’ve settled into the state of hedonic adaptation. The pleasure in the item or activity has gone, so we go looking for the next one. Much like a junkie looking for their next fix. We need another shot of pleasure in the arm to give us that dopamine kick.
Pleasure can lift your mood and leave you feeling awesome, but its effect is fleeting and transitory. An ethereal mist that quickly dissipates.
We can’t escape the hedonic treadmill - it’s a natural state of being for most of us. What we can do is work on becoming aware of it and changing our perspective. As always, self awareness is at the core of any of these sorts of activities. If you don’t know what you need to change, then good luck trying to change it.
However, just because we can’t escape it, doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to live with it. The thing is that it has to be an active process. We can’t just tell ourselves to be more grateful and expect our mindsets to change. Practising gratitude is as much a discipline as regularly exercising or meditating. We have to stretch the muscles otherwise nothing will happen.
On the link between gratitude and happiness, Seneca, a very prominent Stoic philosopher, said
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient.
But what does that actually mean? Firstly, the idea of being present is hugely important, because that’s where all of our experience actually happens. We don’t live in the past, and we don’t reside in the future, so we need to get our heads out of there.
Living inside past regrets is just dragging that suffering from the past into the present. We can’t change it, so why are we worrying about it? All it does is focus our attention on the negative and that, in turn, is where our energy inevitably goes.
Likewise, daydreaming about potential future outcomes and desires is irrelevant. We’re spending energy on something that we ultimately have no control over, and missing out on the opportunities that are right in front of us. Which, ironically, are the things that we can actually do something about, because they’re happening right now.
Being in the moment, then, is a fundamental part of gratitude. Taking stock of what’s around us right now.
When Seneca says not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, he’s again talking about the dangers of idling in future preoccupations. Here, our hopes can lead to disappointments, and our fears to paralysis. Both of which distract us from the abundance of the present moment.
And, of course, rest satisfied with what we have is encouraging us to take enjoyment from our existing possessions. Be that close friends, our health, or food on the table. It’s about recognising that our happiness is not dependent on external “stuff” - that’s the realm of the hedonic treadmill.
Happiness comes from the internal, from our own perspective. We ultimately choose how we view the world and we need to hold ourselves accountable in this. Yes, there are external influences. There are cultural narratives and ideologies that we inherit as we grow older. There are the overlays that we put on the world that are shaped by our own experiences.
But have we ever stopped to question those perspectives? Have we ever challenged them and wondered whether they’re actually working for us, or against us?
In this, our eyes act like projectors rather than cameras. We’re taking the world in, churning what we see in the mix of our past experiences, and projecting it back out again. That projection is our reality and it sits atop the world, not within it. Shaping how we respond to what’s happening to us, from the people that we meet to the choices that we make.
How that projection looks is ultimately up to us. We can let it be filled with disappointment, discontent, and succumb to our obstacles. Or we can find wealth in the present moment, find happiness in ourselves, and see obstacles as a space in which we can learn more about ourselves.
Fundamentally, Seneca is telling us that in order to cultivate long term gratitude within ourselves, we need mindfulness, acceptance, and simplicity. Focus on the present moment and what surrounds us now. Let go of our attachment to future outcomes. Don’t over complicate life and pay attention to the beauty of the simple things.
Of course, none of this is easy, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. It’s a daily practice. An active choice that we are making each day. We can’t get up from a year on the couch and then immediately run a marathon, in the same way that we can’t suddenly change our perspective to engender the benefits of true gratitude.
It’s work. It’s effort. It’s evoking a discipline in our thinking. The important thing is that it’s in our mind, and that we apply it as best we can. Gratitude has a slow yet transformative effect on our perspective and the more we practise it, the easier it will get.
Think about the ideas that we’ve talked about, embrace them, and watch how your view of the world begins to change.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.