“Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.”
— Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881), poet and philosopher
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Gratitude is a combination of things, primarily two: a thought and an emotion. We experience deep gratitude emotionally, but we explain it intellectually. Intellectual explanations of emotions amount to rationalizations and, in most cases, they are a fraud.
By fraud I mean these explanations are misdirecting and self-serving. Our explanations of love, anger, insult, and gratitude are primarily means of justifying ourselves. In these explanations, we talk about ourselves to prove our authenticity.
We rarely sermonize because we know that neither we nor our audience knows what we’re talking about. We explain emotions to justify our actions and sanctify our intentions. As the saying goes, “No one cares what you think until they feel that you care.”
Gratitude Can Be Rational
Intellectualizing serves many purposes, and it serves important purposes when it comes to gratitude, but it is not a fair or accurate means of understanding the emotion. By intellectualizing we can distinguish two types of gratitude: selfish and selfless.
Intellect is the orchard of language, and in it grow pearls of wit and sometimes wisdom. Without language we’d be left to grunt, fawn, beg, and fight to express ourselves. Such demonstrations are often refreshingly direct, but that’s only because we spend most of our efforts being detached, ambiguous, and obscure. But no matter how well we craft our expression, our intellects direct us, they do not feed us. You can eat words, but you cannot survive on them.
Gratitude Can Be Selfish
Selfish gratitude is needy. You are grateful for what you’re getting. It’s contingent and dependent. You will express yourself as being grateful for what you have, or for the support you’re getting. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s neither deceptive nor manipulative, but it can be used in these ways.
Selfish gratitude affirms the conjoined role you and others play collectively, and this is a good thing. But self gratitude can also be threatening or defensive. It can easily be taken as contingent upon continued support. It may not be clearly expressed in this way, but its interpretation is ambiguous.
Selfish gratitude is contractual. Like a well-crafted contract, it has defenses and conditions. I remember telling my partner that I was not so much grateful for her as I was grateful for our family. And while this was a poorly worded expression of the larger emotion, there was truth to it. I did have a focus on the family that presumed her playing a part in it.
She did not have the same conviction, as it turned out. My expression of gratitude for the family could have been a way for us to communicate our feelings but, as is often the case, people who don’t share your sense of gratitude have little to contribute. Selfish gratitude, as the name suggests, revolves mostly around yourself.
Gratitude as Support
Gratitude offered with appreciation asks for no reward. This is something that’s already complete and does not look to the future. And while gratitude so offered feels nourishing it can also feel empty. If you thank your parents for the genes they’ve passed on to you, or to your friends for what they’ve done for you in the past, are you really appreciating an aspect of another person’s intention or simply the good fortune of circumstance?
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Gratitude that asks for no reward sounds more powerful and feels secure. Saying, “I love you for who you are,” sounds unconditional, but it also turns the other person into a kind of object. One that will maintain its role, or be maintained in its role, despite anything they do. There seems to be a need to give another person the power to fail in order to be authentic in appreciating their power to succeed.
When you say you’re grateful for someone’s virtue, are you appreciating them for something they’ve decided to do, for the risks they have taken and the sacrifices they have made? When you love someone for their beauty, or even for the beauty of their soul, have you really given them any credit at all?
Which kind of gratitude offers greater appreciation, gratitude conditional on someone’s continued action, or gratitude for actions in the past now being appreciated? Conditional gratitude is a respect that comes with responsibility, while gratitude for the role they’ve played is what someone gets when they win an award.
Hypocrisy, Celebrity, and Deception
I don’t like awards. They selfishly trivialize serious processes. They seem to celebrate the person or event that’s being awarded, but they really support the status quo. No one gets an award for the messy and painful process of changing the world, they’re awarded after their efforts have borne fruits consumed by others.
Who celebrates the conquerors? Winners are appreciated by those who have benefited from their efforts. Whom does the gold medal really venerate? It venerates the unproductive people who sit on their asses. We are grateful for the support we give each other for our lack of progress. This is not real support, it’s patronage: the power to control the right of privilege.
On the other hand, when I tell my partner I love them for what we’re able to create, am I disrespecting them for who they are? When we present ourselves as accomplished and attractive, are we asking to be recognized for who we can be, or how we’ve made ourselves?
I expect most people would recognize both aspects as valid and respectful, one being gratitude for the past, and the other an expectation for the future. People feel deserving of the celebrity they’ve won despite the lack of recognition given to others.
Very few reject the awards they’re offered. This reveals a deep disrespect for the nature of the struggle in which only one prevails. All Olympians and Nobel Laureates are hypocrites. It started in kindergarten where the gold stars you were given falsely represented progress at what the system chose to encourage. This is exploitation at the most basic level.
Recognizing only the end result of a dynamic process, celebrating your reward rather than your growth, is the static, exhausting, and obstructing phase of evolution. It is not creative and it does not support creativity. It’s the message that you should win the trophy wife rather than aim for the successful marriage, or detonate the better bomb rather than remain in the struggle to understand the world.
A Better Gratitude
I’ve intellectualized about gratitude and come to the conclusion that both nameable forms are defective. I’ve had to use language and reason because simply being emotional would not be effective. We can use language to clarify emotion.
You can approach gratitude emotionally and demonstratively, but you cannot expect to accomplish anything by it. You might evoke emotions like Picasso or Eugene O’Neill, and the results of your efforts may be more long lasting than anything I could write, but you’re unlikely to ever know what effect you’ve had.
The better gratitude is a gratitude you don’t communicate in language. It’s something you feel and live. It pervades your actions, not your statements. It cannot be understood as separate from events because it’s part of a living process. If you are grateful for being alive, this cannot be stated as anything but a symbol of what similarly appreciative people feel.
If the person for whom you’re grateful is not appreciative in equal measure, then there is no point in trying to communicate what they do not understand. As a victim, you might appreciate the process through which you gain enlightenment—be that a disease, a bad marriage, or a bad teacher—but your victimizer will not understand.
There is as little point in saying what you’re grateful for as there is in trying to explain why you love someone who doesn’t love you. Statements of love and gratitude serve similar purposes, which is to remind those who feel similarly of the importance of this emotion.
Gratitude lies in the being, not the doing, and any gratitude for what’s done is just a gravestone, or a marker of lucky circumstance. The better expression of gratitude is the feeling of it. If you feel you have to say it, don’t; show it. Words are impotent. Those who would understand you probably already have. And those who would not understand you, will not now, no matter what you say.
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