Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

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