Against Gratitude: A Manifesto

Gratitude is the watchword of the era, the value that has risen to the top in a time when there are few values, or rather, when the context in which values might have some meaning has been systematically degraded. It is the firm ground upon which people can proudly stand, secure in that moment, at least, that they do have a true north after all.

Our age is of course so monstrously corrupt and beyond redemption that any value with any sort of unilateral support must be a viciously insidious thing. The top value of a corrupt age serves primarily to enable bad people to rationalize their behavior. So what is gratitude, really? What evilness does it permit to be perpetuated with a cleaner conscience? In what ways does it enable bad people to keep doing the bad things necessary to become successful in a bad place?

Gratitude is the condition of being happy with what you have, being thankful for the things that have entered your life. It is realizing that what you have is much more than you might think. We have a psychological tendency to dismiss the positive things in our lives and take them for granted, while focusing on something we want but don't have, and assigning overinflated value and merit to this missing aspect.

We are certain that the experience of having our void filled is more valuable than the, if modest, experiences of wholeness we walk around with every day. We are more whole, more fulfilled, luckier, and fortunate than our brains allow us to perceive. We tend to walk around in states of destructively reductive mania, treating good things like shit. Gratitude corrects this.

So why does gratitude take such concerted effort and practice to incorporate as an active value? Because whatever we have, whatever has been there for us reliably, means little to us. Attaining anything is typically insignificant. What we have means little to us because what we have begins as what we wanted, and we can generally only want stupid things.

Our society would cease functioning if people weren't conditioned to maniacally want things, and the persistent malaise and drift of our society is caused by the perpetual realization upon attaining the objects of desire that having them changes little, and means less. Valorizing gratitude is necessary when desire reveals its hollowness--if wanting and having were less hollow, were in fact fulfilling, nutritive, sustaining, then we wouldn't need to overtly train ourselves to appreciate what we have.

One would think that all the time and effort that goes into achieving something would generate enough meaning to ward off the habit of viewing what you've attained with dismissiveness, or even contempt. Capitalism encourages long, intense working effort devoid of meaning or logic--you can work away at a career for decades and then have a midlife crisis in which everything you've labored for day in and day out appears absurd and meaningless. Capitalism discourages us from even asking, let alone living in accordance with, the most important question of all: what am I doing, and what do I mean by doing it?

Imagine a being completely alien to the American capitalist laborer: someone who understands the meaning of his labor. Such an exotic, alien figure would have deep logic underlying the majority of his daily tasks, and an appreciation for the assets his labors have allowed him to accrue. At no point would such an alien being require a boot camp in gratitude--he would simply have worked for things that were important to him, and would have enough time and a logically supportive environment to have a chance to understand what was important to him. He would not work unless he had a reason to, and if he could not find a reason to work, he would not work, but would be supported by the state.

In our society, we are expected to work before having any inkling of why we work. This pattern holds fast for nearly everyone, since the only way to get a decent job is to become pre-professional and hyper-organized in your outlook from about your first high school report card.

The sooner you can become an adult in training the less likely it is that you will be shut out from the hallowed ground of respectable, gainful employment in your actual adult years. So of course there is no time to instill sense into your actions. It is an absurd thing to expect to understand why you undertake labors every day--you should just be ravenously obsessed with working as much as possible, end of story.

A society which places gratitude on the high altar of virtues is a society in which human beings have no idea why they do the things they do, and yet cannot be permitted to stop, or even slow down long enough to insert some kind of logic into their maniacal activities. Gratitude is a superficial bandage on a deep wound. The fact that we praise a superficial bandage shows how deeply sunk into ideological muck we are, and will continue being.

Narrative in Journalism

You can't read a nonfiction piece these days without wading through some hokey narrative context in the first few paragraphs. I blame Malcolm Gladwell's enormous success for the popularization of this trend--he made millions by writing pop psychology books whose chapters began by telling you about how Joe the Farmer always got up at the same time to check on his chickens and so forth, as a way of illustrating some larger point.

Purveyors of all forms of creative nonfiction think their readers want, or even need, to be "told a story." Is this not just a bit condescending? The presumption seems to be that readers are so resistant to receiving any ideas at all, that they need to be gently brought into the orbit of ideas through relating to an everyday character embroiled in some everyday situation. Is this really the case?

There are too many examples to list, but here's a quick one from a baseball Hall of Fame story yesterday on Grantland. I was excited to read it, but that excitement dissipated after the very first sentence: "Charles Bronfman was desperate." Oh no. Was he? I look forward to eventually learning how this obscure person from history's desperation fractionally elucidates the thesis of this piece of writing.

A reason I've stopped reading much fiction is because I don't really care about imaginary worlds--the real world is interesting enough, dense enough to parse. I don't care about characters--I care about ideas, which should be the province of creative nonfiction. But too often the creative part of nonfiction is interpreted to mean storytelling, or setting some traditional narrative context with colorful characters and charming settings.

Storytelling is a neat way to blend the creative with the nonfiction, since the story is based on a real event, but can include any quirky, minor, offbeat aspect of the character's biography. It also follows the bogus rule that writing should show rather than tell, which makes the journalist feel like he is doing the right thing.

But too often it seems like the narrative is a stand-in for the writer's own grasp of the ideas, or at least serves to pad out a thin idea over greater word counts. A story may more "vividly" (though probably not) illustrate an idea than simply describing the idea itself on its own terms, but not more trenchantly or subtly. If you can find a real life character who can be tied to an idea in some minimal way, you don't have to work to understand the idea as much, and you don't have to develop a narrative context of ideas into which it fits--instead you just shove it into the readymade context of the character's life.