Tuesday, 26 March 2019 -- A short note on gratitude

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of someone encouraging us to be thankful. I’m sure fewer of us, however, have been given a reason why. In fact, I’ve told that complacency, which could be seen as an overabundance of gratitude, is a vice, so the messaging is something to the effect of “Be thankful, but not too thankful”, with very little indication as to where the boundary points are.

Last week when I sent a coworker a thank-you note, I realized that taking the time to purposefully verbalize the gratitude I was feeling toward him forced me to consider the positive aspects of his personality that I would otherwise take for granted. I recall several statistics that amount to saying human beings react more strongly to negative feedback than positive⁰. One benefit of gratitude is that it forces us out of this disposition toward negative perception, since to be thankful for a thing requires perceiving that thing positively.

Looking at gratitude in this way also addresses the problem of boundary points that I brought up between gratitude and complacency. Given our predisposition toward negativity, most of us are likely closer to the boundary point of ‘not thankful enough’. To counter this, we can develop gratitude. On the other hand, if we’re so devoid of negative perceptions that we can see no room for improvement, then we should adjust our perception the opposite way. Some of the research I read suggested an ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ balance of positivity to negativity.