Gratitude isn't enough
Gratitude is relative. You cannot practice gratitude without having the opposite image of what you are grateful for. If you are grateful for having a steady income source, you imagine a broke person or a broke phase of your life. If you are grateful for the food on the table, you imagine an impoverished homeless person.
Can we be grateful in isolation? The short answer is no. The idea of having to be grateful for anything is religious, where they teach you to remain content with what you have. It’s alright to be poor and impoverished as long as you are not sinning. God loves the poor in all religions. But in isolation, without having an opposite image in mind, you do not have to be grateful. There is no need for it.
If you are the only person in your vicinity with a lavish villa and more money than you can spend, would you be grateful? Probably, if you came from a broke family where food was a luxury. So, you need a reference point of worse to be grateful for something better. It’s similar to experiencing happiness relative to the sadness we face in life. If we never have to face sadness, we wouldn’t know what happiness feels like.
Time is relative, and so is our progress. The source of our material suffering is rooted in our envious nature when we want what others have. A hungry man wants food, a poor man wants to be rich, a rich man wants contentment, and contentment cannot be experienced without lack. So, the vicious cycle can only be broken by gratitude — or so religion suggests.
A person walking in the scorching heat of the desert for two days without water will be grateful for finding sweet water in an oasis, as opposed to someone who never had to walk in the desert or live without water for two days. Essentially, you cannot be grateful for something unless you have experienced the absence of it.
At the risk of repeating myself, it is the lack — this absence — that makes everything in life worth achieving. Without the absence, there’s nothing to fill. Being grateful for the food on the table means having lived through the absence of food at some point in time. That’s why practicing gratitude feels like a coping mechanism. A person who has lost two people in a tragic accident has to be grateful that at least someone is alive.
To imagine a God being happy with such gratitude would mean accepting a shallow God who wants humanity to focus on the contrasting elements of society and be happy that they aren’t on the other side of it. God cannot be this shallow, so there must be something wrong with our definition.
So, how do we fix it? We need to start with the fundamental premise: why is there a need for gratitude? There are three main reasons for which we need gratitude — to control greed among people, to discourage the masses from being envious of each other, and to discover happiness from what they have.
All of these problems can be solved by asking and answering two questions: what do you need? And why do you need it?
Greed is wanting more. But why? It could be that, in the mind of the greedy, society’s approval is twisted, originating from a lack of trust and the lack of respect they think they are owed. When we unpack this, we see that greed is often a misguided attempt to fill an emotional void — one that no amount of material gain can satisfy.
Envy stems from not knowing what you need and only focusing on why you need it. You hate the other person for having it, thinking you deserved it, instead of focusing on why the other person got it and not you. But when you understand your own desires clearly, envy dissolves. You realize that their success doesn’t take away from your own potential.
Happiness is a by-product of how you interpret your wants in your mind — not being satisfied with what little you have, but how it makes you feel. If there’s food on the table, enough savings in the bank, a controlled lifestyle, obedient kids, and a virtuous spouse, more money or material things cannot bring extra happiness. Once you realize this, happiness becomes natural. You begin to see that contentment isn’t about settling for less; it’s about recognizing that you already have enough.
All three reasons for which gratitude exists can be solved by internal probing through the right questions. You need to measure your progress and self-worth from where you started and where you have arrived, instead of where you should have arrived. Crawling is better than stalling, and walking is better than crawling, and so on. When you look back into your past to measure your progress, you’d either come out satisfied or disappointed to see wasted potential. In either case, the reflection offers clarity — and clarity leads to transformation.
You can use dissatisfaction as a motivator to fix the things you can to transform your life. At this point, you can either be grateful for mundane things like being alive or having a family around you, or you can commit yourself for a year to doing the things that could push you ahead in life.
Instead of suppressing your unresolved feelings in the name of gratitude by forcing yourself to be content, a much better strategy would be to probe yourself and transform. If there’s ever a devil, it must be in the mundane, in hypocrisy, and in suppression. God must be in the finer details of life that make life so beautiful.