Gratitude List? I'll give you a gratitude list

You know those gratitude diaries? Page after page of lists upon lists of things we’re soooooo thankful for! Forget that. The human brain doesn’t work like that. Imagine if you were told to be content with all the things you’d already learned. Do you think you could suppress your own innate human curiosity by just re-reading only the books and articles and thought pieces you had already read? Sounds like torture to me. In much the same way, when we are confronted with our own innate human desire for some new interesting experience, some new interesting thing, we would ideally not waste our creativity on being redundantly grateful for all the existing good in our lives. Endless gratitude exercises could also be a very powerful indicator of unhappiness and dissatisfaction: “me thinks the lady doth protest too much and there's something she's very very unthankful for" is what comes to mind when I see that type of gratuitously thankful instagram post. (Another possibility is that the person has been told in the past that they are ungrateful and are now compelled to declare how thankful they are to anyone in earshot.)

That being said, gratitude is still an amazingly effective way to put life in perspective, and put it in perspective fast. Did you wake up tired? Thank goodness you woke up. It's nice not being in a coma. Were you up all night because your neighbors were tending to a crying baby from dusk till dawn? Baby shrieks are loud and annoying, right? Yes, so are the sounds of bombs going off. Does your foot hurt from stubbing your toe? That sucks, I hope you feel better soon. It’s nice having feet though, right? No one cut them off while making a torture porn livestream on the dark web. And so on. And so forth.

So let’s create a new kind of gratitude list and give thanks for the ABSENCE of unpleasant situations in our life. I’ll start! I’m so thankful I am not unemployed, that I am not paralyzed, that I am not being diapered, force-fed, or sleep deprived in a captivity-based scenario, that I am not stuck in an unhappy marriage, that no one is cheating on me, that I do not have anyone in my life actively attempting to gaslight, deceive, or hurt me, and that I do not live in a war zone or a war-torn country.

This is measuring joy in time spent in the absence of pain. Literally in minutes spent not feeling pain. Consider the fact that 6 hours (360 minutes!) of sleep spent in a warm cocoon of blankets, sans nightmares/night terrors, is 6 hours spent in a bed-cocoon of bliss (joy!).

Now, it’s likely that we have goals we want to achieve and we predict our lives will be “better” once we reach them. Maybe! I certainly hope so. This won’t change the fact that happiness is an emotion, and because it is a feeling, and feelings last for a finite period of time until replaced by another emotion, it can be measured in minutes. You could even switch from the emotion joy to the emotion curiosity while reading an article that piques your interest. I posit that if the idea you’re thinking about and reflecting upon leads you to feel inspired, motivated, or similarly uplifted, then you remain in a state of feeling joy because you remain emotionally in a state devoid of pain.

I wrote a bucket list in 2014 and one of the items I added was: go on a vacation to a Club Med resort.

In 2020, I achieved this goal and spent nearly a week (10,080 minutes) in the absence of pain in Cancun, Mexico. Not every minute was spent in relaxation and peace. I was nervous and excited while horseback riding, alert and aware of the location of my passport while making the trip from airport to airport, and actually sad when I observed the poverty on the streets outside my tour bus window on the way to the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá. The observation of poverty which led me to feeling sadness was the only number of minutes during the trip in which I was not also in a state of joy. The key to resolving this type of empathy-based sadness (i.e. co-experiencing sadness someone else is feeling, not sadness from an event in our own life) is to ask, what action can I take to make this situation better? “There’s nothing I can do” is the lie that locks people into hopelessness and despair. Or, that sucks people into the vortex of depression which I posit is an ongoing conflict between the mind’s perception that we should feel one way (content! thankful! happy! grateful to be alive!) and the awareness that we do not actually feel this way. Then, within that mental boxing ring is the misperception (i.e. a programmed belief, usually planted into our minds by our first governors — our parents) that there is no action that can be taken. And, that that is ok! There’s nothing you can do, so don’t try! Don’t even try. Many of us had guardians who at an early age not only gave us permission not to care but a command statement not to (usually with the best intention of protecting us from the pain and frustration of disappointment -- we'll cover how to increase our pain tolerance as the antidote in a moment). This attitude renders Life itself a master puppeteer who not only controls our emotions but our subsequent paralysis/inaction when we feel bad! To say nothing of the obedient surrender to the machinations of powerful decision makers who profit when we spend money on things and drugs to numb or reduce this sense of overwhelming insignificance.

Possible Solution: Voting with our dollars, our time, and our ballots in ways that do not conflict with our moral compass (your conscience!! you non-psychopath, you!). We vote in three ways, first with our actual ballot at the polls; second, with our dollars, with which we vote affirmatively for all the laws and policies of the government of the country the product is manufactured in when we buy it; and third, with our time, the minutes and hours we spend assenting to the practices of the companies who create our news, our television, our social media platforms, our music, and our books, by spending that time reading/watching/listening to/interacting on it.

Once we are proactively voting with our dollars, our minutes, and our ballots for local, national and global policies that are morally consistent with our values, we are able to answer that internal plaintiff cry “what can I do?” with “I’m already actively doing it” instead of with “nothing -- it’s just the way it is.”

It is the way it is. Right now. Not forever. Not if you can help it. You object to abuse of power by authority regularly. You protest injustice daily: every time you vote with your minutes, dollars (or Bitcoin or whichever currency) and your ballot. Oh, it only matters who counts the votes? Then why aren’t you an election observer? Oh, everyone in Congress is corrupt? Then why don’t you run for office? Because everyone who gets in and actually starts to make a difference gets assassinated?

Ok. That I can’t argue with.

Consider this though. You have to die anyway. You will die. You are gonna die. All of the people who were put to (public) death as punishment for objecting to abuse of power by authority left the world a better place than it was before they were born. Their legacy was, quite literally, making the world less of a shit hole than it was when they got here. I do congratulate you, dear reader, for having an intact survival instinct that compels you to avoid increasing the likelihood of your death. Just know that it’s already 100% likely. I’d rather die instantly in a car accident or plane crash or by a sniper rifle than from cancer. Just saying.

In the mean time, we can spend our minutes and dollars supporting brave people who are trying to make a difference and indeed may be killed for it. They were going to die anyway, eventually. The difference between us and them is their moral compass compelled them to take action despite the risk. They may have adopted a zero tolerance policy for weakness in themselves. They felt the fear and took the risk despite knowing the outcome can’t be controlled. That they could only control their own personal effort and action toward the outcome they desire.

And we can be grateful for all the good, and the absence of so much bad, and take action to make our own lives better and the world less of a shit hole than when we got here.

Many readers know that I pray to God every day for both world joy and world peace (and whatever miraculous and logical interventions attaining these goals would require). I often share these prayers on Twitter. There is another prayer I have used with great success that I hope will benefit you as well, if you are a person who prays. Oftentimes in life, we could find ourselves in a scenario where we actually cannot change the circumstances. I posit that we would ideally continue to take action daily to TRY to. But if those attempts fail, one way to strengthen our perseverance is to ask God to increase our pain tolerance. Maybe you have experienced the pain of rejection: for example, repeatedly applying for or interviewing for jobs but just not getting hired. May I suggest you pray, “God, if you cannot stop this pain, could you please increase my pain tolerance.”

Read more about how to adopt a zero tolerance policy for weakness in yourself here

Read more on voting with our minutes here

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