#liveplayfully01: Why I choose to keep an ideas book rather than a gratitude journal
Good advice isn't always good advice for you
There is a clip circulating online of Drew Barrymore interviewing Hugh Grant. She asks him if he has a gratitude journal and without missing a beat he quips. ‘don’t be absurd’. The audience laughs. As did I and I noticed I felt quite a lot of gratitude for the gratitude journal diss. With my curiosity peaked, I strayed into the place you really should not, the comments. To my surprise, I found I was not alone. One person declared that the trending obsession with being grateful for every tiny thing, is bordering on toxic positivity. Another comment was from a therapist who reported that her clients have no issue with gratitude but had in fact they had crossed over into some excessive gratitude state, where they felt undeserving and unable to enjoy and accept the good parts of their life. Someone else pointed simply that it is possible for a person to be aware and grateful without writing it down. This was all rather insightful for me, and I must say, quite relatable.
I wasn’t aware I was harbouring some kind of unconscious guilt by not penning my gratitude regularly, but it turns out that maybe I had been. The swell of well-being, self-care and mental health tips that have floated past my eyes and ears the last few years seem to converge in a conclusive point: be grateful. I’ve never spent so much time thinking or saying out loud how grateful I am since covid. Something happened during that time in western culture where gratitude shifted from something a person carried with them, to something that is repeated out loud over and over and put into a practice like the journal, lest we suddenly lose it in the night whilst we’re asleep.
This essay is not a defamation post about gratitude journals, which have nothing but wholesome, grounding intentions and are no doubt are making a positive to many who partake. It has got me thinking however, about how good advice isn’t always good advice for you. Practices of exploring self-awareness, connecting to our intuition and proactively working on our mindset are arguably becoming more generic. Off the shelf solutions and box ticking exercises are added to the things we must do if we are to be considered a nice person. A balanced person. A good person. A grateful person.
It made me think about a conversation I had once with a friend who was going through a really hard time. This situation was very challenging and there were no easy solutions. Once we’d waded through the details, like a neat bit of punctation she went ahead and dismissed the whole thing leaning into gratitude and pointing out a worst situation. Perspective is matters, but this was uncomfortable bordering on dangerous. The gratitude was being used as a reason to wipe out the issue, perhaps this is what the commenter who spoke about the risk of a bias to gratitude at all times meant.
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