Phew. It’s been a minute. My family, you see, has been really going through it. Things aren’t bad per se. But we’re reeling and adjusting.
These things aren’t quite mine to write about—at least not yet, not fully—but I’ve been thinking a lot in a general way about gratitude. Specifically, who needs it? Who pays for it? Cui Bono?
Let me back up. Gratitude can be a fine thing; an important thing; a necessary thing. I’ve written in this space before about how grateful I am for so much, most of all my beautiful family.
But gratitude has a dark side, and I think we need to talk about it. How often is our gratitude, or at least the ways we express it, a way of telling others that they’re our worst-case scenario? When does gratitude read as fear and pity with a side of downward comparison?
I had occasion to wonder this recently when listening to a Maintenance Phase Patreon episode—a truly chilling excursion into their inbox when they solicited testimony for an episode about workplace wellness programs. As many of you will be all too well aware, employers have a legal loophole that allows them to give bonuses to “healthy” employees worth as much as 30% of the cost of their health insurance. In practice, this means penalizing people whose bodies don’t conform to standard health metrics, for example in being fatter than the truly heinous BMI charts dictate we should be.
One of the creepiest additional practices the hosts Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon documented surrounded mental health. Tips given by employers to employees to take deep breaths or “say no” more often, instead of, you know, creating a less noxious and draconian work environment. What a way to shrug off responsibility and victim-blame employees when their stress levels rise or they need a mental health day because of dreadful employment conditions or toxic co-workers or a culture of workaholism.
But perhaps the creepiest of all of these practices was asking overworked, underpaid nurses to spend part of their morning meeting listing three things they were grateful for—and this during a bid to improve workplace conditions. “I’m grateful it’s not even worse,” seemed to be the thinking this little exercise was designed to solicit.
Of course, the easy lesson to take from this is that gratitude shouldn’t be enforced or mandated as a public performance—least of all by your employer. But there are less obvious lessons worth exploring here too, to do with the conditions under which gratitude, much like positivity, can curdle into something toxic. Gratitude can be an invitation to, even a pretext for, comparing ourselves and our situation with others, in what psychologists term a “downward social comparison.” We look at others whom we deem to be less fortunate, and think at least it’s not that bad. Often without any real knowledge of, or interest in, what they’re actually going through.
There are several problems with this mode of thinking. One, it can be insensitive to others when expressed, well, insensitively. I’m not saying you can’t quite appropriately be grateful for your health or your happiness, and even say it to friends and family, or proclaim it on social media. But saying you’re grateful not to be sick or disabled or unemployed or what-have-you errs into tricky territory in how that may read to those living with these challenges.
Two, gratitude can be an invitation to hierarchical thinking of a kind we ought to jettison. As someone who has learned a lot from both the body positivity movement, and the disability pride movement, this again gets delicate. “I’m grateful my body works!” is an understandable sentiment for those coming to grips with supposed aesthetic flaws that don’t undermine your use of your body one iota. But it’s important that the popular and in many ways promising idea that our bodies are not ornaments but instruments doesn’t veer into ableism—inadvertently writing off or downranking those whose bodies aren’t smoothly functioning instruments. Some people, even in a perfectly functioning social world, would still be subject to what disability activists call impairments which make them not one whit less valuable—and often, no less happy. How to be grateful for our bodies, even inwardly, in a way that’s not steeped in ableism is a non-trivial problem, and one I continue to grapple with.
And then there’s fatphobia, and the way it has supported a whole industry of gratitude porn designed to exploit our relief that, sure, we may be fat, but at least we’re not that fat. Sure, we may eat poorly, but at least not that poorly. The latest entry in this burgeoning genre—from the misery-mongering My 600lb Life to the aspirational My Biggest Loser—is, of course, The Whale. An exercise in faux empathy, it’s really just a two-hour long excuse to gawk at Hollywood’s idea of a very fat, 600lb body, courtesy of Brendan Fraser in a fat suit. He struggles to move around his apartment and, in the opening scene, masturbate to gay porn, in a particularly prurient and intrusive moment. He is the trope of a fat person eating himself to death because of his emotional problems and some kind of untreated “eating addiction.” The whole thing is an invitation to horror and, yes, a sense of gratitude that allows us to feel good about our comparatively small and obedient bodies, in the face of his naked waywardness and unboundedness.
Well, fuck that.
I recently read a thoughtful piece on the film by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker, who noted that, faced with the criticism of fatphobia, the playwright and screenwriter Samuel Hunter pointed to a period of binge eating and rapid weight gain in his own life that made him wonder who—or what—he was becoming. (He lost the weight slowly over the decade before the play debuted in 2012.) Though designed to head off the criticism and position the work as more authentic, I found myself even more depressed and dispirited by that backstory. Somewhat fat and formerly fat people can be the most fatphobic, as we sit with unprocessed emotions and battle the specter of what our bodies were and quite likely will become (again) in the future, if and when we gain weight. As Schulman put it: “Charlie’s obesity grew out of Hunter’s lived experience, but also out of worst-case speculation.” “What would happen to me if I hadn’t turned that corner?” Hunter wondered out loud to Schulman. “I was looking at the way I was gaining weight back then and how rapidly it was happening—I was, like, “This could have been me.”” But it wasn’t, and that matters.
As Aubrey Gordon notes in her tour de force and NYT bestselling recent book, You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People, disturbing studies suggest that downward body comparison is very much a thing, at least among thin white women. In a 2014 study, the researchers proposed that, for such women who engaged in “body surveillance” and who hold negative stereotypes about fat people, “downward appearance comparison may create a contrast between themselves and the [fat] people whom they denigrate, thus improving body dissatisfaction.” That is, these women compared themselves to fatter people, and comforted themselves in the process, be it wittingly or unwittingly. As Gordon summarizes: “If the researchers’ assertion holds true, these thin white women were willing to demonize and reject fat people in order to soothe their own negative self-image.” Gratitude for thinness is real; and dangerous; and obnoxious.
Finally, gratitude can have the obvious downside of making us less likely to fight for everyone who needs fighting for in this world. If I’m grateful for my body as it is, will I fight for all bodies to have equitable access to all spaces they’re entitled to access? (Or will I pressure other people to feel grateful for the access to which they are perfectly entitled?) There’s nothing strictly speaking incompatible about the psychological attitude of gratitude for what one has and the political action of fighting for what others don’t. But we need to be on our guard for the kind of complacency that gratitude as an endpoint might lead to—just as we need to be on our guard for hubris and hierarchical thinking under the guise of gratitude.
Famously, comparison is the thief of joy. I wonder if gratitude can be the enemy of solidarity.
“Famously, comparison is the thief of joy. I wonder if gratitude can be the enemy of solidarity.” All of it resonated with me, but, gratitude as the enemy of solidarity! THAT!
This was really interesting, thank you! I sometimes struggle with forced gratitude as a twin to toxic positivity. I don't want to write in a gratitude journal every day. Some days just suck and I want to be honest about the fact that they suck and not have to look for the bright spot or the good in the moment.