Should you feel grateful?

what history teaches us about the dangers of the gratitude industrial complex

Last week, in urgent need of somewhere to write that wasn’t a cluttered table surrounded by moving boxes, I joined a local co-working space. It is painted pink and attached to a yoga and wellness studio. It was a bit of a panic buy, if I am honest. There are a lot of leaflets and posters on the wall of people doing sun salutations on beaches. One word appears often: gratitude.

It feels mealy-mouthed to question the value of being grateful. Perhaps that is why I have found writing this post oddly difficult. I still remember reading Oliver Burkeman’s final column in The Guardian. He spent more than a decade self-experimenting with self-improvement techniques, and one that actually worked was writing a gratitude journal. Diligently, I took up the habit, noting three things each night. I still try to (I have plenty to be thankful for). And it works, short circuiting the petty niggles and simmering resentments of everyday life before they mount up.

But gratitude is not an uncomplicated feeling. Its silken promise of moral superiority and calm is shot through with other dynamics: cruelty, control, power. Here is a glimpse into the history of gratitude that illuminates what I mean. In 1893, a young orphaned boy named Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II travelled from West Africa to Colwyn Bay, Wales. He had been awarded a scholarship to a missionary school there. Yet almost immediately, he fell sick, unused to the cold and the inhospitable regimes of British boarding school life. He learnt that his predecessors at the school, other scholarship boys from West Africa, had also fallen ill. Some had even died. Naturally frightened, he begged to go home. The British tabloid press got hold of the story, and responded with an outpouring of scorn and vitriole of astonishing, but predictable cruelty. They called him ‘spoilt’. They said he was ‘ungrateful’.

I remember when I first read about this shocking episode, in an article I was reviewing. It was a powerful illustration of the way emotions can be weaponised, mobilised for political ends. Gratitude is an important example of how emotions can be used to punish people and keep them in their place, since it so clearly implies a hierarchy of power. The grateful become indebted. The recipient of their thanks enjoy the higher status that comes with appearing to be generous, and gets to hoard the long-term expectation that the person will be loyal, and will acquiesce (or else: the threat of being labelled ‘ungrateful’). And the burdens of the gratitude complex land unequally in societies where some people are expected to be more grateful than others.

The colonial project traded off gratitude, and Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II was a victim of this. ‘The Negro in general is a born slave’ wrote Sir Harry Johnson, one of the architects of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Johnson and many like him, believed colonised people ought to be grateful to Europeans for ‘civilising’ them. Moreover, since colonised people, Africans in particular, were considered naturally ‘inferior’ and ‘servile’, gratitude was thought to come more easily to them. Africans, wrotes Johnson, had a ‘short memory for cruelty and eagerness to please’ and an ‘easily aroused gratitude for kindness’. In a world like this, what looked or even felt like ‘ingratitude’ may have been a necessary first step in asserting your right to self-determination.

I remember being shocked when I read about Eyo, but I also recognised the dynamic. Haven’t we all been at the receiving end of some accusation of being ‘ungrateful’ when we do not behave in the way a parent/teacher/friend/boss requires us to. Some of us are able to outgrow these humiliating experiences as we get older, or see them for what they are: a transparent attempt at coercion. For some, the obligation to show gratitude can haunt them for a lifetime.

In her viral 2017 essay (and subsequent book) ‘The Ungrateful Refugee’, Dina Nayeri described how as an Iranian refugee in America, she always knew she ought to be grateful. ‘But what America did was a basic human obligation’ she writes. ‘It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories’. Gratitude is part of the glistening sugar-glaze. Gratitude could be used to punish, but it could also be used to distract. Defaulting to talk of emotions, especially ‘positive’ ones like gratitude, can make it easier to turn a a blind eye to discrimination and poverty, and can obscure the realities of homesickness and other struggles. And of course, talk of ‘gratitude’ can make an immigrant palatable because she seems more lowly and indebted. The demand for gratitude insists something is a privilege and a gift, when really it is a right.

Ingratitude, then, is a form of defiance. I remember laughing at the pitch-perfect social media retorts by some Ukrainians that circulated after then- UK defence secretary Ben Wallace said ‘people want to see a bit of gratitude’ for British assistance to Ukraine in the war against Russia. If you haven’t seen them, check out the brilliantly ironic gifs, with Wallace’s face surrounded by roses and petals and the message ‘Thank You Ben Wallace!’. The demand for gratitude is always vile, and yet this same demand is made in so many subterranean ways – from parents to their children, bosses and employees, friends and partners, a way of trying to lock people into a cycle of guilt and subordination.

I still jot down, or try to, things I am grateful for, especially when life starts spiralling. In fact, taking a moment to be thankful is helping me right now, amid the chaos of moving. But gratitude is not just the panacea that soothes. Like all emotions, gratitude is bigger, more dangerous and more unruly than this. There are more stories to tell about gratitude, many spiky, many critical, many subversive. Sometimes gratitude helps. And sometimes, feeling ungrateful is the first step to rebellion.

Further reading:

I have been re-reading Pragya Agarwal’s latest book Hysterical. It’s really smart on how the emotions of women and people from the global majority are mobilised against them. Highly recommended!