The word “gratitude” is everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, emblazoned on mugs and motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” (usually jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days) brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.
I don’t want to seem, well, ungrateful. I’m a sceptical historian, but even I was persuaded to take up the gratitude habit, and when I remember to do it, I feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already in my life. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there’s the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?
In positive psychology circles, gratitude is generally defined as a wholly good thing, a spontaneous feeling of joyful appreciation. But back in 1923, the Harvard psychologist William McDougall believed gratitude – especially when directed towards another person, rather than an experience in the more abstract way of, say, being “grateful to be alive” – was far knottier. Yes, there was awe for the generosity of the human spirit, and tender feelings towards the person who had given up their time to help. But there were also quiet feelings of envy or embarrassment, a sense of the “superior power” of the helper and even what he called “negative self-feeling” but which today we’d call “low self‑esteem”. The Japanese expression arigata-meiwaku (literally: “annoying thanks”) gets to the heart of what he meant. Arigata-meiwaku is the feeling you have when someone insists on performing a favour for you, even though you don’t want them to, yet convention dictates you must be grateful anyway. There’s a reason all this feels so annoying: being grateful throws off the balance of power and increases feelings of obligation. There’s your benefactor at the top, bathed in a sunshine glow of generosity. And there’s you, at the bottom, doffing your cap.
It might seem mean-spirited to focus on how being thankful can also obligate, diminish or confuse us. But as #feelingblessed becomes a performative norm, these aspects of gratitude are even more important to understand, particularly for the role they play in how hierarchies are reinforced in our world. One of the bleakest tales about compulsory gratitude I have read is that of the 13-year-old orphan Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II. In 1893, he travelled from his home in British-occupied west Africa to take up a scholarship in a missionary school in Colwyn Bay, Wales. Less than six months after arriving, Eyo wrote to his patron, expressing thanks but begging to return home. The cold weather had made him sick, and he feared for his life, a reasonable worry since three west African pupils had already died at Colwyn Bay.
Eventually Eyo did secure a passage home, but not before the British press got hold of the story. In a vicious outpouring, they called him “spoilt” and “ungrateful”, a “little prince”, their language soaked in colonial assumptions about who ought to feel grateful to whom. Not much has changed. In The Ungrateful Refugee the author Dina Nayeri describes how, as a child refugee from Iran, she was expected to feel “so lucky, so humbled” to be in the United States. Only later did she understand how this “politics of gratitude” had subtly worked to transform her human right to refuge into a gift, one that had to be repaid by staying submissive and uncomplaining, being a “good immigrant” who stayed in her lane.
This connection between power and the demand for gratitude reaches into many parts of life. When people in high-power positions are made to feel insecure, for instance by having their failings pointed out, they commonly berate those who they perceive as inferior to them for being ungrateful. It was hard not to think of this as Donald Trump and JD Vance took Volodymyr Zelenskyy to task for failing to show sufficient gratitude earlier this year (or in 2023, when then-defence UK secretary, Ben Wallace, made a similar demand).
These costs are part of what psychologists now call the “dark side” of gratitude. One common objection to the gratitude movement is that it risks “toxic positivity”, encouraging people to ignore and repress more painful feelings. But feeling thankful can lead to other dangers, too. People are more likely to transgress moral codes on behalf of someone else if they feel grateful to them. Members of historically marginalised groups, including women and LGBTQ+ people, are less likely to complain about unfair treatment if they are reminded first how lucky they are compared with the past. And, as studies with women in abusive relationships show, when people have been gaslit into believing they cannot survive without an abuser, gratitude makes them feel obliged to stay. Should all those coffee cups and motivational posters come with caveats and health warnings?
This is a lot to think about while trying to jot down three things you feel grateful for so you can go to sleep. But I don’t think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The lessons of the latest research remind us that, like all emotions, feeling grateful is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Too little, and we risk being entitled or rude, alienating those who try to help us. Too much, and we may leave ourselves open to exploitation by amplifying the power someone holds over us. Context, as always, is everything.
There are strategies that help mitigate the risk. Focusing on circumstances rather than individuals (broadly, feeling grateful for or that, rather than grateful to) can side-step the issue of power. And if you notice a boss, parent, friend or partner expecting more gratitude than you want to give, you might ask yourself why. What might seem like ungrateful behaviour in our hierarchical world may really be an act of self-preservation, even one of political defiance (“How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” as Malcolm X said).
And sometimes gratitude does need to have an expiration date. When I spoke to the artist Brian Lobel, who experienced cancer as a young person and now creates rituals for others as they move into post-cancer life, he said “for all we feel thankful, sometimes we have to release ourselves from the burden, to move on with our lives”. Gratitude is important. But so is paying attention to its limits. Feeling better? You can thank me later.
Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian and author of Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships (Faber).
Further reading
The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri (Canongate, £10.99)
Smile Or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta, £10.99)
Toxic Positivity by Whitney Goodman (Orion, £14.99)