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Is there any better feeling than the first, like, two hours after you’ve been sick?
We forget how absolutely awful being sick is. When we’re healthy, and others tell us they’re sick, we act sad, and we say, “Oh I’m sorry, that sucks,” as we actually feel nothing inside. Then we put on our surgical masks, and hamster-run away from them in our plastic bubbles–or at least that’s the energy behind our reaction.
But every time we actually are sick, there’s this intense feeling of, first of all, “I forgot how fucking horrendous this is,” followed up quickly by, “I can’t wait for this to be over. I’ll be so, so, so happy when I can just feel normal again.”
Then when ‘normal’ returns, we are so, so happy. We don’t need riches, or laughter, or even the most basic human stimulation. We’re just so ecstatic that we can move again without vomiting up our cheerios.
More than anything, we are insanely grateful, and that overwhelming, relieving gratitude is the best feeling we’ll ever feel.
For like two hours, that is. After that, we forget that we were sick, and promptly return to getting pissed off that our phone battery is low, and that only the uggos on Tinder seem to respond to our corny e-pickup lines. We return to being spoiled, ungrateful assholes.
It would be nice if we could maintain that feeling of joy and gratitude for longer after we’re sick.
Actually scratch that. It would be nice if we could feel that intense post-illness gratitude without first having to go through the whole, you know, diarrhea thing.
Our Sucktitude at Gratitiude
Humans–especially in the first world–generally suck at gratitude. We always need to be surrounded by a storm of shit in life before we can appreciate a merely cloudy day. This is why people from third-world countries can enjoy simpler pleasures, and why we in the first world generally want simple pleasures to fuck off and get our Amazon package here more quickly.
I mean think of everything we take for granted every day.
Think of what a fucking tree is. Think of this giant, living contraption growing from the fucking floating rock you’re existing on, eating up sunlight, and shitting out existence. Think of somebody cutting that miracle down, and rearranging its parts to build a house that you live in. Think of the labor, and the societal genius that took place to create every God damn thing around you–from your phone, to your couch, to your car, to books, to your entire understanding of math.
Think of your friends, and how lucky you are to be able to regularly interact with people like this (by that, I mean people who also like watching Office reruns). Think of the massive base of knowledge you have because millenia of people discovered basically everything for you. Think of the insane perpetual motion machine known as your body that gives you consciousness, and allows you to feel good feelings, and to live a mostly pain-free life.*
*If this stuff doesn’t describe you, uh, my bad. Skip that part.
Think of how you have more access to the awesome parts of life than ever. You have more access to every person, place, thing, idea–every God damn noun you’ve ever enjoyed!
Think of how incredible life is. We are surrounded with mind-blowing, out-of-this-world, what-the-fuck-even-is-this wonders that should melt our faces every day.
And yet, no matter how much I point that out, your face doesn’t melt. Your face remains very much intact and frowny unless someone is pointing a phone at it, and you’re in front of a place with good lighting.
Think of that. Despite the literally infinite amount of awesome shit all around us, many of us are miserable. We’re anxious, we’re depressed, and we’re completely unable to find joy in the wonders of everything around us. Everything is instantly taken for granted, and disposed of, and nothing is ever fully appreciated, and as a result–shocker–we suck at feeling good.
Which is a really just a wordy way of saying we’re a bunch of spoiled fucking assholes.
So how can we suck less at gratitude, and stop hating our lives so much? The same way we suck less at anything: practice.
How to Practice an Emotion
You hear the phrase, “Practice gratitude” a lot, but what does that mean? How do you practice an emotion?
I think it’s about as simple as it sounds. You start by looking at something you should be grateful for like like your mom, or nachos (for many of us, our 1 and 2), and you focus on how great they are, and how fortunate you are to get to experience that thing. You do this several times a day.
But won’t that be awkward and unnatural, and really feel like it’s not working? Won’t it be impossible at first to just force that feeling upon on yourself?
Oh hell yes. It will be completely forced and unnatural at first–in the same way that it’s forced and unnatural to ask someone out, or ride a bike for the first time. Of course you’ll fail at this at first–just as you’ll end up falling off the bike at first, or mentioning your weird love of feet to someone you’re trying to date within the first 10 seconds of talking to them.
In other words, when you first try to be practice gratitude, you’ll say something to yourself like, “I am really lucky to have Todd in my life. He brings me joy with his dry wit, and I’m grateful for when he gives me the ride to my water aerobics I so dearly need,” and then you’ll wait for that gratitude emotion to kick in.
But inside, you’ll still feel, well, dead. You’ll feel absolutely nothing for Todd. You’ll just be some miserable idiot that said a sentence to themselves.
So yes, at first, practicing gratitude will straight up will not work. That’s okay. That’s why it’s practice, and why you have to do it over and over. The more you force yourself into the grateful, big picture perspective, the more it (very slowly) starts to become a part of you, and the more you’re able to actually feel a little less dead in the soul.
So fake it till you make it. Express statements of gratitude again and again. Every time you get a case of the grumpies, remind yourself how this life we’re living is the fuckin’ tits, even when you feel properly dead inside.
Get into the habit of doing this over and over, and eventually these ideas will become a part of you. The notion that you can fully appreciate people around you, or a sunny day, or your grandma’s walnut cookies will become ingrained in your soul, and eventually, you’ll start to actually not hate everything, and instead, feel grateful.
This is why–especially at first–you need to seek out gratitude every single day. It’s not because you need a dose of gratitude every day. It’s because gratitude is fucking unnatural. We’re predisposed to being spoiled assholes who always need things to get better, because misery pushes humanity forward.
We have to practice not sucking at gratitude, so that when we need it, it’s there. But with that said….
When Is It Too Much Gratitude?
Is there such thing as appreciating life too much, and taking too much time to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak?
Yes, of course. Too much of anything sucks, and to the really grateful, joyous yahoos of the world, we get it: sunflowers smell like sunflowers, and ooo, isn’t that magical?
If, instead of looking ahead in life, and trying to experience and accomplish more, you’re just always enjoying what’s in front of you, and you’re like, “Wow, bricks!” then you’ll never follow ambitions, or seek out anything new in life, and that sucks.
You need both gratitude for what you have, and the feeling that you need more so that you make progress in life. You shouldn’t be happy with a situation that sucks for anyone, and you shouldn’t focus on the positive in an overwhelmingly negative situation, because then you won’t fix negative things. You’ll just keep telling yourself they aren’t negative and telling poor people their food stamps are magical, which is, you know, not helping.
This isn’t most of us. Most of us don’t fall under the “Wow, bricks!” umbrella. Most of us are a lot closer to a, “I can’t believe my episode of Guy’s Grocery Games didn’t record. This sucks. My life is fucking bullshit!” end of that spectrum–where we struggle to feel any gratitude.
But there’s a lesson to be learned from that hypothetical “Wow, bricks!” extreme, and how stupid it is, and how you should consume your gratitude.
Take Hits From Your Gratitude Pipe
For practice purposes, it’s good to turn to gratitude a lot early on when you’re still getting good at it, but once you’re able to feel it, it’s important to not overdo it. Gratitude isn’t supposed to be what you’re constantly feeling every second you’re alive. That would be weird, and people would think you were totally creepy, because you’d constantly be giving them massages and telling them how “miraculous” they are.
Once you get good at feeling it, gratitude is best used as a little treasure you keep in your pocket that you pull out when you need it. You’re feeling sad, or angry, or you realize that you’ve been a spoiled bitch as of late, and you take a hit from your gratitude pipe. It brings you that jolt of joy and that bigger perspective when you really need it just because you’re fully appreciating things for what they are.
How to Balance Your Gratitude
So the solution there, I believe, is this: It’s good to go through a decent chunk of life as the ungrateful, unsatisfied pieces of shit that we naturally are. This is fine. This makes us want more, demand better from those around us, and feel bitter that we don’t have more shit than we currently do.
We do this until it ceases to be productive. When this approach puts us into a mood that is negative to the point of being distracting or debilitating, we turn to the teat of gratitude, and we suckle from it until we’re burping joy and rainbows. We notice, “Oh shit, I’m feeling anxious and crabby, and it’s making me an unproductive asshole” then we meditate, we ponder the wonderful world around us, listen to Louis Armstrong, and we thank our lucky God damn stars.
This is one way that you can actually be a little happier. It’s how you can stop treating the good things in your life like shit. It’s how you can see the world more accurately for the pretty awesome place that it is.
So find your balance between thinking your world sucks and needs to be improved, and the perspective that this is an incredible world full of wonder. Find your moments of gratitude. Force the square peg that is your spoiled, ungrateful brain into the round hole of gratitude until its edges are rubbed off, and it fits, and it’s smokeable for you.
And eventually, when you practice a ton and get really good at it, you won’t need to vomit up a lung to feel better ever again.
