Gratitude Isn’t About Pretending Everything’s Fine
Every year, right around Thanksgiving, the internet fills up with the same advice: make a gratitude list, count your blessings, notice the good things. And every year, I feel a mix of appreciation and quiet resistance.
It’s not that I don’t believe in gratitude. I absolutely do. I know, logically, that it helps ground us, lower stress, improve mood, and strengthen relationships. But I’ve also spent enough time trying to feel grateful on command to know that it doesn’t always work like that.
Some years, gratitude comes easily. You notice the beauty in the small things: the smell of coffee in the morning, the sound of laughter from the next room, the comfort of familiar routines. Other years, it feels forced, like you’re trying to convince yourself everything’s fine when it isn’t.
If I’m honest, that second experience is far more familiar to me.
I am thankful for the life I have. I really am. But I often catch myself fretting over what I haven’t done yet, the goals I haven’t hit, the projects I thought I’d have finished by now. I can look around and see abundance, and still feel anxious about whether I’ve done enough, built enough, been enough.
And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
It’s hard to slow down and appreciate what is when your mind is always scanning the horizon for what’s next. Gratitude asks you to pause. Anxiety tells you to move. The two don’t always coexist comfortably.
That’s why, for me, Thanksgiving isn’t about listing everything that’s great in life. It’s about remembering what gratitude actually is and what it isn’t.
Because gratitude isn’t about pretending everything’s fine. It’s about noticing what’s still steady and good, even when things feel uncertain. It’s about presence, not perfection.
Gratitude Isn’t About Denial: It’s About Perspective
There’s a version of gratitude that’s become almost performative in the social media age. You know the one: the highlight-reel posts, the endless “blessed” captions, the insistence that gratitude fixes everything if you just focus hard enough on it.
That kind of messaging can leave you feeling like you’re failing at gratitude if you don’t wake up every morning radiating joy. It also has a way of erasing the harder parts of life, as if acknowledging struggle somehow cancels out thankfulness.
You can see the same thing happening in the way people now say “I appreciate you.” I like the sentiment behind it. At its best, it’s warm, sincere, and human. But somewhere along the way it became a trend, something we say to tick the box of being “grateful” rather than taking a real second to feel appreciation for another person.
Gratitude isn’t a hashtag or a polite catchphrase. It’s a moment of awareness. When someone genuinely appreciates you, you can feel it. It lands differently. It has weight. That’s the difference between practising gratitude and performing it. One deepens connection; the other skims the surface.
John F. Kennedy once reminded us:
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
That line captures something I think we’ve lost sight of. Gratitude isn’t just what we say. It’s how we show up for others, how we act, how we carry ourselves.
Because gratitude, when it’s real, doesn’t deny difficulty. It gives it context.
It’s entirely possible to feel overwhelmed, disappointed, or scared, and still find small moments of appreciation tucked inside those experiences. The gratitude doesn’t replace the pain; it sits beside it.
Think about training. If you’ve ever pushed through a tough workout, you know discomfort isn’t a sign something’s gone wrong. It’s part of the process. You might hate it in the moment, but part of you also recognises what it’s doing for you. That’s perspective. Gratitude works the same way.
It isn’t blind optimism. It’s the ability to zoom out far enough to see that even when something feels hard, it’s not the whole story.
When life gets messy, and it always does, gratitude reminds you that meaning and hardship can share the same space. It softens the edges of frustration. It doesn’t erase the struggle, but it keeps it from swallowing everything else.
That’s why I’ve learned to distrust any version of gratitude that feels like an emotional filter. Real gratitude doesn’t need to be shiny. Sometimes it’s quiet, raw, and incomplete. And that’s perfectly fine.
Gratitude Works Best When Life Feels Hard
Here’s the paradox: gratitude is easiest to talk about when life is good, and most powerful when it isn’t.
When everything’s running smoothly, gratitude feels like decoration, a nice extra. When life throws you off balance, it becomes an anchor.
In difficult seasons, gratitude is often less about joy and more about stability. It’s the small, steady voice that says, “Yes, this is tough… and yet, not everything is.”
I can think of plenty of times when things in my own life felt heavy, financially, professionally, or personally, and yet there’d be these tiny flashes of perspective that changed the tone of the whole day. A message from a client who finally broke through a plateau. A quiet dinner with friends. The rhythm of a run that just felt right.
Those moments didn’t fix anything. But they reminded me that not all was lost. Gratitude, in those times, wasn’t about being happy. It was about remembering what still mattered.
That’s the real value of gratitude when life feels hard. It doesn’t magically erase problems, but it keeps you from collapsing inward. It widens the frame.
As actor and comedian Will Arnett puts it:
“I am happy because I'm grateful. I choose to be grateful. That gratitude allows me to be happy.”
It’s simple but profound. Gratitude isn’t an outcome of happiness; it’s a cause of it. Choosing to look for what’s still good creates the conditions for feeling better, not the other way around.
And that’s something science has backed up for years: gratitude shifts our focus from scarcity to sufficiency, from what’s wrong to what’s still right. It activates neural pathways associated with safety and connection, pulling us out of the endless loop of “not enough.”
It doesn’t mean you have to like every situation. It just means you can hold two truths at once: that life is challenging, and that there are still things, people, moments, and opportunities worth being thankful for within it.
You don’t have to force yourself to find silver linings. Sometimes it’s enough simply to say, “This part’s hard… but I’m grateful I’m still here to face it.”
Gratitude as a Practice, Not a Personality Trait
Some people seem naturally grateful. They notice beauty everywhere, thank everyone for everything, and somehow keep their optimism even when things go sideways. I’ve envied that at times because it looks effortless.
But for most of us, gratitude isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice.
Like training or nutrition, it’s something you build through repetition. And if you stop practising, you lose the sharpness.
We tend to imagine gratitude as a spontaneous emotion, a rush of warmth when something good happens. But most of the time, it’s a deliberate shift in attention. You don’t wait to feel grateful; you choose to notice.
That choice might look simple, but it’s an act of mental resistance against everything that pulls your focus away: comparison, ambition, stress, and self-criticism.
When I’m honest with myself, I know I rarely pause long enough to appreciate what’s already been built. My instinct is always to move on to the next thing. Gratitude, for me, has to be intentional, a conscious decision to stop and look around.
It’s like strength training for the mind. You don’t get stronger by lifting once. You get stronger by showing up consistently, even on days you don’t feel like it. Gratitude works the same way. The small daily reps matter more than the occasional grand gesture.
That might mean taking thirty seconds at the end of the day to name one thing that made it a little better. It might mean quietly thanking someone who made your day easier. It might even mean acknowledging your own effort: I didn’t want to, but I still showed up.
You don’t have to force positivity. You just have to practise noticing.
Over time, that practice creates a subtle shift. You start to see moments of goodness without searching for them. You start to feel less hurried, less reactive. You begin to realise that gratitude isn’t about waiting for perfect circumstances. It’s about training your focus to catch the light when it passes.
The Discipline of Gratitude
If practice is how you build the skill, discipline is how you sustain it.
There’s a quiet strength in choosing gratitude, especially when it doesn’t come naturally. It takes effort to be present, to pay attention, to stay grounded in what is instead of obsessing over what isn’t.
That’s what gratitude as discipline really means: anchoring yourself in the now.
Our minds love to sprint ahead. We chase outcomes, replay mistakes, worry about what’s next. Gratitude interrupts that race. It says, look here, this moment is happening now.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan or dream big. It means you can hold both: appreciation for where you are and ambition for where you’re going. Gratitude gives you the footing to move forward from.
When I consciously practise gratitude, even for a few minutes, it pulls me back to the present. It reminds me that the moments I’ll one day miss are the ones happening quietly right now: the morning coffee before the rush, the music in the gym between sets, the shared laughter with clients at the end of a session.
Brother David Steindl-Rast says:
“The root of joy is gratefulness. It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”
Those are the moments that bring lightness. The ordinary ones we overlook until time and distance remind us how extraordinary they were.
And sometimes gratitude extends backwards as well. It’s the fond remembrance of the things that brought you here: the early mentors, the risks that paid off, even the mistakes that became lessons. Looking back with appreciation grounds you just as much as noticing what’s in front of you.
This is why I often tell clients (and remind myself) that discipline isn’t always about intensity. It’s about attention. Gratitude, practised with that same steadiness, creates presence. It’s what lets you look around your life and realise you’re already living parts of what you once hoped for.
Finding Balance: Grateful, but Still Growing
Here’s where gratitude often gets misunderstood. People think it means being satisfied, as if gratitude and ambition can’t coexist.
But they can, and they should.
Being grateful doesn’t mean you stop wanting to improve. It means you stop measuring your worth by your progress alone.
I’ve wrestled with this tension for years. I can list the things I’m thankful for, health, community, meaningful work, and still feel that gnawing urge to do more. Sometimes that drive pushes me forward. Other times it steals the joy from what’s already here.
The balance lies somewhere in between.
Gratitude grounds you. Ambition pulls you forward. Without gratitude, you burn out chasing the next milestone. Without ambition, you stagnate. Together, they create movement with meaning.
As the poet Rumi put it:
“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”
So maybe the goal isn’t to “arrive” at gratitude, but to carry it with you as you go.
It reminds me of something we talked about in How To Become The Kind Of Person Who…: that self-love doesn’t mean standing still, and that accepting yourself doesn’t mean you’ve given up the permission to change.
Gratitude works much the same way. You can be fully thankful for the now, and still want more from the future. You can love what is, without closing the door on what could be.
When I remember that, the anxiety eases a little. The need to control outcomes softens. Gratitude reminds me that impact isn’t measured only by scale, but by sincerity, by the moments of real connection and the lives quietly improved along the way.
You can be deeply thankful for where you are and still excited about what’s next. Gratitude isn’t the opposite of growth. It’s the ground it grows from.
The Quiet Practice
So here we are, Thanksgiving again. The season of full plates, full schedules, and (hopefully) full hearts.
If you’re feeling grateful, wonderful. Savour that. But if you’re not, don’t beat yourself up for it. Gratitude isn’t a moral obligation. It’s an invitation.
Maybe this year, it’s enough to notice something small. A calm moment in a busy week. A meal shared with people who matter. A bit of progress you almost overlooked.
You don’t need a gratitude list taped to the fridge. You just need to look up once in a while and see what’s already here.
And if the world still feels noisy, uncertain, or heavy, as it often does, that’s fine too. Gratitude doesn’t erase those realities. It just reminds you that amidst all of it, there are still things worth holding on to.
Hip-hop legend, Gza (of Wu-Tang Clan fame), once advised people to:
“Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.”
That’s what I’ll be practising this week: a quieter, simpler kind of gratitude. One that doesn’t pretend everything’s fine, but recognises that even when life is messy and imperfect, there’s still beauty in the mix.
So wherever you are, whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving or simply taking a breath before another Monday begins, I hope you can find a moment, however small, to pause.
Because gratitude isn’t about ignoring what’s hard. It’s about remembering what’s still good. And that’s something worth practising all year long.