We should make evident our gratitude by unrestrained expressions of emotion, and we should express these feelings everywhere. —Seneca, On Benefits, II.22.1.
Twenty years ago this winter, a high-school classmate talked me into driving him a thousand miles to spend our holidays interviewing survivors of one of the most devastating hurricanes of the 21st century. Five months prior, hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast had hit each other with all the force of a colliding pair of galaxies—but driving through eastern New Orleans and coastal Mississippi you’d think it had just happened in the past week. Flattened and broken loblolly forests, collapsed and mud-caked homes, and large boats grounded in unlikely places reared their skeletons anywhere you cared to look. My job was to hold the camera while my colleague—now a successful journalist-filmmaker—started a conversation with whoever we found. We spoke to people waiting in very long lines for food, buskers playing blues, aid workers and managers, and to at least one hippy commune (still a thing!) whose camp had been leveled. We also heard from dozens of people who walked us through their windowless, wall-less living rooms to share mercilessly diverse stories of tidal waves, miracles, and near-misses while offering us cold drinks. “Here is where the water shoved me against the ceiling; here’s how I somehow found myself floating up the stairs where I could breath again; here’s the window that we all crawled out of to swim to the boat.”
Fortune creates a hundred thousand stories wherever she goes. For all the human (and political!) complexity of a disaster like Katrina, the stories we heard fell out into such a clear theme that even my 17-year-old brain could compute the overriding moral: gratitude. Over and over again, independently of how much they had lost, the people we spoke to emphasized how thankful they were for what they still had left. Something about the impersonal universality and wide reach of what the community had experienced helped make Fortune’s pill easier to swallow. Cup-half-full thinking was in every corner and under every rock. “It could have been worse” was the phrase I remember hearing like a mantra day-in and day-out. Or—no—the exact words people used were less abstract than that: it was worse for someone else. “Some people got it worse than we did,” we’d hear. Everyone could point to a real-world proof that whatever they had not lost was something to be thankful for—because after all, they could have lost that too.
There is something beautifully counter-intuitive about this. Catastrophes bring a lot of other feelings—pain, loss, blame (decades after Katrina, we are still debating the reputation and efficaciousness of the United States’ disaster response agency, FEMA). But amidst the enormous weight of misfortune, somehow there is a protective tendency for humans to re-scale and refocus their opinion of what has value. It’s as if we reflexively try to find that what we still have left, or what we got to have at least for a time, is really worth quite a lot more than we may have thought. “I do not regard a man as poor,” says Seneca at the opening of his masterwork, “if the little which remains is enough for him” (Letters, 1.5).
Whether this kind of reflexive gratitude is a healthy thing is something that we can debate. On the one hand, it can be seen as a kind of defensive naiveté or denial—something all too easy to overdo. I lost a relative this fall, and as the family gathered, the stories and gratitude we shared in some ways mirrored the logic of hurricane victims: there were many events in his life to be thankful for, and many things that could very easily have been worse. But amid some of the heartfelt sharing, a sort of threshold would be crossed now and then, and someone would feel the need to clarify: “I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that he died.” Acknowledging the silver lining, as healthy a coping mechanism as it may be, is a balancing act. If we don’t also acknowledge the horribleness of horrible things, then our encouragement sounds hollow at best.
Then along comes Stoicism. The Stoics take a sort of glee in blowing up balancing acts (only later restoring order, after you’re forced to walk through the nuances of their system). When it comes to gratitude, they dial it up to 11. Why not take that same ability for reflexive gratitude we sometimes exhibit amidst tragedy—they ask—and engage in it even in the good times, and in all times and all moments of every day? Why shouldn’t we elevate the value of what we still have (or once got to have) systematically and absolutely, to the point that we can be happy (in some restricted, but deeply meaningful sense) in literally any scenario? What if we don’t back off from gratitude for fear of overdoing it? Our tradition invites us to tap into that universal human ability to find the silver lining—to suss out and embrace the positives—and cultivate it into such an extreme re-scaling of our values that it comes to transform our entire way of being, our way of giving, and our relationship “with both gods and human beings” (Enchiridion 1.3).
As pervasive and obvious as it is once you know to look for it, “radical gratitude” isn’t quite the way that we are used to hearing Stoic spiritual practice talked about in the modern revival. When I looked for references to gratitude in academic sources and modern Stoic writings, I found that we refer to gratitude very often in passing as part of other topics (typically in less than a sentence), but we have paid little attention to gratitude itself as a concept with depth and distinctive richness within Stoicism.
But Stoicism does have a rich theory of gratitude. As we’ve entered the Stoic Fellowship’s international Month of Gratitude this year, I want to offer a multi-pronged, conservatively Stoic vision of gratitude that invites us to apply thankfulness not just in service of emotional tranquility and resilience, but also toward the higher ethical and spiritual goals that fall out of Stoics’ program for analyzing human life. “We should make every effort to show all the gratitude we can,” says Seneca, “for the good in it is our own. After all… much of the good in gratitude redounds to oneself” (Letters to Lucilius, 81.19). The ancients have a special understanding of gratitude that integrates beautifully with several key parts of their worldview. It includes the everyday generic appreciation for what we have (which is accessible to people of all world views and spiritual traditions). But it also moves beyond everyday gratitude in important ways. The core meditative practices of the Stoic tradition offer us an especially strong and focused route to cultivating gratitude, because they push us toward a radical re-scaling of values that makes thankfulness flow easily and consistently.
One of the core lessons of the modern Stoic revival is that many of the world’s most powerful ideas are ones that are easy to state but hard to put into practice. This is a big part of why following an ancient tradition makes any sense at all: while our modern scientific urge to seek out novel ideas and discoveries has its place (and our tradition should always evolve), human flourishing is less about discovering subtle breakthroughs or new arguments, and much more about just doing the dang things that we already know we should be doing. As Patrick Barry of the Pittsburgh Stoa argues in a recent Stoicism Today post,
“Humans don’t simply hear a lesson once and internalize it forever. If only it were so simple. To fully grok and internalize and be changed by some central insight, we have to pound it into our skulls repeatedly for years. That’s why having a practice is necessary.”
In that sense, one could argue that you wouldn’t lose terribly much if you stop your search for a “theory of gratitude” right here, without reading any further. Thankfulness isn’t complicated. It’s just a matter of building the habit—one of those things we all know we should do more often than we actually do! But as Musonius Rufus argues in his famous lecture on theory vs. practice, a little theory goes a long way—even when “practice is more important than theory” (Lectures, 4.4). So try and stick with me a moment while we derive a uniquely Stoic perspective on how to be thankful!
In my house we’ve got little glass “gratitude jars” on the shelf that we were gifted long ago—we’re supposed to fill out little papers with gratitudes and slip them in (which, true to form, we never do). My two-year-old performed this week in a daycare event where the toddlers got on stage and sang songs of gratitude to their parents and community (she was petrified at first, but once she spotted Mommy in the crowd she danced like nobody’s business!). My mother picked up the idea of listing five things each day that you’re grateful for, and now has engaged in it as a decade-long routine each morning before she opens her eyes: “It’s the only type of meditation that I have experience with,” she’ll say, “but I’ve found it immensely valuable—there has never been a day, even in the worst of times, where I can’t think of at least five things.” Seneca refers to gratitude as a value that has remarkable consensus across cultures and schools of thought—”there is one point on which all of them speak with one voice, as they say: that when people have done us good service, we should render thanks” (Letters, 81.31).
At the same time, there is something novel—even sideways and out-of-left-field!—about the way Stoics approach the topic of gratitude. Like everyone else, we do find the Roman Stoics occasionally stepping through the simple exercise of listing things to be thankful for. Epictetus talks about how remarkable it is that “milk is produced from grass, and cheese from milk” (Discourses, 1.16.8). And I needn’t mention Marcus Aurelius’s famous first book, dedicated to gratitude for all the lessons he’s learned from his family and community. When the Stoics do list out their gratitudes, they like to focus on strength of character as the ultimate gift. But I’ve cherry-picked even these examples (and bypassed a lot of context): the Stoics don’t really approach gratitude through your general method of “let’s list things to be thankful for.” Instead, for some reason they like to talk a whole lot about loss—about what we’ve lost, what other people have lost, what we will lose, and (more straight to the principle of the matter) what we could lose. In short, they sometimes sound quite a bit like hurricane victims.
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To be a Stoic is in many ways to believe that making a regular habit of visualizing negative things is a practice that has a profound, multi-layered spiritual lesson to teach us. At first brush, negative visualization leads to a simple insight that seems rather perverse (at least outside of extreme situations like being imprisoned or severely disabled): that we can insulate ourselves from pain by expecting loss and detaching from the external world in response. But if you push beyond that rather amoral and unsatisfying stance on the human condition, there’s a deeper and far more interesting shift of perspective on the other side. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl described it aptly as a shift from viewing the world from the vantage of “What is it that I want?” to a different question: “What is it that is wanted of me?”
The entire Stoic ethical program stems from a version of this shift. For Epictetus, it’s the shift from “things not up to us” (τὰ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν) to “things up to us” (τὰ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν). The fundamental claim of the Stoic worldview is that all the greatest and most valuable aspects of human flourishing belong to the second category—which is made up of what Frankl would call “meaning” and “conscience,” and the Stoics called “virtue.” The deeper lesson that we get from meditating on adversity is that adversity and loss are really small things in the final analysis when we set them alongside positive ideas like courage, benevolence, and justice—which concern the type of person we want to be. This is why, even in the aftermath of a category 5 hurricane, we can always truthfully say that what we still have left is really worth quite a lot more than we may have thought.
This is what I mean when I refer to Stoicism as a radical “rescaling” of values (see Figure 3). As Seneca puts it, “vexation and pain and anything else that is uncomfortable have no significance: they are overpowered by virtue” (Letters, 66.20). He goes on to compare virtue to the sun outshining the light of a little lamp—”the sheer scale blots out all pains, discomforts, and hurts.” Cicero gives the same lamp vs. sun comparison, and also likens external things to a drop of honey lost in the Aegean sea, or a coin compared to the legendary wealth of the Lydian king Croessus (De Finibus, 3.45). The massive gravity of these positive values is the engine that drives the Stoic system.
Figure: Stoicism challenges conventional values by asking us to assign extremely high weight to internal character traits.
Partly because these things are a whole lot easier to say than to actually believe “in your bones,” Stoicism is a highly meditative tradition. Negative visualization practices make up a subset of a total of a dozen or so canonical spiritual practices (where we normally understand “spiritual” in the sense of Pierre Hadot) that recur over and over in the surviving Stoic texts and which aim to help us rescale our values.
What I want to argue is that these practices are effectively forms of gratitude meditation. As we’ve seen, listing gratitudes per se is not one of these canonical practices. But negative visualization in a sense gets at the essence of what it means to be thankful for something even more directly than, well, saying that you are thankful!
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To make this clear, let me turn to Bill Irvine. People are attracted to Stoicism today from different directions and for different reasons (just like people approach, say, Mozart in different ways). A turning point in my own journey was reading Irvine’s Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Irvine does many things in his interpretation of Stoicism (some more orthodox than others), but for me what had a lasting impact was the way he centers the school on the cultivation of joy. Amid this wider thesis, Irvine liked to give an interesting characterization of the Stoic as a radical practitioner of gratitude (p. 73–74):
“We normally characterize an optimist as someone who sees his glass as being half full rather than half empty. For a Stoic, though, this degree of optimism would only be a starting point. After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen. And if he is atop his Stoic game, he might go on to comment about what an astonishing thing glass vessels are: They are cheap and fairly durable, impart no taste to what we put in them, and—miracle of miracles!—allow us to see what they contain. This might sound a bit silly, but to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place. To such a person, glasses are amazing; to everyone else, a glass is just a glass, and it is half empty to boot.”
This image of the Stoic’s internal emotional world is compelling—very different from the dry, emotionless stereotype of a person who retreats from the world in fear that it might upset him or her. This was the first time I started to understand the gravity of the positive values that make Stoicism work as a strong way of centering human life. (And the turning point in my journey to Mozart? Glad you asked! It was seeing this video of Mitsuko Uchida conducting Piano Concerto No. 20 from the piano (!).)
Irvine’s optimist is an interpretation—a brief gloss on a complex textual tradition. But he makes a very interesting argument that implies we’ve got the question backwards when we ask how we can get from Stoic negative visualization to gratitude. Instead Irvine argues that any time people engage in a conventional gratitude practice, they are in fact dabbling in a kind of negative visualization (p. 77):
“Understood properly, saying grace—and for that matter, offering any prayer of thanks—is a form of negative visualization. Before eating a meal, those saying grace pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that this food might not have been available to them, in which case they would have gone hungry… Said with these thoughts in mind, grace has the ability to transform an ordinary meal into a cause for celebration.”
Seneca takes it one step further, by arguing that no one can in fact be truly grateful unless they engage in the Stoic re-scaling of values. “No one can be grateful,” he says in Letters 81.27, “unless he has little regard for the things that ordinary people lose their heads over.” This is a variation of one of the Stoics’ favorite paradoxes—where they insist that a robustly ethical approach to life is only possible if we draw a sharp distinction between virtue and everything else.
For me, this relationship between Stoic meditation and gratitude is very consistent and direct. A good negative visualization session—whether I’ve gone with Epictetus’ recommendation of “starting from something trivial” (ἀπὸ τῶν σμικροτάτων) like a favorite pot (Enchridion, 3), or I’ve jumped in the deep end with a full-blown death meditation—doesn’t stop at gritted teeth and resolve to endure. Instead I always find I come out the other side with a surge of positive energy. Conventional gratitude, for sure. But also a new sense of perspective, coming from the unique Stoic practice of re-centering myself on virtue and joy.
This last step brings us to a new kind of gratitude—gratitude that isn’t just a passive appreciation, but an active acknowledgement that we have the opportunity to choose well in the here and now with regard to things that are not up to us. After all, I have not yet lost the pot that I like, and I am still alive—so “while you have life in you, while you still can…” make the most of it: be grateful, spend time with family, do all the things you know you ought to do but somehow fail over and over to prioritize (to paraphrase Meditations, 4.17). When we really follow negative visualization to its ultimate conclusion, we arrive at an extremely grateful and active way of being.
Join us for the Month of Gratitude
Are you ready to cultivate gratitude? Join the Stoic Fellowship’s Month of Gratitude. Each week challenges you to focus on a different aspect of gratitude:
- Week 1: Appreciating simple daily pleasures like morning coffee or birdsong
- Week 2: Recognizing others’ virtues and kindnesses
- Week 3: Identifying life lessons from mentors and people we’ve met (inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Book 1)
- Week 4: Practicing finding gratitude even within life’s challenges
Practice on your own or with others. You can also log your gratitude practice to show your commitment! Learn more and sign up for TSF updates at https://www.stoicfellowship.com/service.
About the Author
Eric “Siggy” Scott is coordinator of the Washington, D.C. Stoa. In 2016, he founded Stoics in Action (https://medium.com/stoics-in-
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