Gratitude and Ideology

For the last twenty years or so (during the Oprahification of America basically), there’s been a big push to get everyone to have more gratitude. Maybe more than anything else, that has been the main value of the neoliberal era. There was even a scientific study about the medical benefits of gratitude recently.

The big push to have everyone be grateful has happened at the same time as everyone has less than ever to be grateful for. It was largely impossible for millennials to make their way out of the Great Recession. It’s been one catastrophe to the next. And Zoomers are the most screwed generation in American history. They have even less to be grateful for than millennials.

And yet all we hear—mostly from Boomers who had the easier lives ever!—is that we should all have gratitude. Boomers have plenty to be grateful for—they all bought homes for like $80k in 1972 that are worth a million now. They could major in whatever they wanted to in college—humanities subjects that they were actually interested in—and could get jobs doing things that weren’t related to their majors. (And by the way college cost like eighty bucks back then—now it costs hundreds of thousands). Now you have to major in a specific thing to get a job in whatever that thing is. You used to be able to major in music or something and then get a job in an office doing something totally unrelated. Now you have to like major in “business” or something.

The point—we have nothing to be grateful for. Boomers had the easiest lives ever, and they’re the ones pushing this gratitude ideology. They have a lot to be grateful for—but we don’t. Gratitude is their ideology, not ours.