What's it all about?

What does it mean to be thankful?

Gratitude is an emotion. Like regret or remorse or anger. Or it's an album by several, mostly defunct bands. Or a song by Paul McCartney, or The Beasty Boys, or Danny Elfman.

I am thankful to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for this information. Or so I just wrote. I didn't feel the emotion, though. I didn't send any money to Jimmy Wales. I take it for granted that I can look this stuff up. Information wants to be free. (Wikipedia tells me that Stuart Brand said this to Woz at the first hackers conference in 1984, a year that will live in fictional infamy.)

Around Christmas time, Jimmy Wales usually tries to get us to send him some money by invoking, some would say manipulating, our feeling of gratitude which he thinks might lie dormant in us as we look up things on the internet. Thankfulness can be a fleeting or unconscious emotion and it might need to be called to our attention. Or the fleeting feeling of guilt may arise and quickly be masked by some gratitude so that we like ourselves better. Christmas time is good for this as other sources are attempting to find feelings inside us--guilt or gratitude--for one purpose or another and it can become something of a group effort.

Gratitude, we are told, is a good thing to feel. People keep gratitude journals in which they record what they're thankful for on a daily basis. This, it is hoped. will make them feel more gratitude and thus be better people. I'm not saying it doesn't, though I'm skeptical of this activity. (I'm reminded of the study concluding that the physiological expression of a smile works to make you happier, followed by another study rejecting the first's validity.)

Being thankful can feel good, but for some, it feels bad. It can feel weak or dependent. Saying "thanks" can feel like paying a debt.

Receiving actual gratitude can feel good. Someone thinks of you and you acknowledge your appreciation of their attention. Though you might think others' professed gratitude the setup for asking for something--a favor, your business, or your participation in the wrong end of a scam.

In practice, most expressions of gratitude are pro-forma. They are polite. It's Apu on the Simpsons when he says "Thank you, come again." He says it to everyone, even Bart who has just given him a hard time.

When I was growing up, my mother made me write thank you notes to those who gave me gifts. These were mostly her friends--adults who knew me as an extension of her and had little idea of what I might want (not that they didn't occasionally guess correctly.) "How will they know you even got the gift?" my mother would argue. I could see she had a point there.