Gratitude reduces the complexity of modern life to make it more meaningful
A New Year’s Meditation
The contentification of life
The world is increasingly filled with noise and nonsense, making it difficult to see what is valuable amid a torrent of trivialities. With the rise of social media, our attention has become an economic commodity. Four million new posts are made on Instagram every hour; 3.7 million new YouTube videos are uploaded every day. This is chump change compared to what’s coming. The rate of content production is going to increase exponentially as generative AI matures in consumer applications. And the contentification of the internet for the commodification of our attention has overflowed into the offline world. Everywhere we turn, we’re offered the chance to level up in our jobs, our relationships, our skills, or our goals (and on Facebook, for me, level up my hip mobility because I clicked on an ad about stretching once). There’s always more to see, more to learn, and more to do to maximize the moment and optimize our happiness. Almost all of this is a heap of rubbish. Yet there are always small, buried treasures that keep us coming back to rummage through the garbage.
The exponentiation of life
Beyond the value of the content we produce, the speed of production also gives us heartburn. We humans, evolved in the cradle of the natural numbers, nourished as a species by the small positive integers that we found on our fingers and our toes, have difficulty handling the exponentiation of possible human experiences. There are so many things we could do. So many ways to spend our time. So many counterfactual worlds unfolding at ever increasing speeds ahead of us. Navigating life is increasingly complex, increasingly overwhelming. Our attention can’t handle it all.
Many options that mostly stink
So, we have tons of ways we could spend our time, energy, and attention. Too many. Most of these options are garbage. But it’s hard to tell upfront what is worthless and what is valuable because attention is money, so everything is marketing. Everything has a new coat of paint and has been spritzed with perfume. What do we do when there are so many things we could do, but it’s hard to tell which are wastes of time? How do we reduce the dimensionality of our options with so much noisy data?
Gratitude can help
Gratitude can help us focus on what is valuable. Being grateful for something implies a host of magnificent and healthy epistemic processes. For example, I’m grateful for my dog, Rosie. I’m particularly grateful that she’s acting less like a puppy and more like a productive member of my family’s household society. To tell you about my gratitude for my dog’s behavior, I had to first search through all sorts of things in my life I could tell you about. Rosie was easy to find in this search process. However the algorithm works, it was efficient and accurate - it didn’t take me long to come up with an example and I’m certain about my feeling here. To articulate my gratitude, I then had to particularize Rosie as an object of my attention. Rosie is not an abstract concept or just an idea. She became an object of my attention with properties and characteristics that I can describe. In other words, I focused on her to the exclusion of anything else. Once presented in my awareness, my relationship with her takes center stage. I’m grateful for her because of how we interact. Not just because of who she is or who I am but because of who we are together. We’re correlated statistically. What I think is associated with who she is. We’re coupled cybernetically. How she exists influences what I do. My gratitude is about our existence together - a dynamic, fluid, abstract-yet-influential relationship that helps to direct my experiences and actions over time.
Gratitude as a signal of value
Rosie has helped me find what is valuable. My gratitude acted as both search and filter for finding something that has meaning to me. Easy, quick, accurate. It doesn’t matter how many more things I add to search through or how much more content humanity produces; it will still be easy to identify her - and a host of other good things in my life - as something I’m grateful for. This salience in my focus, this worthiness of attention that gratitude produces, is something I can only describe as meaningful. It fills that epistemic moment with a sense of value. Gratitude helps us find the signals of value in the noise of modern life.
Gratitude as dimensionality reduction
To be grateful for Rosie, I also had to focus on her to the exclusion of anything else. There are many, perhaps uncountably infinite, things I could be grateful for. There are also many, perhaps uncountably infinite, ways that I could be grateful for Rosie. Relationships are dynamic. They change in quality over time. But from all of these possibilities, I could wrap my attention around a thing known as Rosie and describe her in a way that is comprehensible to you in just a few words. I could envelop the intricate complexities of our relationship, an immaterial thing, to communicate the positive experience I take from it. Considering how Rosie and I can move through life together, there are yet infinitely more ways that we could act and interact, and yet my gratitude at where we’ve been suggests possible futures that are valuable and that would make me grateful anew. In a sea of infinite options, gratitude has reduced the dimensions I must consider, helping me reflect on where I’ve been and chart a course for the future.
Gratitude in 2024
This has been a meditation on part of life I find overwhelming. I want to do good stuff. I want to be good at the things I do. I want to have meaningful relationships. I want to live my life well. Many and more are the ways this could happen or could go wrong. There are so many dang options for how to spend my time. I’m extremely grateful for my dog, obviously, as well as my family, friends, job, and God. Gratitude helps me slow down, find those things that are meaningful, and savor the good dynamics of those relationships. It also helps me to think about how to nourish those good things so they bloom into something beautiful. Being grateful for what I’ve experienced in 2023 helps me plan what to do in 2024. I have goals, but gratitude suggests the purpose of planning isn’t to achieve goals but to help what is true, beautiful, and good in my life flourish.