When one draws up a gratitude list, the implied statement about the items on the list is:
'This list of things is good'.
This list's selectivity presumes that some things are good and others are not.
The list therefore requires judgement and partial negative assessment.
It also requires according a different status to the good than to the bad.
Are we to divide everything into good and bad, focus on the good, and pretend the bad is not there?
And what if there is more bad than good?
Is the world more good than bad or bad than good?
Is the world getting better or worse?
One's life: is it more good than bad or bad than good?
Is my life getting better or worse?
Does gratitude not foster attachment and anxiety about loss?
Does gratitude not position me as recipient, focusing on receiving, on the satisfaction of self?
Does gratitude not position the source of good as outside of myself?
Does gratitude not deprive one of agency in one's own unhappiness and happiness?
Metaphysically, is the higher realm not the greater or the only reality, anyway?
Does gratitude not deepen the illusion that this realm is the ultimate reality?
One's own life, the world, the direction of the world may indeed produce cause for gloom.
All lives end.
Dying with due warning but without a dispiriting decline, serene, free of pain, and surrounded by loved ones is a rarity.
All civilisations end.
Life itself will end.
The universe itself will end.
Pollyannaism won't do as an adopted position.
The case for gratitude per se appears weak.
The case for the proposition all is well is fatally flawed, from the material point of view.
The proposition all is well is theologically sound, in various metaphysical approaches.
But one cannot live in a metaphysical realm entirely.
Yes, keep one's head in the cloud with God, one's feet on earth, where our work is (page 130).
But the world is noisy, and few intellects are tough enough to seal the mind in holy things.
The vast bulk of our experience is here, in the material plane.
We cannot spirit ourselves out of it or deny it is here.
We cannot reason our way into construing this world as the Leibnitzian best of all possible worlds.
[Or so Voltaire held.]
But what is to be done? How does one actually live here, despite being awake?
What we're left with is gratitude as an absolute practical necessity, regardless of philosophical, theological, or psychological considerations, reservations, or drawbacks. It is impossible to live well or indeed at all without it. Life, frankly, would be too depressing.
It is irrational to be grateful for one's cup of coffee, for having a nice, cool room on a hot day, for finding an unexpected snack in the fridge, for knowing where to put a comma, for having done the laundry, for having one's affairs in order, given the greater context.
But what else are you going to do?
There is no viable alternative.
The child is comforted by its stuffed rabbit.
Is the stuffed rabbit really the child's friend?
No.
But the comfort is real.
Gratitude opens up a channel to something beyond and allows in what makes everything here possible in the first place.
It is the cable under the ocean to the other side.
The faculty of appreciation, when activated, is life itself.
What is appreciated is irrelevant: it is the activation of the faculty that counts.
That's what produces the flash of light that obliterates the universe and leaves us with God alone.