Killing Time
CancerShrink ended our time last week with the story of a Seinfeld routine. Seinfeld had been off the stage for some time. So there he was, putting himself on the line, making himself a target for public ridicule. Why was he doing it? he asked. He had a ton of money, so that wasn’t the reason. He was 6o years old; he’d had professional success. Mostly he was doing it he said, is because, ultimately, what we have to do is kill time.
I laughed out loud. In one sentence, Seinfeld summed up the existential hurly burley I’ve felt since early in cancer life. How was, how am, I going to live as fully as possible within the always shifting parameters cancer sets out? What matters? is the question I keep working.
It’s not lost on me that it’s a pretty sweet life that lets you think about this as you go through your days. Of course, I’ve always dwelled on this kind of stuff. (Pity my poor family when someone at the dinner table asks, “So, how was your day?)
Moments like the Seinfeld bit are like magnets that attract the random life shavings that have been piling up. Then, boom. There’s a shape.
Photo: Iron filings in a magnetic field by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0
Shavings & The Magnet
There have been some iron filings piling along the edges of my thoughts lately. For example,
- A lingering sense of unease after some recent medical foolishness;
- Sadness for a friend who is coping with debilitating side effects from his second clinical trial this year: Does any safety net exist beyond this?;
- A sense of dullness in my thinking and feeling;
- A small philosophical treatise, The Burnout Society, added more thoughts to my already simmering collection. The author argues we’ve moved into an achievement society, where the cacophony of “Be your best!” or “You can do more!” exhausts us physically and emotionally, takes away our attention and connection to other people, and makes us numb even to ourselves.
Then, with an episode of the podcast Hidden Brain: The Enemies of Gratitude I felt a swoosh of thoughts coming together. I’ll talk a little about the points that capture me below. For those of you who might want more, you can listen and/or read the entire episode & transcript on the Hidden Brain site. For something in between, I asked ChatGPT to do a summary of the whole transcript, which you can find here.
Shankar Vedantam, the host of Hidden Brain, introduces the episode by saying, “This week…we explore the importance and limitations of self-control and we examine how a habit that is within easy reach can help us achieve our goals. That overlooked habit? The practice of gratitude.”
A Powerful Emotion; A Skill We Can Learn
It’s been oddly challenging to wrap my mind around gratitude as a tool for achieving goals. Maybe I’ve just seen gratitude as another of those woo-woo gimmicks for self-help. Apparently, though, gratitude is an emotion so powerful it can change the brain. The nature of the change? Gratitude shifts the way the brain computes the value of a future reward. Rewards that were in the future seem more attractive, so we change our expectations for how we should react in the present moment
Vendantam’s guest, Northeastern University psychologist David DeSteno, says, “It’s not building your self-control by giving you more willpower. It’s basically working from the bottom up by changing what you value and if you value something more than you normally would, if you value a future reward, your future health, your future savings, doing the right thing for your friends more than you normally would, then it just becomes easier to persevere toward it.”
- If you build a habit of cultivating gratitude, it plays out across all kinds of domains: dieting, saving money, health, studying, exercise, building relationships.
- People who reflect on gratitude are more likely to engage in acts of compassion. They’re more likely to do the right thing, to call out injustice and stand up for justice.
- Gratitude amplifies the natural pleasure we get from giving to someone else.
- Gratitude shows that we’re aware of how others have helped us to be who we are and where we are in our lives today.
“What we’re finding time and time again is that being grateful, engaging in compassion, these lead to long term benefits for people in terms of their physical and mental well-being.” -Dr. David DeSteno.
Here’s the bottom line: Gratitude isn’t a fleeting thing that happens to us. It’s not a character trait we either have or don’t. We can develop it as a skill.
Filling Time
What I love about Seinfeld’s line is how it takes the pressure off what it takes for a life to be “meaningful.”
What I love about the idea of practicing gratitude is how it simplifies the definition of “meaning,” making it more personal, a development of the spirit rather than something that can go on a resume (or be recognized in the burnout society).
Once, in a writing group, a friend announced, “Thinking about writing is not the same as writing.”
In other words, I can think about gratitude all I want, but that doesn’t mean I experience it.
Now a small orange notebook lives on my desk. I’m trying to remember, each day, to reflect on and capture three things in the day I feel grateful for.
Thanks for reading. I’m grateful to know you’re out there.
P.S.
This video from Cornell University sparked the Hidden Brain episode on gratitude. Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich discusses several “enemies” of gratitude, the psychological processes that underlie them, and how they might be combatted—making it easier for people to feel grateful and live up to their best selves.