I find gratitude surprisingly confusing.

It’s been described as a duty, an emotion, a mindset – whatever you call it, the research supporting its effectiveness is overwhelming. But beyond therapeutic solutions like gratitude journals and saying “thank you”, there is a vexing question: how do you reconcile being grateful with being detached from anything beyond your control?

I don’t know about you, but for me, the joy and the pleasure I experience when an old friend sends me an unexpected care package – or when it rains in June – suggest that those things do matter to me, even if they’re unessential. My day really is better because of them, even though both are completely out of my control. Perhaps I’m just parsing words, but I struggle to reconcile the idea of being made happier by something genuinely meaningful with not needing that same thing to be meaningfully happier.

Consider, for example, the following verse from the Bhagavad Gita:

“Fettered no more by selfish attachments, [those who are wise] are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad.” ¹

The word “elated” here isn’t just referring to the state of being pleasantly surprised – the original Sanskrit describes a person who desires or craves a certain outcome. Seneca and his fellow Stoics would agree; I’m sure he would tell me there is no contradiction here, because I am not expecting rain in June or a care package from my friends. In fact, the less I expect anything, the easier it is for me to feel grateful and happy.

I suspect that the resolution to this problem lies in the term “gratitude” itself – it’s too broad. We assume that gratitude is always positive, but in fact it might depend on what we’re grateful for, and why.

Gratuitous Gratitude vs. Fearful Gratitude

American philosopher Martha Nussbaum understood the tension between detachment and gratitude as well. To bridge the divide, she came up with a term that I love: “gratuitous gratitude.” This kind of unfettered gratitude rests on having low or no expectations and then being pleasantly surprised when things go beyond those expectations. 

Nussbaum gives a real example from her own life for this: going to the store to buy fish. She had plans to host a dinner party and was preparing to cook a fancy salmon dish. To do so required her to spend a lot of time doing the difficult work of skinning the salmon and cutting it up perfectly, and she was mentally prepared for this. However, at the store, the assistant behind the counter not only helped her find the salmon she needed – he offered to skin it and cut it up for her, saving her invaluable time and effort. Because this was a totally unexpected windfall, she was able to feel genuinely delighted gratitude at the fact. ²

There is, however, another kind of gratitude I’ve experienced that’s very much tied to expectation. It’s the constant thankfulness each day that things are normal. I think about the possibility of being in a car accident and am grateful that I arrived home safely for the ten-thousandth time. I think about the possibility of my daughter getting sick and am grateful that she’s healthy. I am grateful for things that might veer into silly: that I arrive on time to appointments. That the weather wasn’t too hot today. That there were no rude drivers on the road.

On one hand, this kind of gratitude is a sort of mindfulness practice: I’m realizing things are better than they could be and it helps me not take things for granted and feel more grateful as a result. But there is a darkness to this kind of gratitude. It’s almost as though thankfulness has become a burden and a talisman to ward off future evil – something I have no control over, and yet I live and act as though I do. This “fearful gratitude” may also be a strangely twisted version of survivor’s guilt: some part of my mind worries I don’t deserve good things when others suffer more than I do. I realize it’s a problematic way of thinking, but there’s a powerful pull to it.

Gratuitous gratitude is easy to understand and apply when it comes to everyday things like the weather and customer service – but it’s hard not to have fears and expectations for the bigger things in life, and I think this is where gratitude becomes more complicated. In this case, gratitude must become an entire way of life.

Amor Fati: the ultimate form of gratitude

Perhaps the ultimate existential expression of gratitude is amor fati: love of one’s fate. It is, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” ³

What’s interesting about amor fati is that it works no matter how good or how bad your life is going. Most people would say that if you can be grateful in bad times, you are going to be grateful in good times, and I agree – but I think it also works in the other direction. If you can be grateful in good times, you are more likely to have the creativity and neural musculature to be grateful in bad times. Or in the more poetic words of the Apostle Paul: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound.” ⁴

In 1888, just a few weeks before his descent into permanent insanity, a deeply suffering Nietzsche penned these words in the introduction to his quasi-autobiographical book Ecce Homo:

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once…How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? – and so I tell my life to myself. ⁵

True gratitude, both gratuitous gratitude and amor fati, has very little to do with what happens and everything to do with how we perceive what happens. You can have a relatively blessed life and still feel gratitude and wonder when the store assistant offers to cut your salmon for you. You could be debilitatingly ill like Nietzsche and still feel “the sun fall upon your life.” Or you could fail to feel gratitude in either of these situations, or in anything in between.

I’m not convinced that the difference between gratuitous gratitude and fearful gratitude is a wide one. To feel grateful for something – whether it’s rain in June or the safety of a loved one – means that thing matters to us. And the more it matters, the more vulnerable we are. But amor fati is the closest thing I know to helping us find gratitude no matter what our circumstances are – to be truly grateful without fixed expectations in a very uncertain world.

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Read Next: Gratitude: A Most Misunderstood Virtue →

1. The Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, 2009.
2. Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford University Press, 2018.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Edited by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, December 17, 1989.
4. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, Chapter 4, Verses 11–12.
5. From Ecce Homo