Michael Mitchell: Archive

This is why I quit writing seriously a little less than 20 years ago. It didn't happen overnight. I just gradually lost interest as I integrated all my beliefs while simply thinking of writing seriously, by which I mean philosophically, with the goal of expressing them as clearly as possible.

If you tried to tell me some shit like "gratitude is a virtue" when I was a kid I would've laughed at you. Hello! Life sucks for a lot of people and it fucking should and they should not appreciate or spin it positively in the slightest way. Or. You can't practice gratitude as a virtue all the time, so is it really that important? Or. If gratitude is a virtue, honesty is a vice. But when you really see the truth, that gratitude is an emotion and can't possibly be a virtue, you can't unsee how fucked up all of our minds are and you start thinking maybe it's better to just let people fake shit and choose a less psychologically disruptive career.

Long story short? Yes, because you're self-aware, you can feel gratitude for gratitude, but it stops there. Think about it. You don't just feel it, you know you're feeling it. It's not really gratitude for gratitude itself that you're feeling, it's for the fact you can feel anything at all, and for the fact that you know it, for your humanity. Should we all value that? Yes. But it's not a virtue. A virtue is the act of your intellect in grasping your own emotional states, i.e., rationality. If you live your life on autopilot, never really examining your inner states, consistently practicing introspection as a virtue, then you'll never even understand it, much less learn how to control it, your emotions, and it's in this sense that teaching gratitude for life as a virtue is condescending to me but comforting to others.

Too heady? Can't relate? Have you ever heard this before?

"YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL TO ME FOR ALL I'VE DONE FOR YOU!"