Beliefs Archives - Farther to Go!

Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

March 8, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a British movie but Always Look on the Bright Side of Life could easily be America’s theme song. Barbara Ehrenreich covered the pitfalls of what some call toxic positivity in her book Bright-Sided, which I read shortly after it was published in 2009. It probably goes without saying that I have never been on the positive psychology bandwagon so I welcomed her blistering critique of compulsory optimism.

As one reviewer of Ehrenreich’s book said, “There’s no need to try to sugar-coat the world; reality is far more interesting.”

But what better way to keep our attention focused on the bright side than to get us to compulsively itemize the things we are—or ought to be—grateful for? In fact, many of the benefits cited by a majority of articles and videos promoting the development of a gratitude practice are aimed at generating or increasing a sense of personal wellbeing.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? —Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

The primary purpose of counting our blessings, in the view of many, isn’t to make us better people. It isn’t to fortify us to go forth and help create a more equitable or humanitarian world for everyone. It’s to make us feel better about ourselves.

Gratitude is touted as a coping mechanism, an alternative to “junk food, self-medication, shopping, etc.” Some so-called coping mechanisms may be inherently less harmful than others, but all coping mechanisms are intended to modify a perceived negative emotional state: to change the way we feel without addressing the circumstances or situation.

When we practice gratitude, we shift our attention from what’s wrong or missing to what is here. —Rev. Connie L. Habash, LMFT

Putting attention on “what’s wrong or missing” is assumed to be counterproductive to this aim. Yet some who have explored the gratitude practice phenomenon have discovered a dark side to trying to drum up gratitude. One negative side effect is invalidating difficult or unpleasant emotions. Emotions provide us with information, so trying to avoid some and only experience others disconnects us from that stream of information.

I suppose that 20 years ago when my partner died suddenly, I could have focused on being grateful for the decades he and I had spent together or for the fact that I still had Tashi, our cat, or that I could remain where I was living. But thinking about what I still had would not have diminished the enormous chasm in my life. He was missing. And that meant something to me. When I think about identifying what I was grateful for in that instance, it feels at the very least dismissive and shallow.

Making ourselves feel better, or trying to, has limits—at least if we want to retain our humanity.

It’s impossible not to conclude that the emphasis on looking for things to be grateful for, no matter what angle we come at it from, serves to—in some cases is even intended to—maintain the status quo. It keeps us focused inward, on ourselves. It chips away at our sense of agency. It requires us to be beholden to someone or something else: the giver who bestows gifts based on criteria we are unaware of and have no influence on. It admonishes us to be satisfied and content—to not wish for more.

It’s an extremely powerful barrier to creating transformational change.

When I said “more,” above, I wasn’t referring to accumulating material goods or status. I mean “more” in the sense of aspiring to be more, to have a more satisfying and meaningful life, and to achieve the objectives that make that possible. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine that will seek immediate gratification unless we train it to help us up our game and our aspirations.

Living = Acting in the World

Essential to creativity is a ferocious dissatisfaction with the status quo. —Roger Mavity, How to Steal Fire

Focusing our attention on what we have is an attempt to inoculate us against dissatisfaction, especially ferocious dissatisfaction, along with anguish, discomfort, sadness, longing, tragedy, confusion, loss, or just a bad mood. There are numerous problems with this trajectory, one of which is that it also inoculates us against joy, exuberance, desire, curiosity, and aspiration.

The most useful—and the most human—way to proceed is to be grateful when we’re grateful, dissatisfied or uncomfortable when we’re dissatisfied or uncomfortable, sad or confused when we’re sad or confused, and joyful, happy, or exuberant when we’re joyful, happy, or exuberant.

And then to be curious. What is it we’re grateful for, dissatisfied with, uncomfortable or sad about? What is the source of our confusion? What is making us happy, joyful, or exuberant? What are we longing for?

Lastly, is there something for us to do about what we’re experiencing? We are not stuck with any status quo. We are not required to accommodate ourselves to our circumstances. We have an ability to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change. That’s what we are built for.

There is one more post to come in this series.

The Cosmic Gift & Misery
Distribution System

February 28, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning I looked out onto my patio and discovered a red Mylar balloon in the shape of a heart lazily floating to and fro in the breeze. Today it’s gone, carried away by a gust of wind.

This is New Mexico, after all: the wind giveth and the wind taketh away. The wind routinely creates “fugitive dust,” for which there is a system of warnings in place. The wind is at the top of my list of things I dislike about living here. The light is at the top of my list of things I love.

Sometimes delivery people drop off food I didn’t order, leaving it on the mat outside my front door because they only notice the letter designation of my apartment and not the number of the building. There’s no one to call, no indication of who the food was meant for. Rarely, do these delivery people ring my doorbell or knock on the door, so I have no idea how long the food has been there. I carry it across the parking lot and deposit it in the dumpster.

According to one of the articles I read on developing a gratitude practice, life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift.

When I entertain this notion, I’m faced with a disquieting cascade of questions I’m sure philosophers, ethicists, and religious scholars, among others, have been ruminating over for centuries.

I tend to imagine a couple of possible general scenarios. One is that someone or something is determining how “the good” should be parceled out to living creatures. (I include animals here, as it’s obvious the circumstances of their lives vary as greatly as do the circumstances of humans.) Someone who enjoys more good circumstances than bad might find this notion comforting. They wouldn’t question it, thus avoiding looking a gift horse or force in the mouth. They might feel deserving, as well as “blessed.” Maybe their good circumstances make them feel kindly toward those less blessed. Maybe they don’t.

Perhaps kindliness is what a gratitude practice is meant to foster, but there’s no indication that the extremely fortunate comprise the target audience for lessons in gratitude. In many cases it appears that the better one’s circumstances are, the less likely one is to want to share and the less grateful one is. There’s a belief, especially among the most materially fortunate that they alone are responsible for their success. So this method of distribution does not seem to be an overall plus for humanity as a whole—at least if the distributor (let’s just call it that) or distributing force might be expected to have an attitude of good will or good faith toward earth’s living creatures.

The other, equally dubious, scenario is that someone or something is indiscriminately tossing around Mylar balloons or take-out food or IQ points or loving parents or stock dividends. Maybe this distributor or distributing force isn’t paying close attention to the delivery address and isn’t concerned about whether the recipient of such a “gift” wants or needs it; what anyone ends up with is entirely random. This seems less inherently comforting than the first notion but a lot more in line with both experience and observation.

The most relevant definition of gift seems to be this one: something bestowed or acquired without being sought or earned by the receiver.

Gifts, by nature and by definition, are in the control of the giver not in the control of the receiver. We are wired to want things: that’s the definition of motivation. So it’s no easy task to persuade people to be satisfied with their lot in life—not just satisfied, but also grateful!

It’s quite natural that we would want to try to game this system. What can we do to get more gifts? If we can influence the distribution of gifts to get more, are they technically still gifts? Is this a zero-sum game or are there an unlimited number of gifts to be bestowed?

While I agree we aren’t owed anything in particular, it doesn’t then logically follow that all (everything good) we have is a “gift.” First, if this is true for one person, it’s true for everyone: everything anyone has is a gift. So: so what? Presumably everyone gets something. This is just the way the system works. We didn’t set it up and we don’t operate it. It’s literally out of our hands.

The Misery

Second, if this applies to “the good,” it must also apply to “the bad,” unless that’s a different distribution system. What, then, is the appropriate response to the bad that has been delivered to us? There’s a fad in some circles to look at difficult circumstances as “a gift,” too, but those advising us to do so are usually not the ones upon whom such misfortune has been bestowed. I think it requires a certain amount of both privilege and ignorance to adopt this attitude, and espousing it for others seems rather callous.

Yes, each of us may have our personal misfortunes to deal with, but no one reading this is hungry and tired, living in a crowded, torn tent in the winter amid rubble, dead bodies, and unexploded ordnance, wary of snipers trying to shoot us in the head should we venture out to find food for our family.

Are we supposed to be grateful for that? And if we are, what are the ramifications?

One more gratitude post to come.

Should You Practice Gratitude?

February 24, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

No. There you go; you can stop reading and move on with your life, unless you, too have ever wondered what the point is of looking for things to be grateful for and then writing about or listing them.

I previously called out empathy and authenticity, so why not go for a positive psychology trifecta and knock off gratitude, as well, right? To be fair, both empathy and authenticity—at least as authenticity applies to human beings—can be written off as valid concepts, while the same can’t be said for gratitude. What I’m taking aim at here is not gratitude itself, but gratitude as a practice, which involves focusing time and attention on identifying things to be grateful for.

One might think that’s a better focus of time and attention than identifying things to be distressed by, but we shouldn’t be too quick to make that assumption. In my workshop Anatomy of Desire, I ask participants to create three lists: what they have that they like, what they have that they don’t like, and what they don’t have that they want. Writing a list of things we’re grateful for over and over is like being stuck on repeat at step 1 in this list-making process, a step that’s intended as a prequel to the most important step: identifying what we want.

What Is Gratitude, Anyway?

To answer that question, we must head once more into the breach: much as I discovered in researching empathy, it depends on who you ask, what’s being measured, what perspective the person talking about it is coming from, and what his or her agenda or aim is.

Gratitude is considered by some to be an emotion. I could explain why trying to create and sustain a particular emotion, whether “positive” or “negative,” is wrong-headed, but you probably already know that, and gratitude is clearly not an emotion.

There are emotions that accompany the experience of gratitude but they vary from one person to another and even from one situation to another within the same person. A drink of cold water when we’re thirsty, an unexpected gift from a friend, the warmth of home on a snowy day, or the arrival of a tow truck when our vehicle is stranded on a dark lonely road will elicit different types of gratitude and a different range of emotions.

In researching gratitude practices, I encountered several different varieties, including what I call bright-siding gratitude, undeserved gratitude (I am not worthy, but thanks, anyway), and performative gratitude. I’ll tackle that last one in this post.

We’re Doing It Wrong

A neuroscience guru who shall remain nameless claims that everyone is practicing gratitude wrong. He says new research reveals it isn’t experiencing gratitude that matters; it’s expressing it to someone else or watching it being expressed by other people. That would make gratitude an action or behavior.

This is not a new or original idea. An article from Greater Good Magazine quotes a passage from the New Testament in which Jesus healed 10 lepers but only one returned to thank him. Jesus muses as to whether or not the other nine were ungrateful (which is something it is very, very bad to be). The author of the article questions whether or not their gratitude “counted” if they didn’t express it.

The notion that gratitude is something you actively express to the person to whom you are grateful suggests the idea of making lists of things you’re grateful for, which might include a sunny day, does not represent gratitude. Gratitude, by this definition, is an expression, not an experience.

So then can we only be grateful (express gratitude) toward other people? Most of us don’t routinely express gratitude to the water that quenches our thirst or the furnace that heats our home. Yes, there are some cultures that thank nature and the environment for what is provided, but that is not the case for any of the cultures that are part of my heritage or the heritage of most people I know. And it’s beside the point. The water and the heater cannot receive our expressions of gratitude.

The Debt of Gratitude

This view of gratitude turns it into nothing more than a transactional social interaction, which excludes the water and the heater as recipients. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that obligation is one of the synonyms for gratitude. Are we motivated to express gratitude because we’re supposed to? Certainly children are repeatedly told to “say thank you.” In days of yore, writing thank you cards was a chore many children routinely put off. But is “thank you” an expression of gratitude or is it simply an acknowledgement? Is it any different from saying “hello” when you encounter a friend or answer the telephone or saying “good-by” when you leave or end your call?

The aforementioned neuroscience guru claims the expression of gratitude releases dopamine, which is apparently enough to validate this theory. But dopamine is released when we complete a task or a behavior loop. If doing so involved throwing a plate against a wall or shouting an obscenity, dopamine would be released whenever we did that, too. Dopamine motivates us to do everything we do. Dopamine literally is motivation.

The notion that performative gratitude has any inherent value is highly dubious. And I don’t recommend taking up expressing gratitude or finding instances when you can observe other people expressing gratitude, which sounds kind of creepy, in order to generate the release of the dopamine. There are far better ways to generate dopamine and less-creepy things you could be observing.

Wellbeing Enhancement

Most of the cheerleaders for gratitude practice point out how gratitude reportedly enhances our sense of wellbeing—or in some cases, our actual wellbeing. This idea is relatively unexamined, although there’s a tiny sub-genre of writing about gratitude practice that considers the potential negative impacts. The exploration of negative effects, however, is limited to effects on individuals. I believe the negative effects far outweigh the positive and that they extend beyond individuals to groups, societies, and humanity in general.

So…obviously there is more to come.

What Are So-Called
Secondary Emotions?

December 23, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It isn’t exactly news, but the evidence that we are all walking around, unaware, inside our personal fog of vagueness is becoming hard to ignore. We not only lack clarity, but we are also unable to pin down (be specific about) what’s important to us. We use words, we engage in verbal communication, we consider and think about things, but we are often in the dark about the meaning of our own words, let alone the words of others.

So it is not such a surprise that much like investigating the ephemeral concept of empathy, investigating what is meant by secondary emotions leads to less clarity and more confusion. Empathy, as I previously discovered, is not a thing. The same can be said about secondary emotions.

Psychologists, psychotherapists, and other wellness-minded individuals don’t agree on what constitutes secondary emotions in the first place. In other words, the meaning is vague.

“Secondary” as a Characteristic

Some of them believe “secondary” is an attribute of particular emotions, meaning that those emotions labeled as such are never “primary.” But they do not agree about which emotions are secondary and which are primary. Nor is it easy to determine what this theory is based on or how it serves us in terms of survival.

There is a commonly-held belief that secondary emotions “mask” other emotions, but that would actually defeat the purpose of emotions, which is to provide us with information. Emotions are generated by the brain to keep us apprised of our current state of affairs. We may consciously attempt to hide our feelings from others or to change our emotional experience (for which we can’t blame emotions, since they don’t have intentions). But it’s one thing for us to want to keep that information to ourselves; it’s another thing altogether to want to keep it from ourselves.

The brain is attempting to tell us what it perceives we need to know (11 million bits of information condensed into a 40-bit stream); nothing more and nothing less. It’s not playing games with us or actively attempting to mislead us. If, for example, you’re feeling guilty, your brain generated that emotional response based on the circumstances and your personal mental model of the world. The conscious you may not enjoy feeling guilty. Your brain doesn’t care. It’s giving it to you straight—and automatically. It’s telling you that you violated your own moral code in some manner or to some extent. You get to brush it off, distract yourself, examine the situation and/or underlying beliefs, or rationalize it away. That’s on you, not your brain.

The same goes for psychology’s favorite secondary emotion, anger, which I’ve also written about. In that post from two years ago, I mentioned being unsuccessful in my attempt to determine the source of this concept of secondary emotions. I also considered that people who are uncomfortable with expressions of anger might be motivated to view it as a secondary emotion:

I suspect the secondary emotion idea is an attempt to cut anger down to size, so to speak. So-and-so isn’t really angry; he or she is actually sad or anxious or depressed or afraid or hurt: wounded in some manner. They’re not threatening; they’re vulnerable.

Of course, people may also apply this reasoning to themselves.

At this point, I’m more inclined to view the reaction from a broader perspective, though: less as discomfort with expressions of anger and more as discomfort with discomfort. Discomfort with expressions of anger is situational. Discomfort with discomfort is existential.

“Secondary” as a Sequence

Others believe secondary emotions are those that immediately follow the initial, primary, emotion. In that case, “secondary” is not an attribute of the emotion: any emotion can be either primary or secondary depending on where it shows up in an apparent sequence of emotional responses. But is that 10 seconds later, 10 minutes later, 10 days later, or 10 months later?

If you don’t understand that the brain is focused on what to do right now, then it seems conceivable that an emotion you’re experiencing today is a result of an experience you had two days ago. Your brain uses past experience to determine current action, but it doesn’t live in the past. The emotions you’re experiencing now are a response to what is going on, externally and internally, in the present.

I don’t know what makes a secondary emotion, in this context, significant. Are there always secondary emotions—emotions that are a reaction to a previous emotion? (If not, why not?) If so, aren’t all emotions secondary emotions given that there was always a prior emotion? But then the term is meaningless because there are no actual primary emotions. There are just emotions, one after another. Which, as it turns out, happens to be the case.

Categorizing Emotions

There are many different ways one could classify or categorize emotions. The brain categorizes things in order to get a quick grasp of what something is and how it pertains to us so it can figure out what to do about it. Speed is of the essence if you’re pursuing rewards but even more so if you’re dodging threats. Classifying emotions as primary or secondary is completely unhelpful to this process. In my opinion, it’s nothing more than psychobabble. Classifying emotions as good or bad may be easier to justify (potential reward or potential threat). But it’s not fail safe given that context and personal neurochemistry play a bigger role in determining how we experience an emotion than these black or white categories suggest.

What I’ve learned from those who specialize in researching the origins and functions of emotions is that there are many benefits and few, if any downsides, to getting granular (specific, not vague) and to getting comfortable experiencing a wide range of them.

Procrastination Is NOT a Thing

July 1, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I just read another article about self-sabotage—which is also not a thing. Your brain does not have ill intentions toward you; believing that it does is irrational. This particular article used procrastination as evidence of the brain’s self-sabotaging tendencies.

The word procrastinate is meant to describe delaying or postponing taking a particular action: the emphasis is on not doing something. But when we’re awake we’re always doing something. Procrastinating doesn’t mean you’re sitting vacantly in a chair staring off into space or out a window not doing instead of cleaning the house or finishing a report or making that one phone call. No, it means you’re doing something else instead of the thing you think you should be doing. That seems obvious, right?

So why isn’t there a word for eating a cheeseburger for lunch when you planned to eat a salad? Why isn’t there a word for staying up late at night when you meant to get to bed before midnight? Why isn’t there a word for binge-watching a TV show when you intended to go to the gym? There’s only a word for doing one thing when you strongly believe you should be doing something else if it’s based on a real or self-imposed deadline.

There is no substantive difference between doing something other than the thing you think you should be doing, whether that involves what you eat, when you got to bed, how much exercise you do or don’t get, and say, when you complete a report or project.

All these incidences of doing something other than what you think you should be doing have a couple of things in common. One is the false belief that understanding the benefit of a particular behavior ought to automatically cause us to “do the right thing.” But understanding has no direct impact on behavior. So it’s completely unsurprising that we’re likely to do whatever we’ve been doing rather than do something different based on information or vague desires to shape up or be better.

Rewards ARE a Thing

Another is the fact that the brain moves toward what it believes will provide a reward and away from things it considers a threat. That means we’re inclined to do things that give us pleasure and avoid things that provide less pleasure or may even amp up stress neurochemicals.

If you like cleaning the house or writing reports or eating cheeseburgers or watching You Tube videos, you’re likely to do more of those things and less of other things. This is why we use rewards to motivate us to do things we don’t otherwise get pleasure from when we’re doing them but nevertheless want to have done. This is called using your brain. If you decide your problem is procrastination, however, you have diagnosed yourself with an imaginary condition that you have to explain (why do I sabotage myself?) and treat. Or you may simply use this imaginary condition to explain yourself to yourself and others. Neither approach will generate any change in behavior. There’s no solution to the problem of procrastination because procrastination is not a thing.

There is one difference between the behaviors that fall under the category of procrastination and other behaviors like the ones I used as examples. That difference is time. You can convince yourself you’ll choose the salad tomorrow or the next day; you can get to bed on time…eventually; you can start going to the gym next month. But if something has a deadline, you don’t have more time than that.

Nevertheless, moment-to-moment, the brain still moves toward what it thinks it will like and away from what it thinks it will dislike. A deadline in the future, with potential negative or positive consequences, is not compelling to the brain until the task becomes an emergency. Failure to eat a healthy diet or get enough sleep or enough exercise are not, moment-to-moment, perceived as emergencies by the brain because we believe that we have more time to get them right.

If you look at all these behaviors through the same lens, though, you can see that they all involve doing something in the present that we understand would be a good idea (good for us in one way or another) but that we don’t particularly want to do right now. We may believe that we should want to do them right now, but the fact is that we don’t.

The belief that we should want to do things that we don’t want to do because we know they’re good for us is one of the most counterproductive beliefs we can have. It’s an enormous obstacle on the path of creating any level of behavior change, let alone transformational change.

What would it look like if you gave this belief up? What might then be possible?

Although I haven’t mentioned specific neurotransmitters in this post, it is part of the series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.