Like many subjective feelings, "gratitude" is fuzzy and varies in meaning from person to person. It also takes on somewhat different implications from culture to culture: direct translation is tricky because of the addition or subtraction of secondary connotations within different communities.
In general, though, to be grateful means you have a sense of appreciation, either for something specific and concrete, or in a general sense of being satisfied with the broad state of things in your life.
That latter sense is possibly a more modern interpretation of the concept, derived from older, religious and spiritual conceptions of gratitude.
Gratitude for one's life would have traditionally been aimed at one's deity of choice, and in the modern Western world in particular—which is becoming increasingly secular—that sometimes translates into being grateful for one's life and aiming that gratitude at a vague, life-shaped concept or energy, rather than a god or spirit who may have traditionally been thought to be literally responsible for that life.
Wherever it's aimed, though, gratitude is also sometimes blended with a sense of indebtedness, and thus personal diminishment: you give me money I desperately need and I am grateful to you for that money, but in a manner that lifts you up while implicitly lowering me beneath you.
There's some literature on this topic that links gratitude of the traditional sort with personal submissiveness or even abasement, then (in the sense of submitting oneself to one’s god), but the more contemporary conception of gratitude is often the opposite: it's associated with a branch of psychology called positive psychology, and within this schema, gratitude is considered to be both therapeutic and personally uplifting.
Since the turn of the century in particular, an array of studies have shown that allowing oneself to feel grateful—and actually seeking it out, making a habit of feeling gratitude—can make us measurably happier, can increase our positive affect, can reduce stress and anxiety, can temper depression, can amplify the positive aspects of therapy, can help us sleep better, can lower blood pressure and reduce the symptoms of illness, can help us ignore aches and pains, can make us more resilient, strengthen our relationships, make us feel closer to family and friends and our communities, can improve our relationships with our romantic partners, and can lead to more equitable divisions of labor, promote forgiveness, make us more altruistic, and help us feel more satisfied with our lives.
Important to remember, here, is that there's an ongoing replication crisis in fields relevant to this topic, so there's a chance some of these studies won't replicate and thus might be nonsense, or not as clean-cut in their findings as they currently seem to be.
But there's enough data here—even if some of that data could be questionable—to make this concept a potentially compelling tool for therapy and personal growth.
Gratitude practices also seem to have few or no downsides, as they typically involve consciously setting aside a few minutes a day to think about things you're thankful for, making sure to thank people who have done nice things for you over the course of your life, or formalizing that practice into writing: keeping a gratitude journal and writing in it each night before going to bed, for instance.
Part of the appeal of this concept, then, might be that it's such a low-effort practice to apply, and the benefits may be substantial, even if they are someday shown to be partly (or mostly) placebo.
Paid Brain Lenses subscribers receive twice as many essays and podcast episodes each week. They also fund the existence and availability of all the free stuff.
You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.
You can also support all my work (and receive gobs of bonus content) via Understandary.