A Gateway to Virtue.

“Gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life.” -Jack Canfield

Gratitude is such a powerful concept, essential to our being and pivotal to our life, that I keep coming back to it. After exploring gratitude through appreciation, expressing it, finding gratitude when it’s hard, and giving, a deeper philosophical question emerged: How does gratitude influence our success, shape our perceptions, relationships, and worldview? Let’s explore.

1. Passive Gratitude

What is this gratitude filter through which we view life? Most of the time, we don’t consciously think about it. But we all have filters, the habitual ways of thinking that help us make sense of the world. In the short term, our sense of gratitude seems to depend on our circumstances: we’re either feeling temporarily blessed when things go well, or disappointed when they don’t. In the long term, it seems it can depend less on circumstances and more on personal leanings as we develop perspective.

Unfortunately, our gratitude filter is easily influenced by the nature of modern media coverage. The constant stream of urgent, negative, and polarizing news about everything that is going wrong in the world distorts our sense of reality. Doom and gloom news sells because it grabs our attention—but it stains our worldview, our gratitude filter. It makes us feel pessimistic and hopeless. It constantly sets us back to focusing on circumstances. All this can impair our ability to feel grateful.

Additionally, we’re saturated with a plethora of social movements and injustices that can feel overwhelming. It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s going on, and in the macro, there’s very little we can actually do. While there’s no shortage of real issues to solve, it all just ends up making us feel powerless and eventually indifferent.

This media-induced pessimism and exposure to global issues affect our ability to be deeply grateful for life, for the world, and for humanity. It makes us reactive rather than actively shaping our worldview. If we let ourselves fall into mindless passive gratitude, our mood and thus our decisions become easy prey to external influences.

2. Active Gratitude

We’re so busy that we forget to pause to consider how actively cultivating gratitude might help reshape our worldview. While constant exposure to global problems exacerbates our perception of life, we must ask: Is the present really that bad and the future that bleak?

While maintaining gratitude is important, we must acknowledge that problems do not fix themselves. Embracing gratitude doesn’t mean we take life for granted or become complacent. We must still develop thick skin, grit, and not be naive about life’s harsh realities. Rather, it catalyzes our resolve to tackle upstream kinds of problems with optimism, clarity, and determination.

It instills something crucial: the belief that you matter, what you do matters, and that we’re collectively building a better future. Active gratitude involves recognizing, regardless of our life stage, that not everything we’ve accomplished or possess, we have solely earned, nor is everything we’ll do entirely within our control. Gratitude leads to humility. Humility encourages acceptance. And acceptance enhances gratitude. We do our best, and we learn to let go. The individualistic nature of modern culture has us fooled. We’re conditioned to believe that all outcomes depend strictly on us. We’re indeed responsible to a significant degree—but that’s not the whole picture.

By cultivating gratefulness for the life we’ve been given, and being mindful of our potential, we can remind ourselves in challenging moments that we matter, and that life itself is a miracle. I believe life wants to see us thrive. Perhaps we can all be a little less fearful about that doom and gloom future the media portrays. We can choose to believe that we can succeed in whatever we choose to pursue. This perspective resonates with Paulo Coelho’s insight: “When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.”

Perhaps the universe does quietly conspire for our success, scheming for a better world with more connection, meaning, love, and purpose. What is this universe? You can define it as you see fit—but it’s the belief that there’s something bigger than ourselves. What matters is embracing gratitude until we deeply believe life is designed to see us joyful and fulfilled. It’s quite the stark contrast to the hopelessness induced by social media, news consumption, or really anything political these days. Instead, active gratitude makes us hopeful, confident about the future, and eager to continue contributing to the world.

3. A Philosophy of Gratitude

A philosophy of gratitude is an underlying understanding of how we measure our life. It explores the gap between the tangible aspects of our lives and those that cannot be measured: visible value and subtle, often overlooked, value. It is particularly focused on what cannot be measured but remains fundamentally and uniquely valuable to the human experience. Once we immerse ourselves in this state of mind—mindful about what truly matters in our lives—we’ll intuitively understand that gratitude cannot be purchased or be easily measured, yet it’s vital to our well-being. Let me explain.

A philosophy of gratitude is essentially about recognizing that life’s best gifts are already present. However cliché, it bears reminiscing about: the grand beauty of life is here and now, with you and your loved ones. If you recognize this truth, I believe it opens a window to experience life differently, beyond its demands and expectations. Whatever the circumstances, we can breathe, do, think, move, and enjoy the simple things we never had to work for—these overlooked life miracles we were freely granted.

From the moment we set foot in school, we begin this long journey to “make it.” Making it means successfully graduating, getting a job, and finally buying your way to happiness. Of course, we need resources. And of course the quality of your life depends on your ability to generate resources. However, nowadays and perhaps more than ever, we’re oblivious to the development of our human values. From school to the remainder of our adult lives, we’re now (men and women alike) exclusively prioritizing a career, and becoming increasingly selfish. Many want to keep their money to themselves—even within married couples—all in the pursuit of a modern, materialistic definition of success.

A philosophy of gratitude is like an antidote: it makes us less selfish and less entitled. Most importantly, it helps with the development and adoption of human virtue in our lives. What are we missing in our lives? I believe we’re all yearning for more virtue and less vice. According to Scott Jeffrey: “Virtues are ideal qualities and attributes considered beneficial for every individual within society. In the context of virtues, what is considered ‘beneficial’ is morally good or desirable for every human being.” However, society rewards self-centered individuals and organizations. Professionals only care about others to the degree that it’s also profitable. That’s part of capitalism. But we’re paying dearly with a society that’s increasingly lonely, depressed, and less fulfilled.

While organizations focus on missions, visions, and values, I think we would benefit more from developing personal missions, visions, and virtues instead. Our school system prepares students to be successful college candidates, but we should be focusing on developing students with strong character traits. For the first time in my life, I’m learning what virtue is and how to begin cultivating it in myself. I feel like pursuing virtue would naturally bring us inner peace. It’s like surrendering to what keeps us whole and in harmony with ourselves. Why not take it more seriously? Resisting virtue may very well be one of the root causes of unhappiness.

Gratitude paves the way. To be truly grateful, we need to step outside ourselves to contemplate a different perspective. Figuratively stepping out helps us see what matters, what’s virtuous, and how we might live differently—perhaps not as a replacement for our regular lives, but at the very least as an enrichment to them. A philosophy of gratitude is like a bridge that connects us with human virtue.

Consider a life guided by Socrates’ four cardinal virtues: prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance. Or the four Brahmaviharas in Buddhism: benevolence, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Can you imagine approaching each day with the wisdom and courage to face adversity? With the fairness to treat others justly, and the temperance to live in balance? These are the real life skills that we don’t teach. These human virtues represent timeless wisdom that we can all cultivate through effort.

While this may seem overwhelming, our journey begins with a simple step: moving from reactive to mindful gratitude, and ultimately to a philosophy of gratitude—a deep appreciation for virtue and life. By doing so, we’ll recognize that gratitude is truly a gateway to a fulfilled life through transforming how we live, connect, and grow in virtue.