Socratic Gratitude: What are you Grateful for, and why is it Good?
In Plato’s Crito, Socrates sits in prison awaiting execution after having been sentenced to death on questionable charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. His friend Crito arrives at his cell and tries to convince him to escape, explaining that he and several others have already planned and paid for the arrangements. Socrates insists, however, that before taking action they must consider:
“whether we shall be acting rightly in giving money and gratitude to those who will lead me out of here […] or whether in truth we shall do wrong in doing all of this (Plato, Crito 48c–d, trans. Cooper).”
Here Socrates reveals his belief that being grateful for the wrong reasons is a bad thing.
Can gratitude be bad?
The notion that we might be doing wrong in expressing gratitude for something might strike some as odd today. Researchers have amassed a pile of research that point to the potential benefits of gratitude for mental health (e.g. Bohlmeijer et al., 2021), physical health (e.g. Jackowska et al., 2016), and the quality of our romantic relationships (e.g. Roth et al., 2024), among other things. With findings like these, it can be easy to come to think of gratitude as an unconditionally good thing. Can gratitude really bad?
Socrates thinks so (and science seems to be catching up with him – gratitude may indeed be unhealthy if it reinforces unhealthy habits or relationship dynamics [Tosas, 2026]). In fact, for Socrates, nothing is unconditionally good except wisdom as the know-how to make use of all other things. Conventional goods like wealth, health, beauty, and, yes, gratitude, can all be used badly, e.g., in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others (Plato, Euthydemus 279a-280e). Unreflective gratitude may simply reinforce the wrong things.
As an example from my work as a psychotherapist, I once had a client describe in detail how the owner of the company she worked at had systematically violated her boundaries and almost seemed to revel in it. And then she said, “but I have to be grateful for the paycheck.” It’s one thing to recognize that there are elements of good in a generally bad situation, but it’s another to lean on gratitude in the attempt to make ourselves content with situations that we probably ought not to be — a coping mechanism that this person readily acknowledged when we began exploring it.
How do we tell whether our gratitude is beneficial or harmful?
If we accept the Socratic premise that it takes a certain know-how to put gratitude and all other things to good use, this naturally raises the question: how do we get this know-how?
Turns out Socrates thinks we can’t – at least not fully (Plato, Symposium, 203e–204a). The best case, according to him, is that we make steady progress toward wisdom while never fully getting there. So, Socratic wisdom exists on a spectrum. We progress in Socratic wisdom by regularly giving an account of what we believe to be good, then examining whether this account can hold up to scrutiny (Symp. 202a) and rejecting any account that cannot (Plato, Protagoras, 333a). This is the famous Socratic “examined life” (Plato, Apology, 38a). Importantly, our pool of beliefs about what is good is the same pool from which we draw our gratitude. After all, anything that we deem a fitting object of gratitude is something we believe to be good in some way.
So, if we think something is worthy of gratitude, we ought to be able to explain why and defend that account. The more we are able to refine such an account, the better able we will be at determine whether our gratitude itself is good or bad, that is, beneficial or harmful.
Combining a standard gratitude practice with Socratic self-examination
I have been doing gratitude exercises on and off for over twenty years. For the past several years, however, my gratitude journaling has largely taken a backseat to a Socratic-inspired freewriting practice in which I put into words and then examine my thoughts and beliefs about what is good and bad. I have found this to be a rewarding activity that has helped me to learn about myself. But my prioritization of this exercise has caused my gratitude exercises to fall to the wayside (who has time for two writing exercises!?).
Eventually, I started wondering, “can’t I combine these things?” After all, there seems to be conceptual overlap between the practices of counting one’s blessings and giving an account of the good. Both involve reflecting on the things we take to be good. So, to a typical gratitude prompt of “what am I grateful for?” I added on the follow-up question, ”and why is it good?”
Rocket science, it was not. But simple as it is, it has been a surprisingly fruitful exercise. In some cases it has not yielded any great insights but has provided an opportunity to savor gratitude by elaborating on why something in my life is good. In other cases, it has led me to some surprising insights. And in still more cases, it has left me at an impasse that has invited further reflection. I thought I would share an example of one of each here:
Example 1: Clarifying a value
One evening I expressed gratitude for the way my children greeted me with warmth and love when I woke them up in that morning. When I asked myself to account for why this was a good thing, I reflected on my beliefs regarding parent-child dynamics: I believe that, as the parent, I am responsible for setting a loving tone in my relationships with my children. I do not believe I should put the expectation on them to do this. So, when they do set a loving tone, it is truly a gift – something very worthy of gratitude.
In this case, examining the source of my gratitude helped me to clarify my values and increased my gratitude about this gift of affection I had received.
Example 2: Gaining an (uncomfortable) insight
One afternoon I expressed gratitude that my partner RSVPed and bought gifts for a couple of upcoming birthday parties our children were invited to. I reflected gratefully on the initiative and care she took in doing this – the joy the gifts she bought would likely bring to the children, as well as on the sense of belonging and community that the party itself fostered.
Then when it came to articulating why it was good that my partner did these things, it became apparent to me that I had not taken seriously the possibility that I could have RSVPed to the party and bought the gifts. I had simply assumed she would do it, and that was unfair. Sure, partners divide labor, but this was something we hadn’t come to any agreement about. I asked myself, “Is it actually good that I shirked responsibility for this task and now get to bask in the warm glow of gratitude about my partner stepping up?”
To be sure, I didn’t notice myself feeling any less grateful for my partner’s action, but because of this exercise I did come to realize that there was a deeper problem lurking that unexamined gratitude likely would have ignored. Likely, stopping at unexamined gratitude would have reinforced this dynamic. But because I didn’t stop at unexamined gratitude and asked, “and why is it good?” I dug deeper, felt a moderate pang of guilt, and came away from the exercise with an increased feeling of gratitude toward my partner and the resolve to take a more active role in these tasks in the future.
Example 3: Inviting further reflection
One morning I chose to record my gratitude for those who had helped to get the coffee I was sipping into my cup. I tried to envision the farmers from Colombia where this particular coffee was grown, the workers who put it into packages, the crew who transported it overseas, the drivers who brought it to my local grocery store where, the clerk who shelved it, the cashier who rung it up (and I’m sure I’m not even aware of many other links in the chain).
And then I asked, “and why is it good that I am enjoying this cup of coffee?” And this question got a little bit uncomfortable. I had to ask myself whether it is a good thing that I am participating in this chain. On one hand, I noted, by buying the coffee at my grocery store I helped to support the jobs of everyone in the supply chain. On the other hand, I considered the carbon footprint of this cup of coffee. And then I wondered the whether workers in the supply chain were being treated fairly. The questions quickly piled up, and I didn’t have answers to them.
Socrates would be familiar with this experience — he would call it aporia, the Greek word for puzzlement. In fact, many of Socrates’ conversations as portrayed in Plato’s dialogues are referred to as aporetic because they end with everyone involved experiencing aporia. Determining what is good, it turns out, is not as easy as it seems! In my case, I found that my gratitude began to concentrate around the people — unknown to me — who had been involved in this supply chain, while my view of the supply chain itself became ambivalent. My feeling of gratitude gave way to a more complex emotion, something like gratitude augmented by serene melancholy. It was a rich experience, emotionally and cognitively, that has led me to reflect more on a very complex issue.
What are you grateful for, and why is it good?
Giving an account of why I am grateful for things — reflective gratitude, I came to realize, is gratitude with accountability. This is accountability not only to others, but to myself.
Whether you are a seasoned practitioner of gratitude or are totally out of the habit, I would be curious to know your experience when you tack on “and why is it good?” to the question, “What am I grateful for?” I recommend beginning just like you would with a standard gratitude exercise — simply pick something you are grateful for, large or small, mundane or out of the ordinary. Then, do your best to put into words why you think that thing is good.
Sometimes you may find that your answer is pretty obvious or unremarkable. In these cases, simply try to savor the gratitude as you reflect more deeply on how it harmonizes with your underlying values. Other times you may find that as you put into words why something you’re grateful for is good, you hit on an uncomfortable insight or an uncertainty. Stay with it — this is the exercise working (of course, if you hit on something highly distressing, consider working through it with a professional). Recall that in my second example I hit on the uncomfortable insight that I had failed even to consider taking responsibility for buying a gift. By sitting with this insight and not just moving on quickly to some comfortable justification for my gratitude, I determined to make a change to resolve the discomfort by addressing its source — myself. In my third example, I sat with an ambivalence and found my gratitude shifting toward individual people while I reflected more deeply on the uncertainty I had about the value of the system around them. The exercise is an invitation to self-knowledge, if you’re willing to take it.
So, what are you grateful for, and why is it good?
References
Bohlmeijer, E. T., Kraiss, J. T., Watkins, P., Schotanus-Dijkstra, M., Mols, F., & Westerhof, G. J. (2021). Promoting gratitude as a resource for sustainable mental health: Results of a 3-armed randomized controlled trial up to 6 months follow-up. Journal of Happiness Studies, 22, 1011–1032. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00261-5
Jackowska, M., Brown, J., Ronaldson, A., & Steptoe, A. (2016). The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology and sleep. Journal of health psychology, 21(10), 2207–2217. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105315572455
Plato. (1997). Plato: Complete works (J. M. Cooper, Ed.; D. S. Hutchinson, Assoc. Ed.). Hackett Publishing Company
Rosàs Tosas, M. (2026). The downsides of gratitude. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.0.a982281
Roth, M., Good, N., Ledermann, T., Landolt, S. A., Weitkamp, K., & Bodenmann, G. (2024). Building happier bonds: Gratitude as a mediator between dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction in romantic couples. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1452397. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1452397
