Then why call it "gratitude" instead of calling it what it is, to wit: appreciation? Obviously the proponents of gratitude meant something more than appreciation.

'Gratitude' or 'thankfulness' sound like they'd induce more humility than 'appreciation'.

To appreciate can mean to understand or recognize. Art appreciation doesn't quite mean gratitude towards art, as far as I can see.

Consider, 'I am grateful for the grace of God' or 'I am grateful that fate has spared us'.

Then try, 'I appreciate the grace of God' or 'I appreciate that fate has spared us'.

Appreciate sounds almost haughty and egocentric in comparison.

If I appreciate my food the focus can still be on me, maybe I can even relish how my oh-so sophisticated palate is able to extract wonders from the food, indeed how amazingly I'm able to appreciate the overall art of cuisine (or anything else).

If I am 'grateful' for the food, such a stance seems difficult. It's hard or silly to think of oneself as excelling in gratitude. Of course it can be done (and is always annoying to witness) but it seems harder to keep up as it's more obviously self-contradicting than garden-variety egotism.

So it seems that 'gratitude' suggests a more measured relationship between object and subject, and does a better job encouraging humility.

Good response, I agree.

Except of course for the connecting of appreciation and egocentrism.

I can appreciate eating a delicious croissant, for example, savouring its buttery flavours as experienced on the tongue without egotistically thinking of "my" oh-so sophisticated palate. Moreover the word "appreciation" does not necessarily imply selfish thinking of any such sort.

Of course gratitude is not taught in such "mundane" contexts of sensately enjoying eating a croissant. It is always about some "higher" things like God or your childhood hurt memories or "food" (as nourishment rather than sensory pleasure).

And humility is a core part of gratitude. Yet humility exists to counter pride (one can't help but be proud of being humble.). Humility and pride are two sides of the same coin, and appreciation has got nothing necessarily to do with either of them.

Have you had a bad experience with spirituality or something? You sound hella mad my friend and it's not a good look.

People invested their time and effort in this course. The least you can do is be grateful that there are such people on the planet who care about the wellbeing of others.

Who hasn't had a bad experience with spirituality?

This is the same kind of thing that's used to promote anti-vax campaigns and scam people out of thousands of dollars for fake medical treatments.

I think a lot of people have had both positive and negative experiences with spirituality (which I want to emphasize is not synonymous with "religion", which I think provokes stronger emotions for a lot of people). Similarly, I've had both good and bad experiences with public transportation, which I think is also fairly common. There are plenty of things that I've had bad experiences with that I still find useful due to other experiences that were better.

Why not just intelligently respond to my questions/ comments instead of projecting your feelings ("hella mad") onto me? Did what I write offend any of your sensibilities?

You inserted the concept of spirituality in an attempt to take some kind of stance; that was never present. You fabricated that, then complained when you were downvoted for being obtuse, and you keep complaining about lack of intelligent discourse while ignorantly hammering at a point that doesn't exist here.

Would you please stop with this flamewar? You've posted 20 times in this thread already and taken it way beyond pale. HN isn't for this kind of thing, so please don't do it here again.

Edit: I had to warn you about this just two days ago. If you keep doing it we are going to have to ban you, so please review the site guidelines and don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My understanding is that gratitude is the standard term for that in the context of mindfulness.

I'm doing this class and I don't think there's any essential difference between gratitude and appreciation. Call it however you want, those are just names for particular practices anyhow.

The "gratitude" definition you give seems to be a special case of "appreciation"; I honestly don't see how appreciating and returning kindness could be objectionable.

You're raising a lot of interesting points; I appreciate it! (No pun intended)

I think that meditation might be better viewed as a practical tool that assists in doing what you are suggesting. The idea would be that meditation trains you to focus on the present, objective reality which would in turn make you more likely to appreciate a cup of coffee. My understanding is that at least in the Buddhist tradition that is the stated purpose of the basic breathing meditation that most people are familiar with.

Thats not to say that it might not be an ineffective tool, but I don't think its necessarily contrary to the approach that you are talking about.

Could you explain more about how you would approach things as opposed to gratitude? I think I'm understanding now what you are getting at, but I'm not sure I'm understanding the practical steps that you are advocating as an alternative to meditation.

> Could you explain more about how you would approach things as opposed to gratitude? I think I'm understanding now what you are getting at, but I'm not sure I'm understanding the practical steps that you are advocating as an alternative to meditation.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905620

> Write a thank-you note.

> Thank someone mentally.

> Keep a gratitude journal.

> Count your blessings.

> Pray.

> Meditate.

I don't really see the first two things as being specifically spiritual, and I don't see it as much of a stretch to see that they can help with mental well-being. The third one is somewhat recursive, so I obviously can't argue that it isn't specific to gratitude.

The next two definitely feel spiritual, but I feel like they could pretty easily be expressed with "appreciation" and still be spiritual, e.g. "appreciate your blessings" or "appreciate the presence of god".

I'll be honest and say that from my naive understanding of meditation, I don't exactly know how it falls into the "gratitude" bucket. If I were asked to describe what "meditation" is in the spiritual sense, I definitely would have been more like to use the word "appreciation" than "gratitude", e.g. "appreciate one's place in the universe", so I don't really know enough to understand the distinction here.

Overall, to me, this list seems to be a mix of things that are overtly or mostly spiritual and things that don't seem particularly spiritual to me. Maybe it's just my lack of knowledge about this sort of topic, but I'm still not seeing any huge distinction between the two terms based off of those quotes. I definitely agree that from them, the course definitely seems to have a spiritual bent, but the word "gratitude" at least to me doesn't have anything to do with it.

> Where did I write that they are objectionable?

Fair enough; I may have been inferring a tone that wasn't present. It just strikes me as a bit odd that you feel so strongly about the differences between gratitude and appreciation when they don't seem that different to me (and from reading other comments, others seem to share this confusion).

Gratitude and appreciation are different things. I can appreciate an piece of art, it doesn't mean that I am thankful/ grateful for it. There are many things you can appreciate without being grateful - infact, this is inherently the issue that gratitude is addressing, which stems from ego, self-centeredness, thoughtlessness. An easy place to fall into.

What are some examples of things you appreciate (without being grateful) that stem from ego, self-centeredness, thoughtlessness?

The word comes from the Latin appretiare, 'to price' or 'to appraise'.

'Only I can truly appreciate your suffering and your needs, and so only I can lead you.'

How about that?

Perhaps some forms of lust?

To say mindfulness and meditation is pseudoscientific is totally absurd. There's has been a ton of proper science aimed at it, all the scientific consensus is that it has an effect far beyond placebo.

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because some "out there" people also like it. You might as well stop eating healthy because Acai berries are hip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness#Scientific_researc...

Did you read your own link? One line from it mentions the study that actually brought me to this conclusion:

"A meta-analysis on meditation research published in JAMA in 2014,[167] (that included a combined total of 3515 participants), found insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight."

While there may be other with differing results it's... pretty sketchy in any case. I would hardly say scientific enough to belong in such a class.

I had a look at this when I considered meditation once but found it'd most likely just be a waste of my time. I'd rather not flush my time down the toilet.

I started practicing mindfulness after seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist for anxiety. One of the core parts of CPT are learning how to relax your mind (I’d literally have all these thoughts racing through my head that were barely grounded in to any kind of reality). Practicing mindfulness instead of letting my mind wander into dark places effectively cured me of my anxiety. And that’s not just one anecdote, CBT is the gold standard in science-based therapy right now.

That quote is very dishonestly misleading, as the same study found it had evidence of improved anxiety, less depression and pain.

You also cherry picked the negative paragraph for some reason, despite the above paragraph on the Wikipedia article citing a newer meta study with other positive results.

I only focused on the JAMA study as I'd seen it before, sorry about that I see it may have looked pretty slanted now, I wanted to have a better look at the positive metaanalysis, however the link on wikipedia was broken, look at where it points on wikipedia, you'll see "Cite error: The named reference Gotink was invoked but never defined (see the help page)."

I'm not disagreeing with you about that depression and anxiety thing, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest it to a generally mentally healthy person.

Finally someone on HN who is not gaga about meditation. :-P

In my understanding, meditation simply enables one to develop a heightened form of emotional detachment that may help deal with life's vicissitudes. Of course, that's again treating the symptoms and does nothing to cure the unhappiness.

Note that most of the research referenced there isn't properly controlled - it's sort of hard to control for something like that, you'd have to have a therapy that could offer something comparable without matching it, so comparing it's effectiveness to placebo seems in some ways quite apt.

<I mean the whole idea of "mindfulness" and "meditation" are the sort of pseudoscientific bullshit>

A good book to go down a scientific path is "Why Zebras don't get ulcers" by Dr Robert Sapolsky. Dr Sapolsky is professor of biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford.

His book helped me understand the physical effects on my health caused by my stressful company work environment. In short - our primate bodies have a fight or flight response to stress resulting in spikes in blood cortisol, muscle tension, gastrointestinal changes etc.

Once you understand how mind affects the body then it becomes possible to see how breathing and relaxation (mindfulness/meditation) can undo the effects of stress that we battle in our daily lives.

Of course there are other ways towards well-being. I found the tips in 'Getting Things Done' very useful in reducing anxiety. Switching to 'Eat food, mostly plants' advice is helping in mood and energy levels.

It makes you feel better, even if unmeasurably. It belongs more with the arts rather than sciences - people will do it even if there's never any p-value that gets significant. The "is good for you" in the scientific sense aspect is not that important.

Again, just to stress it out - the scientific aspect is not much relevant. From the science department I only care about it not doing harm.

I'd happily take an effective placebo. Remember, placebo effect is real and apparently the reasons for it are psychological.

The broad dismissal of entire fields of practice as placebo effect is itself a pseudoscientific reduction of science to a narrow band of European cultural practices labeled “science” then used to indulge discriminatory impulses against other cultures. The sense of certainty and self-satisfaction derived from this destructive effort is, itself, placebo.

"he broad dismissal of entire fields of practice as placebo effect is itself a pseudoscientific reduction of science to a narrow band of European cultural practices labeled “science” "

It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

'Traditional Chinese Medicine' is effectively bogus, or what we would call 'placebo'. It's not 'racist' to point that out. Chinese Emperor's in the 19th century knew that and banned it, Mao knew it as well (he had a Western doctor for himself) but re-introduced TCM after the civil war because it's the only medicine he could afford. And 'it does work' (i.e. placebo) for quite a number of things.

But 'mindfulness' crosses reasonably into the domain of legit psychological and mental well being and frankly it's not rocket science to start to conceive how 'clearing one's mind', and 'being in the moment' as opposed to living in constant anxiety can be an issue in one's mental well being, just as an example.

So yes, it's soft, and susceptible to a lot of hocus pocus and probably some 'believers and hypers' etc., but that doesn't in and of itself abnegate the real opportunities from it.