Let’s talk about gratitude fatigue, shall we?

Yes. We shall.

There are limits to how long you can be truly grateful for something. As someone who has been dependent on the kindness and forbearance of others for my entire life, I can attest to this personally. Every human faculty has human limitations and sooner or later, whatever it is gets tired and the energy powering it is exhausted and the show ends.

I’ll give you a simple example.

Say a co-worker graciously offers to pick you up on the way to work every day. This helps enormously. It saves you a lot of money and time and hassle, and you are super grateful to this person.

And you thank them many times over the next few week, to the point where you can tell they are getting annoyed by it, so you stop.

Fast forward three months. This nice person has picked you up every work day quite reliably ever since they started. You have gotten used to it. It’s a routine part of your day, just like your morning cup of coffee.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, that co-worker tells you that you are taking them for granted and do not appreciate what they are doing for you and they have half a mind to just leave you waiting some morning to teach you a lesson.

And you protest that you still appreciate what they are doing for you and they tell you that you have a funny way of showing it and that you just expect that ride like they owe it to you and would it kill you to kick in some money for gas now and then?

And now you are in a bind. Because you know that, on one level, you are guilty as charged. You have fallen into simply assuming you would have a ride to work every day and you have been getting in and out of the car like it’s a taxi and not a favour someone is doing you and maybe you could have offered to chip in for the gas money, even though they never asked you for any.

And yet, deep down, you don’t really feel like you did anything wrong and you want to defend yourself from this charges and retain your self-respect, but you don’t know how to do so without coming across like exactly the sort of ungrateful prick you are accused of being. Plus – brass tacks time – you don’t want to lose the ride.

Well the problem here is one of articulacy. What you need to say is that you are sorry if you don’t seem as grateful as you did in the beginning BUT nobody can maintain a high level of gratitude over a long period of time.

Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with expecting something that has happened dozens of times in a row to happen again. Even if it is something with a strong human component like someone doing you a favour. Over time, the person getting the favour will inevitably begin to expect it and not show a lot of overt gratitude simply because it has become a routine part of their life.

Essentially, the honeymoon period of this particular relationship is over and it will never again feel like it did in the beginning. That kind of emotional reward relationship is golden and wonderful but it isn’t sustainable.

It’s kind of like how lottery winners are, of course, super hot dog amazingly happy at first, and have a hell of a lot of fun for a while, but if you catch up with them two years later, they are no happier than anyone else.

Eventually, whatever it is becomes the new normal and life settles back into its usual balance and you are left with the exact same human issues as everyone else on the planet : the search for love and acceptance, conflicts between personalities, the people you love the most being the people who can also hurt you the most, and so on.

Human beings adapt to their situation. It’s inevitable. If we did not, the stress of a new situation would wear us out and we would have a nervous breakdown.

Back to the car. As you might have guessed, I have been in the exact situation I have described apart from the having a job part. But I never learned to drive, let alone been able to afford a car, and so I have needed a lot of rides in my life.

So I have had a lot of time to think about what exactly is going on there. And for a long time, I had no response to the situation other than to feel terrible about it and hate myself and conclude I must be a shitty person to take people who are helping me out of the goodness of their hearts for granted like that.

In other words, it just added to my depression.

But over time and through my recovery, I have come to recognize that it is a lot more complicated than that.

It’s not fair to punish someone who is dependent on you for depending on you when you volunteered for the job. It’s not wise to expect to get the same reward from doing a good thing for someone every single time you do it till the end of time. And it’s not right to take your frustrations out on someone you know can’t fight back and who has no choice but to take it.

Even if they do seem to be taking you for granted. That’s just the term we use to describe the falling off of emotional reward involved in doing good for others.

I am not saying anyone in the situation is blameless. People who are both smart and wise realize that relationships required maintenance and that usually comes in the form of the expression of things like appreciation, gratitude, and acceptance.

I am just saying the honeymoon always ends.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.