The Surprising Truth About Thankfulness: It’s Not About Being Happy

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a tourist attraction called Polar Caves guides visitors through granite passageways formed at the end of the last ice age. Some of these crevices have names that perfectly capture the feeling of being in a tight spot: “the lemon squeeze” or “the orange brush.” They are a potent metaphor for those moments in life when the boulders are pressing in, when we feel squeezed by disappointment, grief, or struggle. What does it mean to be grateful then?

Our conventional wisdom suggests that gratitude is the happy feeling we get when good things happen to us. But this understanding might be entirely backward. True, resilient thankfulness isn’t about pretending our problems don’t exist. It’s about discovering a profound and unexpected strength not in spite of our hardships, but directly through them.

Here are four surprising insights that reframe the entire concept of gratitude, turning it from a passive feeling into an active, life-altering practice.

Gratitude Isn’t for What Happens to You—It’s for How You Cope

The common assumption is that we are grateful for positive events—a promotion, good health, a peaceful day. But gratitude can be a much more powerful and active practice. It is not a feeling that arrives when circumstances are perfect, but a practice of recognizing the inner resources we find to deal with negative events.

This is the kind of radical thankfulness practiced by St. Paul. While he called on others to rejoice, he did so while being brutally honest about his own suffering. He didn’t pretend life was easy; he acknowledged its crushing weight and then celebrated his ability to endure it. As he wrote:

We’re hardpressed on every side, but not crushed. We’re perplexed, but not in despair. We’re persecuted, but not abandoned. We’re struck down, but not destroyed.

This is a profound shift in perspective. The gratitude isn’t for being “hardpressed” or “struck down.” It’s for the discovery that we are not crushed, not destroyed. It is a thankfulness for the courage, resilience, and inner resources we didn’t know we had until we were tested. By turning our attention away from the event and toward our own coping, we find a source of strength that cannot be taken away by circumstance.

We’re Often Hungry for the Wrong Things

In the Gospel of John, a crowd follows Jesus not because they understand his message, but because he miraculously fed them loaves of bread. They are satisfied, but only for a moment. Jesus challenges them, pointing out the difference between the “food that perishes” and the “true bread” that satisfies our deepest hungers.

This serves as a powerful metaphor for our own lives. We often think that what we hunger for is a trouble-free existence, material comfort, and a life free from pain. These are the “food that perishes”—temporary comforts that never truly fill us. Our deepest hungers are for something more enduring: for love, for beauty, for connection, for a sense of truth in our lives.

Ironically, these are the very things we often discover not by avoiding hardship, but by navigating it with others. The truest nourishment is found when people walk alongside us in difficult times, helping us to bear the unbearable.

The Most Powerful Expressions of Gratitude Are Born from Suffering

If you look at the origins of some of our most cherished traditions of thankfulness, you won’t find stories of peace and prosperity. Instead, you find tales of unimaginable suffering. Two of the most traditional Thanksgiving hymns are perfect examples.

The first, “We Gather Together,” did not emerge from a peaceful harvest. It was written during the Dutch war for independence against Spain—a long, brutal, and terribly bloody conflict. It was composed as a testament to faith and endurance in the midst of terrible violence, after a battle that marked a turning point in the war.

The second hymn, written by Martin Rinkert, has an even more harrowing origin. Rinkert was a pastor in a small German town during the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict so devastating that in many parts of Germany, at least half the population died. As the only surviving pastor in his town, he watched his wife die from famine-induced sickness and personally buried over 4,500 people. It was in the depths of this despair that he wrote his iconic hymn of thanks. These hymns are not thankful because life was good. They are powerful expressions of gratitude for the ability to cope, for the inner resources that allowed them to endure when all seemed lost.

Gratitude Ultimately Has a Human Face

When we are in the deepest pits of despair, divine help can feel distant or non-existent. The theologian Lewis Smedes knew this feeling well. He struggled with severe depression for much of his life and wrote with candor about his gratitude for Prozac and other antidepressants that helped him through hard times.

But even with modern medicine, he sometimes fell into a dark hole of depression. During one of his worst periods, he felt completely abandoned by everyone, including God. In that darkness, only one person remained by his side: his wife, Doris. As he began to emerge, he had a profound realization: “God is in Doris.” He understood that divine love and support often don’t appear as a cosmic intervention, but through the simple, steadfast, loving presence of another human being. This experience led him to a conclusion that is the bedrock of true gratitude:

Look hard enough at any gift we receive that we’re grateful for. And if we look back far enough, we’ll find a human face, someone in the difficult moments of life who embodied God’s love to us.

Gratitude, in its most profound sense, is for the people who show up. It is for the ones who help us make it through the lemon squeezes and the orange brush of life, embodying a love that makes the unbearable bearable.

It’s Not Happiness That Makes Us Thankful

If you have been waiting for happiness to arrive before you feel thankful, you may have been waiting for the wrong thing entirely. The profound wisdom passed down through ages of human struggle suggests the formula is reversed. Gratitude is not a reward for a perfect life. It is a tool that allows us to find the good even when life is far from perfect. It is the practice of seeing our own strength, of recognizing our deepest hungers, and of honoring the human faces that show us love along the way.

It is a lens that changes how we see everything, especially our struggles. And in doing so, it opens the door to a deeper, more resilient kind of joy. As thinkers like David Steindl-Rast and Henry Ward Beecher have observed, “It’s not happiness that makes us thankful. It’s gratefulness, thankfulness that allows us to see the good things.”