Perspective

You’ve probably heard a lot about gratitude as a means of improving your mood or your life. You make a daily list of all the things and people in your life that you’re grateful for. It can help put things in perspective.

I call this the “There art thou happy” list. In Romeo and Juliet, after Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt and Romeo has been banished from the city for his crime, Romeo goes crying in despair to Friar Lawrence. The priest runs down a litany of things that have gone right for Romeo, ending each item with “there art thou happy.” You’re alive. That’s good. Juliet’s alive. That’s good. Your sentence could have been death. Be thankful.

You’ll notice that Romeo’s problems literally deal with life and death. For less dramatic issues, I suggest the following tactics.

The “Could be worse” list

Look on the bright side by naming the bad things you could be experiencing but aren’t. In Young Frankenstein, while committing the tiring, filthy and unpalatable task of digging up a body in a graveyard, Igor looks on the bright side and says, “Could be worse. Could be raining.” Of course, the strategy immediately backfires on him when it starts raining. If you want to practice this one without the comic irony, you could substitute something more catastrophic than rain. It could be your “Could be worse. Could be a giant meteor wiping out the Earth” list. Add items like “Could be abducted by aliens“ or “Could be gored by a rhinoceros,“ as appropriate.

Ditch the list

Sometimes it’s hard to make the list. All those things going wrong for you are dominating your thoughts and you’re too cynically close to it all to feel grateful for anything. Then skip the list and give in to fatalism. In the old Bill Murray summer camp movie Meatballs, Bill gives the misfit camp kids a pep talk when they despair about the prospect of losing miserably to the more physically coordinated rival camp in an athletic contest. He leads them in the chant, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”

This is a great approach for those little everyday problems that rub you raw. Your boss tells you your work stinks. Your car/water heater/cell phone breaks down. Are these serious problems? Sure. But do they constitute the end of the world? Or even the most horrible thing that could ever happen to you? Nah. In the long run, it just doesn’t matter.