Gratitude Burnout and the Radically Amazing Guitar

My wife of 30-plus years, possesses many strengths and talents—one of them is her uncanny ability to find a gift that resonates with the lucky recipient. And sometimes, that fortunate person is yours truly. One afternoon she called out to me from our kitchen and told me that she’d purchased a used guitar for my son Isaac. “Can you put some strings on it?” she asked. I strolled into his bedroom and sure enough, a worn cardboard-and-vinyl case sat on the bed. I’ve seen hundreds of these over the years, and this one could only hide a thrift shop special or some such bowed-neck misfit worth $100 at best.  As I opened the case thought, “Too bad my wife went and bought this piece of crap guitar without consulting me."

But what I saw inside stunned me: the most beautiful acoustic guitar I’d ever seen, a jet-black Martin with white herringbone trim and an inlaid ivory neck, straight from some Johnny Cash wet dream. The guitar even brandished an outlaw name equal to its beauty: The Martin OM Negative!“How cool!,” I thought. “How utterly rock and roll!” 

Clearly, my wife hadn’t purchased it for my son. But she knew exactly what this guitar would mean to me, and that surprising me with the funny used-guitar-for-Isaac ruse would make me love it all the more. The guitar in all its stunning physical radiance surprised and delighted me enough. But I felt—and still do—that the thoughtfulness behind it held even more significance. Why? Because my wife's intuition regarding the single greatest material item I could ever hope to own was accompanied by a generosity that linked spirit to spirit. To me it read: ‘I know you and therefore I know the things you love, and I care about those things simply because you do.’ For me to feel known in that way was to feel deeply loved—and to feel loved so deeply known. 

The Zulu greeting “Sawubona”means, “I see you”; the traditional response, “Yabo, sawubona!”means: “Yes, I see you, too!” or “I see you seeing me.” Inherent in this greeting is the sense that until you saw me, I didn’t exist. When you stand before me, when you recognize me and acknowledge me, you bring me into being.

Truly thanking someone means that we see and grasp the nuances of what we’ve received. A grateful mindset shows our attunement to the time and effort it takes to bring a particular thing into our lives. In other words, a real “thank you,” real gratitude, connotes something of a meditation. It implies that we grasp some cognizance of our love, not only for the gift, but also the giver. Conversely, a well given gift testifies to the time we take to know and appreciate the needs, wants and desires of the intended recipient. Not just a talent, people with expertise in gift-giving reveal an openness of spirit and willingness to put aside one’s own immediate needs to acutely tune in to the needs of another. 

Gratitude Burnout – Why novelty fades  

Granted, it’s not every day we receive an OM Negative or its equivalent. But if you stop to consider it, every single day of our lives showers us with gifts of far greater weight: the gift of shelter for example, or of friendship, sustenance, health and family. Yet because we receive these gifts so often (or in a continuous, uninterrupted stream) we tend to ignore them or diminish their worth. This stems from something we all experience and psychologists have a name for it: Hedonic Adaptation. I call it Gratitude Burnout.

Here’s a simple way to understand Gratitude Burnout. You buy a new car and for a few days (or perhaps just one) you feel elation. Smell that interior! Look at that paint job! You take pictures and send them to your car-happy brother; you drive your kids to school in it and feel sense of elation. Then, as we so often say of many novelties in life, “The new car smell wears off.” And so we’re off, chasing the next possession that consumer culture can offer in terms of a dopamine shot. Even the ancient Greeks must’ve known something of this spiritual hamster wheel: hedonic stems from their word hedone, meaning pleasure. (Advertisers seized on this long ago, incorporating words such as “spirit,” “life,” and “soul” into their campaigns.)  Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman similarly calls this a “satisfaction treadmill.” It’s an apt description isn’t it?   

We all know this feeling. I know I do. We win an award; we land a promotion; we receive some object we covet. We’re happy. But once a certain amount of time goes by, we get bored with it. Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky have shown that Gratitude Burnout occurs for two simple reasons. First, let’s say you’ve just purchased a new camera. You’re excited and base that excitement on the potential to soon create positive eventsfor yourself. But the “positive events” part represents the key ingredient here—not the camera itself. The novel thing merely acts as a catalyst for real-life experiences; the positive events that take place as a resultof acquiring the novel thing. (Yes, Maria’s gift could well have turned into another “thing.” But as a literal “instrument” of my creativity, its value has grown and multiplied.)

Positive events might look like this:

It’s a beautiful autumn morning. You put on your warm, virile-looking Pendleton sweater and head off into the woods to photograph a family of chestnut-sided warblers. Treading through the woods to follow these rare birds to seize that perfect photo thrills you. After a while you take a breather and check the camera’s LCD screen to review the images you’ve captured. “They’re astounding” you think and you imagine how arresting they’ll look on your New Year’s holiday cards. Now, you sit on a moss-covered log and take a peanut butter sandwich out of your backpack. You feel so content that you wonder if perhaps this isn’t the best peanut butter sandwich you’ve ever tasted. 

You grasp the novelty here, the fresh experiences that envelop you. If you trace them back to their genesis, it all stems from the new purchase. If not for the camera you wouldn’t have experienced “a broader lens” on life. 

While the descent into hedonic adaptation might look like this: 

After a short while, maybe just one day, your camera starts to feel rather familiar. You’re loathe to admit it but by dinnertime your Nikon honeymoon is officially over. The gadget may not exactly bore you, but it, along with the experiences it affords you, no longer thrills you either.

And the hedonic treadmill? Perhaps you’ve already guessed:

The next morning you wake up and it hits you: A new telephoto lens! A new camera bag! Maybe a tripod … and a …  

Brand new birds 

Kennon and Lyubomirsky’s research shows that Gratitude Burnout occurs for a second reason: Even the positive events that inspired our thankfulness can turn stale after a short time. Let’s say you’re still motivated to head off to the woods and take photos. But since you’ve already lived this experience once, you need a brand new bird to photograph or that bigger lens to shoot it with—maybe you need a whole new camera! In other words, your aspiration level has shifted. It used to feel great at say, a 7.5, but to get the same feeling, it now needs to hit an 8.5 or a 9. The former 7.5 no longer suffices. It’s the same camera and the same bird, but now you no longer feel the juice—which in biochemical terms is dopamine, the brain’s reward neurotransmitter. So you just slog along. In “The Brain That Changes Itself,” Dr. Norman Doidge sums up why cameras and new cars lose their luster with a crisp three-word phrase: “Dopamine likes novelty.” 

It’s similar to the lift and letdown we experience after we misplace something and recover it. It could even be trivial. Recently I lost a scarf at the YMCA and afterwards couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I finally tracked it down in the lost and found closet, I was practically ecstatic. But it wasn’t a particular favorite of mine, either. It didn’t take long for the scarf to disappear into a lost and found of a different kind.

Fact: Everything we gain and experience becomes old after a while. Also fact: If we can create—and more importantly, exist—in a dynamic relationship with both the gift and its giver, the treadmill grinds to a halt. We no longer adapt sadly: We adapt gladly and take gratitude by the reins … just as I did with that badass Martin guitar my wife gave me, which has joined me for many a show and inspired me to write many a song.