Why I Stopped Taking ‘Be Grateful’ as Career Advice
For a long time, I thought gratitude was the secret ingredient to success. I believed that if I kept my head down, smiled, thanked my boss for every little thing, and repeated to myself “be grateful you even have this job,” everything else would fall into place. I thought gratitude would make me stand out. I thought it would earn me respect, advancement, and peace.
But it didn’t.
Because gratitude, when handed down as career advice, is not about keeping you humble. It is about keeping you small.
Image Credit: Midjourney AI
I can still remember the times it came up most clearly. When I wanted to grow, the reminder came: “Be grateful you already have what you do.” When I asked for recognition, I was told, “Not everyone gets this chance.” When exhaustion caught up with me, the response was, “You should count your blessings.” At first, I thought these were lessons in perspective. But they weren’t. I wasn’t being encouraged to be grateful. I was being told to stop asking for more.
And the more I listened, the more it cost me. Every time I swallowed my ambition, I shrank. Every time I accepted less in the name of gratitude, I betrayed my potential. Every time I told myself I should be thankful for the bare minimum, I silenced the part of me that wanted to thrive.
Over time I realized this wasn’t just coming from well-meaning coworkers. This was the script of corporate America. Executives and CEOs love to talk about gratitude because it keeps employees quiet. They say, “Be grateful you still have benefits,” even though half of them were stripped away. They say, “Be grateful you don’t have to work outside,” while demanding you sacrifice your family and your health. They say, “If this isn’t for you, find someplace that is,” which is just another way of saying do not expect us to change.
And here is the dangerous part. This messaging doesn’t just create complacency, it creates fear. It trains people to keep their heads down, to take abuse, to allow toxic environments to continue unchecked, because they have been told that speaking up risks everything. Instead of standing together and saying “No, this isn’t acceptable,” people are pressured to whisper “At least I have a job.”
But if someone unemployed looked inside these walls and saw what employees are really forced to swallow, would they even want that job? Why would anyone aspire to enter a system where their effort isn’t valued, where their humanity is secondary, where gratitude is used as a muzzle? If survival is the only reward, then people will do the bare minimum to survive. They will find ways to make just enough money without giving their heart to a company that does not care. And then corporations wonder why employee engagement is low.
The contradiction does not stop there. How do these companies expect to have customers if their customers cannot even afford the products they sell? They cut wages, limit benefits, and keep people living paycheck to paycheck, then act surprised when no one is buying. Gratitude will not fix that imbalance. Gratitude will not put money back in people’s pockets. Gratitude will not build loyalty when the system itself is broken.
That is when it clicked for me. Gratitude in this context isn’t advice, it is manipulation. It is a corporate survival tactic, not a personal one. And once I saw that, I could not unsee it.
So I stopped taking “be grateful” as career advice. I stopped mistaking silence for strategy. I stopped apologizing for ambition. Because gratitude has its place in life, but not as a leash. Gratitude is the soil. Ambition is the seed. Without both, nothing grows.
And if you have ever been told to shrink under the weight of “just be grateful,” I hope you stop listening too. Because gratitude was never meant to be a cage. It was meant to be a celebration. And the best way to celebrate your life, your work, and your future is to demand better than survival.
We do not need more grateful employees. We need workplaces worth being grateful for.
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