Episode 05: Forced Thankfulness

In this episode of Disrupting Default, we expose gratitude for what it's become: a performative productivity hack that's selling your authentic feelings back to you.

We explore how thankfulness has been weaponized into instant content. Post it, get your dopamine hit, move on – gratitude has become the same kind of quick fix as two-day shipping. When did feeling grateful turn into performing gratitude for an audience, complete with curated Instagram stories and corporate-mandated "What are you grateful for today?" training sessions?

This episode traces our gratitude crisis back to its transformation from genuine appreciation into transactional performance. Your brain can't be tricked into feeling thankful just because you wrote it in a journal for 90 seconds. That's not reflection – that's checking a box. We've turned gratitude into another metric of optimization, another way to perform "wellness," another item on the self-improvement to-do list.

Tune in to discover why real gratitude requires slowing down (the opposite of instant gratification), and why the pressure to be publicly, constantly thankful is making us less connected to actual appreciation. Spoiler alert: gratitude can't be rushed, optimized, or accelerated – and that's exactly why it matters.

Perfect for anyone who's ever felt guilty for not feeling grateful enough, or wondered why their gratitude journal feels more like a chore than a revelation.