Who doesn’t like feeling appreciated? In a culture and at a time when cynicism can carry the day, others’ appreciation matters. We feel noticed, respected, and reassured.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife told me she appreciates how I go about being a dad. She’s not an effusive person who deals in flattery or faint praise. When she says she appreciates me, she means it. I’m touched, and I want to keep doing the stuff that earned her respect and approval. It’s fulfilling in ways few other things are.
Since then, several other people have told me, “I appreciate you.”
I rarely struggle to find words or discern my feelings, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to these “I appreciate yous.” I felt uneasy and obliged to reciprocate, but I resisted because the sentiment seemed contrived. “I appreciate you” means something more to me—something that can’t be enforced by a contract I never signed.
Confused, I pondered these recent, seemingly random “I appreciate yous” for some time. It wasn’t the act of expressing appreciation in the workplace that felt off. Many times over the years I’ve expressed appreciation to coworkers, and they’ve expressed their appreciation to me. Appreciation is a natural human emotion. In the right contexts and work relationships, I feel honored to express it and grateful to receive it. Something about these “I appreciate yous” was different.
I contrasted them with my wife’s “I appreciate you” and several others from my past. The recent, routinized versions felt oddly condescending, even without a power differential between us. Some of the “I appreciate yous” even felt manipulative—as if to head off any expectation on my part that these coworkers should pull equal weight in our shared responsibilities.
More unsettling was the guilt I felt about my own emotional reaction. What kind of person makes negative attributions about others who say, “I appreciate you?” Me, I guess. Still confused, I turned to Google and the admittedly limited psychology literature.
Gratitude Shaming or Forced Positivity?
Gratitude shaming (Kohli, 2020), a recently advanced though yet-to-be studied concept akin to weaponized gratitude, describes how we shame ourselves, or others, to feel grateful rather than what we or they are actually feeling. Initially, gratitude shaming referred to invalidating ourselves (or others) for underappreciating what we (or they) have.
Since then, the term has expanded to include, according to personal accounts, situations such as those I describe—where “I appreciate yous” can be construed as subtle demands for reciprocal emotional warmth, feigned positivity, and contrived recognition. This can alter power dynamics in workplace relationships by pressuring others to withhold honest appraisal and curtail negative feedback through forced positivity—precisely what I felt.
This kind of performative intimacy can undermine workplace trust, reduce productivity, and cause resentment among employees. Hollow “I appreciate yous” have, ironically, the opposite effect of the real thing. Rather than feeling noticed, respected, and reassured, we can feel patronized, wary, and oddly diminished.
Is It Performative?
Now that I have words for and an understanding of performative intimacy, how should I handle it in real time? I have no power over my coworkers’ behavior in such situations, and even if I did, exerting it would cause more damage to my relationships than any satisfaction from confronting the issue head-on.
The phrase “I appreciate you” has exploded in the English language and continues to gain steep traction, as the adjacent Google Ngram analysis shows. Given this, its original meaning—the meaning I’m used to as a middle-aged man—will naturally become relaxed and perhaps change entirely.
If I’m to feel contented in the workplace, I need to embrace a second meaning of “I appreciate you”. After all, when used in the sentence “I appreciate you”, appreciate is a performative verb. And that’s okay.
