Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books)

by A.J. Jacobs

Another study summarized in Scientific American finds that gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being and good relationships, beating out twenty-four other impressive traits such as hope, love, and creativity. As the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast says, “Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.”

But the result of this negative bias is that we are awash in modern-day anxiety.

“What’s upsetting is when people treat us like machines, not humans,” Chung says. “When they look at us as just a means to an end—or don’t even look at us at all.”

If something is done well for us, the process behind it is largely invisible.

We overemphasize individual achievement when, in fact, almost everything good in the world is the result of teamwork.

Fighting this bias requires an active strategy. A commitment to noticing.

When I ponder the number of gratitude recipients involved, I start to get dizzy.

In Paleolithic times, my project would have been much easier. But with globalization—which I do think is a force for good, despite its many pitfalls—thanking everyone involved in my cup of coffee could be a lifetime job.

Maybe the guy who drove the warehouse truck blasted Beyoncé to stay alert. “That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think?” Julie says. “Yes and no,” I say. We are all so interconnected; it’s hard to know where to draw the line.

Thanking Beyoncé is just too far afield. I need to limit myself. Maybe I’ll just try to thank a thousand people. That can be my goal. Thanks a thousand. It’s huge, but manageable.

“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”

So that’s a goal for this project. Avoid complacency. Make certain that gratitude is a spark for action,

So up here in the Catskills, dams were built, fields flooded. The lakes swallowed up eleven towns and thirty-two cemeteries. Gone were farms, blacksmiths, schools, and shops. Thousands of the locals were kicked out and lost their jobs.

This is a huge theme I need to remember as part of Project Gratitude: My comfort often comes at the expense of others.

As her head rests on her pillow, she’ll go through the alphabet from A to Z and try to think of something to be grateful for that starts with each letter—A for her husband Andrew’s blueberry pancakes; B for bocce, her favorite game in the summer; etc.

But instead of succumbing to my default complaint mode, I’m trying to put my minor ailments into perspective. Which is why I’m reading this list of diseases that I do not have.

but while I’m moderately healthy, I need to be more aware of it. I need to cherish it.

“It’s important to try to be grateful for things that wouldn’t even occur to you,” Will advised. It’s hard not to take the existence of arms for granted. But it’s worth the effort.

But one strategy I’ve found useful is the memento mori, the reminder of death.

I’m reminded once again how grateful I am to have been born in 1968, not 1868, because the good old days were not good at all. I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking. I used to write a magazine column in which, each month, I would research just how horrible the previous centuries were—disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous. I wrote about food, but also childrearing (opium lozenges to calm kids), clothes (tiny-waisted corsets that deformed women’s bodies), and jobs (nightmen, the eighteenth-century workers who would haul manure from houses). We have huge challenges now, no doubt, but the solution doesn’t lie in a return to yesteryear. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly annoyed about something—the rattle of the air conditioner, say—I’ll repeat a three-word phrase: “Surgery without anesthesia.”

“For an invisible object, [pallets] are everywhere: There are said to be billions circulating through the global supply chain. Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets.

The idea of Effective Altruism is to rigorously calculate which charities help the most lives on a per-dollar basis. It’s moneyball for saving the world.

If I had to put numbers to it, 20 percent of my fate has been determined by hard work and persistence, and 80 percent has been cosmic Powerball.