Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books)

by A.J. Jacobs

Earlier this year, in an attempt to battle my default mental state (generalized annoyance and impatience), I undertook a deceptively simple quest. I pledged to thank every single person who made my cup of coffee possible. I resolved to thank the barista, the farmer who grew the beans, and all those in between.

According to the research, gratitude’s psychological benefits are legion: It can lift depression, help you sleep, improve your diet, and make you more likely to exercise. Heart patients recover more quickly when they keep a gratitude journal. A recent study showed gratitude causes people to be more generous and kinder to strangers.

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. Gra...

we are awash in modern-day anxiety. We often see our lives as problem after problem, crisis after crisis. Many of us live in what some psychologists call the “deficit” mind-set, not the “surplus” mind-set. We spend far too much time fretting about what we’re missing instead of focusing on what we have. I needed a mental makeover, and a gratitude project could

My goal for this project was to flip my ratio: By the end, I wanted to spend more than half of my average day experiencing gratitude and mild happiness. Or at least not outright irritation.

coffee has a huge impact on our world. More than two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day around the globe. The coffee industry employs 125 million people internationally. Coffee is intertwined with politics, economics, and history. The Enlightenment was born in Europe’s coffeehouses. Over the centuries, coffee has helped create international trade and shape our modern economy.

The act of noticing, after all, is a crucial part of gratitude; you can’t be grateful if your attention is scattered.

“I see my job as getting them coffee, but also making them happy.”

She won’t miss the occasional feeling that she doesn’t exist at all. “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.”

I know I’ve treated many others—waiters, delivery people, bodega cashiers—as if they were vending machines. I sometimes wear these noise-cancelling headphones when running errands, so that just makes me look more aloof and unfriendly.

“Grateful living is possible only when we realize that other people and agents do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Gratitude emerges from two stages of information processing—affirmation and recognition. We affirm the good and credit others with bringing it about. In gratitude, we recognize that the source of goodness is outside of ourselves.”

But Ed’s true love is coffee. He’s smitten with it, head over heels. Some proof? He spent his honeymoon taking a five-day coffee-tasting course in Massachusetts. On his days off, he goes café hopping and “gets wasted on espresso.” He talks about particular cups of coffee the way some people talk about long-lost girlfriends.

The very fact that Ed thinks so deeply about my coffee is part of the reason I don’t have to think about it at all. It’s a key reason gratitude is so difficult to maintain, and why it takes so much effort and intention: If something is done well for us, the process behind it is largely invisible.

author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman (no relation to Ed), who taught a popular course on positive psychology and gratitude at the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted a little background on the science of thankfulness. “Gratitude has a lot to do with holding on to a moment as strongly as possible,” Scott told me. “It’s closely related to mindfulness and savoring. Gratitude can shift our perception of time and slow it down. It can make our life’s petty annoyances dissolve away, at least for a moment.”

it’s hard to be grateful if we’re speeding through life, focusing on what’s next,

“It’s kind of odd that you’re featuring me in your book,” he says, as we sit down. “Because I’m usually more of a background guy. I’m a bassist.” He means that literally. Ed plays bass guitar in a band called Erostratus, an alt rock group that sings songs about heartbreak and alcohol . . . “The usual,” as Ed says. “I like being the bassist,” he says. “Everyone wants to be the lead guitarist or lead singer, and we need those. But we also need bassists. I’m necessary, but I’m background.” On my subway ride home, I can’t stop thinking about Ed and his humble but essential bass guitar. It’s a wonderful metaphor for my project.

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

Psychologists have a name for this failure to acknowledge and thank collaborators: the “responsibility bias.”

the man who patented the press-down tab is a notorious billionaire who renounced his U.S. citizenship to live in Belize, the Caribbean tax haven.

coffee lids are a huge business. Over 1 billion are sold per year.

When it’s effective, gratitude should be a two-way street. It should be helpful to both the thanker and the thankee. It’s not just a self-help tool, it should brighten other lives.

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.

I recently read a Wharton study that concluded that people who say the phrase “I am grateful” are seen as more genuinely thankful than when people simply say “thank you.”

the phrase “thank you” is too often seen as robotic, a mere verbal reflex. If you switch it up with other gratitude phrases, maybe it will jolt people awake, cause them to take notice.

There’s a great quote from the man who founded Habitat for Humanity that describes this phenomenon. He said: “It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”

I ask if I can take a thank-you photo, since I’m making an album of all the thankees. Four of the guys—including Eric and Lee—say yes. But there’s another long-haired man sitting on a forklift. He waves me off. He’s not interested in being thanked. I’m not sure why. Maybe he thinks it’s condescending to be thanked. Maybe he just wants to be left alone to do his job. Maybe the other guys do as well but are too polite to say so.

That weekend Julie and I take the kids on a trip to visit our friends Ruti and Andrew in Rhode Island. Ruti is an international relations professor at Providence College. I tell her about Project Gratitude. “Are you serious?” she asks. “You know I just taught a course in the economics of coffee?” I did not know that. I don’t believe in fate, but I can still be grateful for life’s little serendipities, and this is a wonderful one. Ruti spends the weekend talking to me about the supply chain. “One thing to remember: Don’t whitewash the process,” she says. “Some of these plantations are barely better than slave labor.”

just keep in mind there’s a lot of oppression on the path that coffee takes.”

Coffee causes much good in the world, but it also causes massive suffering.

Drinking coffee delivers little bursts of dopamine to millions of people every day. It has provided the fuel for many great works of art and engineering. Beethoven famously had a cup every morning (exactly sixty-four beans), and Balzac downed an alarming fifty cups each day.

Coffee is an enormous economic engine for prosperity. Coffee provides jobs for an estimated 125 million people worldwide.

A group called ClimatePath estimates that one pound of coffee—growing, packaging, shipping, etc.—creates five pounds of carbon dioxide. And that’s not to mention the billions of discarded plastic coffee lids floating in the Pacific. Or how coffee plantations are wiping out forests in Central America.

I don’t want to be so thankful that I start to believe the world is perfect. Which some people argue is the greatest danger of gratitude. Author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a New York Times op-ed a few years ago called “The Selfish Side of Gratitude.” In the piece, she says that gratitude can be the enemy of positive social change. She sees gratitude as an opiate of the people. Walmart employees are told to embrace gratitude instead of complain about their low pay. Ehrenreich even hints that the gratitude movement is a right-wing plot.

Scott says, to my great relief. “Actually, it’s the opposite. Research shows that people are more generous and pro-social when they feel gratitude.”

Grateful people volunteered to help far more often. They paid it forward.

when I’m feeling grateful, I’m happier, and more likely to think of others. I’m more likely to empathize, to volunteer, to donate money to good causes. When I’m cranky or depressed, I revert to the selfish mind-set. “My life is miserable, so why should I bother helping anyone else?”

Writing thank-you notes. I carve out an hour around lunchtime every day and write about ten notes that I send off via email, LinkedIn, and good old-fashioned paper envelopes. The etiquette books say the more personal the better, so I try to add details,

Coffee is just a small part of coffee. The ratio in my cup is 1.2 percent crushed beans, 98.8 percent water. So if I’m going to thank everyone involved in my cup of coffee, I better thank those who provide the vast majority of the liquid.

In one day alone, New York City consumes enough water to fill ten Yankee Stadiums.

My comfort often comes at the expense of others. I benefit daily from the disruption to this community. I need to be more grateful for these sacrifices.

New York water is tested 2.2 million times a year. They’re testing our water for more than two hundred substances.

I’m with the CDC, which said the addition of chlorine to drinking water is one of the ten great health achievements of the twentieth century.

I could easily stay for weeks and thank a thousand people for my daily water: the valve-makers, the water scientists trying to minimize the effects of climate change, the folks who mow the grass on top of the reservoir dams. “That’s a tough job,” says Adam. “These guys are stung by bees. They get smashed in the face by a sumac tree. Inevitably, they’ll step on a hornet’s nest and get stung.”

I recently told a friend about Project Gratitude, and she said she uses a gratitude trick to fall asleep. 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. I figure I should give it a try, but maybe focus exclusively on coffee.

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. Admittedly, this is a risky strategy, depending on your mind-set. If you’re prone to hypochondria, you might start to think, well, maybe I do have rubella.

It’s much easier to be grateful for a good thing (a raise at work, a delicious meal) than for the lack of a bad thing. But both are important.

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

I hate the phrase YOLO, since it can be an easy excuse to act like an idiot and, say, whack mailboxes with a baseball bat. But I do believe in WOLO: we only live once. Live life to its fullest as long as you allow other people to do the same and don’t interfere with the U.S. mail.

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).