A. J. Jacobs - Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey

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Thanks for Serving Me My Coffee

Thanks for Stopping the Coffee from Spilling on My Lap

Thanks for Taking the Heat

Thanks for Filling My Cup

Thanks for Keeping Me from Dying

Thanks for Lugging My Coffee Around the World

Thanks for Getting All the Raw Materials

Thanks for Growing My Coffee

To my family. And everyone else.

Its a Tuesday morning, and Im in the presence of one of the most mind-boggling accomplishments in human history. This thing is so astounding in its complexity and scope, it makes the Panama Canal look like a third graders craft project.

This marvel I see before me is the result of thousands of human beings collaborating across dozens of countries.

It took the combined labor of artists, chemists, politicians, mechanics, biologists, miners, packagers, smugglers, and goatherds.

It required airplanes, boats, trucks, motorcycles, vans, pallets, and shoulders.

It needed hundreds of materialssteel, wood, nitrogen, rubber, silicon, ultraviolet light, explosives, and bat guano.

It has caused great joy but also great poverty and oppression.

It relied upon ancient wisdom and space-age technology, freezing temperatures and scorching heat, high mountains and deep water.

It is my morning cup of coffee.

And Im grateful for it. Really, really grateful.

It wasnt always so. I tend to take things for granted. For most of my life, I rarely thought about my coffee unless it spilled on my jacket or scalded the roof of my mouth. But the last few months have forced me to change that. 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.

That turned out to be a hell of a lot of thank-yous. My gratitude quest has taken me across time zones, and up and down the social ladder. Its made me rethink everything from globalism to beavers, from hugs to fonts, from light bulbs to ancient Rome. Its affected my politics, my worldview, and my palate. Its made me feel delight, wonder, guilt, depression, and, of course, a whole bunch of caffeine jitters.

How did this quest get started? Well, Ive been an admirer of gratitude for several years. Its not an emotion that comes naturally to me. My innate disposition is moderately grumpy, more Larry David than Tom Hanks. But Ive read enough about gratitude to know that its one of the keys to a life well lived. Perhaps even, as Cicero says, it is the chief of virtues.

According to the research, gratitudes 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. Gratitude leads to happiness.

So intellectually, Ive long known gratitude was invaluable. And for a while now Ive made modest efforts to kick-start my gratitude whenever I couldand to instill the value in my kids.

My three boys are required to write old-fashioned handwritten thank-you notes when they get birthday gifts, much to their disbelief.

When Im running errands with my sons, I nudge them to thank the bus driver.

I even tell them they should thank our household robot Alexa when she informs us about the weather.

Alexa doesnt have feelings, my son Jasper will say.

Yeah, but its good practice, I respond.

And sometimes, before a meal, Ill say a prayer of thanksgiving. Sort of. Were not a particularly religious family. Im agnostic, verging on atheist, so instead of thanking God, Ill occasionally start a meal by thanking a handful of people who helped get our food to the plate. Ill say, Thank you to the farmer who grew the carrots, to the truck driver who hauled them, to the cashier at Gristedes grocery store who rang me up.

You know these people cant hear you, right? my son Zane asked me one night.

I told him I knew, but that its still good to remind ourselves of others contributions.

Yet Zanes comment stayed with me. Hes right. Those people cant hear me. My pre-meal thanks are kind of perfunctory.

As I pondered this over the next few days, I wondered if I should commit more fully. What would it be like to personally thank those who helped make my food? Each one of them?

I knew the idea was absurd on one level. Itd be a major headache. Itd be time-consuming and travel-heavy.

But it could also have huge benefits. It might be a nice thing for the people who make my meals possible.

It would show my sons Im serious about gratitude, and that they should be too.

And it might make me more grateful, which would, in turn, make me less petty and annoyed. Because I needed to be less annoyed. Even though I know that Im ridiculously luckyI dont lack for meals and I have a job that I mostly enjoyI still let all the daily irritations hijack my brain. Ill step on our dogs dinosaur-shaped chew toy, or Ill open an email that begins, Dearest A.J., I regret to inform you... , and Ill forget the hundreds of things that go right every day and focus on the three or four that go wrong. Id estimate that in my default mode, Im mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours. Thats a ridiculous way to go through life. I dont want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of the harp music.

Im not too far from the norm. If you believe evolutionary psychologists, all humans are genetically programmed to pay attention to what goes wrong. In Paleolithic times, it had survival value. Your one-thousandth great-grandparents needed to be damn sure they remembered which mushroom was poisonous.

But the result of this negative bias is that 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 were missing instead of focusing on what we have.

I needed a mental makeover, and a gratitude project could be my key to success. 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.

My first task: I had to choose what food item to be thankful for. I considered apples, white wine, and Monterey Jack cheese. (My sons lobbied for smores, since they figured it would increase general smore consumption around the house.)

I thought about nonfood items as well: my pen, my socks, my toothpaste. Almost every object I encounter in my day requires thousands of humans and tons of efforteffort I take totally for granted.