The Gratitude Diaries Read online

  “You could run your own experiment,” Seligman said with a smile. “I’ve never thought of doing more than one gratitude visit, but see what happens if you do three over the year. Or twelve.”

  On the train home, I thought about a gratitude letter I’d written years earlier that still made me feel good. At the time, I was editor in chief of the largest-circulation magazine in America, reaching some 72 million people every week. I’d done a cover story on President George Bush when he was in office, and when Barack Obama was elected president, I thought it would be a great coup to have him write a cover story for the weekend before his inauguration. I spoke to his communications guy, who pointed out, reasonably enough, that the president was saving all the good stuff for his inaugural address. What did I have in mind that would be worth writing and wouldn’t conflict? I had about thirty seconds to come up with a persuasive idea.

  “Maybe the article could be a letter to his daughters about what he hopes for them in the next four years,” I suggested.

  “Not bad. Let me check,” he said.

  Within an hour, I had the reply. Obama liked the idea and would start writing. But as the deadline for closing the issue approached, I still hadn’t received it, so I called again.

  “I’m anxious to see the president’s story,” I said.

  “So are we. He’s actually writing this one himself,” said his communications chief.

  The article arrived that afternoon, so beautifully written that I didn’t change a word. (Trust me—that’s unusual. Even in a piece from the president.) When the issue came out, the president’s letter got a rapturous reception and international attention. A couple of years later, the president turned the letter to his daughters into a children’s book.

  All the excitement around the article and the praise I got for publishing it made me reflect that good ideas—even “original” ones—came from somewhere. The seed for mine occurred years earlier when a rabbi we knew talked about writing an “ethical will.” Typical wills dealt with money and property, he said, but shouldn’t we also leave our children a record of our values and hopes, our dreams for their future? He read aloud the letter he had written to his then toddler daughter, talking about morals and values and the kind of person he hoped she’d marry. Moved by both his sense and his sensibility, I went home and wrote my own ethical wills to Zach and Matt, then just four and two. Tears streaked down my cheeks as I tried to imagine not being with them as they grew, so I used this letter to tell them what I thought mattered, what I hoped they would find in life. I sealed the envelopes and put them in a safe.*

  That powerful experience had been in the back of my mind when I suggested the president write a letter to his daughters. And when the article came out, I sat down and wrote another letter—this one to Rabbi Jeffrey Segelman. I told him how his words had resounded through the years, stayed in my heart, and sparked an article that millions of people had now read.

  I am so grateful for the inspiration you gave me these many years ago and proud to share it, I wrote.

  Recognizing how someone has contributed to your life makes you feel deeply just how interconnected we all are. The rabbi sent me a gracious thanks, but I was probably more moved by writing the letter than he was by receiving it. Marty Seligman was right—a very sincere expression of gratitude makes you happy. His studies found the glow could linger (and even fight depression) for several weeks. And here I was, several years later, still feeling good about a gratitude letter.

  Following in Seligman’s positive-psychology footsteps, a number of academics have started to do gratitude research—some of them setting up rubrics and definitions for what makes us feel grateful to another person. I’m not sure I agree with all of them. For example, one popular line of reasoning holds that we feel more gratitude when something is costly—whether in time, effort, or money. So we thank the friend who drops us at the airport when he’s going anyway, but we’re much more grateful to the neighbor who goes out of her way to drive us. We also appreciate actions done voluntarily and altruistically—that is, the person didn’t have to do it. One research survey I saw raised the question of how grateful you’d be to a person who jumped into a lake to rescue you if you were drowning. Very grateful, probably. But how about if he were a lifeguard? Would you be equally grateful to someone just doing his job?

  Personally, once I’ve stopped coughing up water, I’m not going to be making a lot of distinctions about who dragged me to shore.

  Sitting on that train, I thought that the best kind of gratitude is the one you feel in your heart, not your mind. The rabbi I wrote to had given his advice as part of his job, but I was grateful for the wisdom and power of his words. All the techniques that Marty Seligman recommended—journals and photos and letters and visits—were just ways of helping us get into the moment and see the beauty of the world and the people in it. Amtrak isn’t known for inspiring epiphanies, but looking out the window, I felt a deep sense of bliss.

  —

  My new grateful attitude hadn’t improved the weather this winter, but I’d started to bring my own bit of sunshine into every day. My efforts to live gratefully were starting to add up. The first month of my project, I’d made saying thanks to my husband into a daily game, but now it was completely natural—and made us both feel good. I was still writing regularly in my gratitude journal, though three times a week seemed like a better rhythm for me than every night. That way it remained exhilarating, rather than a chore.

  Looking for the positive in every event had changed my attitude—and it was also fun. I felt liberated to understand that it wasn’t events that made me happy but how I chose to frame them. Whatever happened in a day or week, with my husband and children, with passing incidents on the street, I had more control than I realized. I could decide to feel annoyance and torment—or I could decide to feel joy. It still required some conscious effort, but gratitude was helping me to feel the joy.

  PART TWO

  SPRING

  MONEY, CAREER, AND THE STUFF WE OWN

  We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

  —Thornton Wilder

  CHAPTER 5

  How Diamond Rings Shrink and Memories Grow

  Grateful . . . to learn that I don’t need “stuff” to make me happy

  So glad for experiences that I can remember

  Lucky to jump off the wanting-more treadmill

  Being grateful for the people in my life over the last few months was changing my experiences and my view of the world. As I looked around my house, I wondered if the next step should be appreciating all the stuff around me—like photographs and furniture, artwork and knickknacks, new TVs and old toys. I liked most of the things I already owned, but I didn’t feel like thanking any of them. I wondered if it was new stuff that made us grateful.

  So on a Saturday afternoon when Ron had office hours, I headed over to Bloomingdale’s—in the name of research, of course. The fitting rooms were crowded in the clothes departments so I went for the quicker pleasures of housewares. Prettily patterned dishes were on sale, and even though I didn’t need them, I happily bought half a dozen yellow cereal bowls. Very cheerful! And how about new velvety towels? Some pastel colors would brighten our bathroom and look lovely with the new pale-green sheets I also bought (no-iron to make my life easier). Drawn to a display of cooking tools, I snagged a ceramic paring knife with a bright teal handle for only nine dollars. Given the price, I could buy two. I left the store laden with big brown shopping bags. It had been fun to buy, but as I walked home, the bags felt very heavy.

  By the next day, the purchases weighed even heavier.

  I wanted to be grateful for my new stuff, but the zing I’d gotten from buying was already gone. Most of us do our part to keep the consumer economy thriving. We buy when we’re happy and buy when we’re bored. Walmart boasts that most Americans live
just six miles from one of their stores, but suburban malls are closing down as online shopping makes our desire for instant gratification even more instant. Very late one night, I bought a decorative pillow from my favorite home-and-accessories site, One Kings Lane. No reason to wait for daylight to shop. The immediate rush from that Buy button was so satisfying that I bought another pillow two nights later. And that was just the start. The UPS delivery guy was at my door so often I felt like I should serve him coffee.

  Online retailers have sales in the hundreds of billions and they’re soaring to the stratosphere. But once we get all that stuff, what do we do with it? The editor at a women’s magazine once told me that her best trick to increase newsstand sales was the cover line “Get Organized!” I went over to the drugstore to see if that wisdom still held, and sure enough, half a dozen magazines offered tips to declutter storage spaces, organize closets and cabinets, and enjoy a neater home. I bought the one that promised techniques to tame clutter—as if our belongings were wild animals that needed to be whipped into shape. It’s not just magazine editors who know that our possessions start owning us, rather than the other way around. The Container Store, which exists solely to sell products that let us sort, store, and stow away stuff, is a $750-million-a-year success story.

  Writing in my gratitude journal after my visit to Bloomingdale’s, I tried to extol my purchases, but I couldn’t work up much genuine feeling. The cereal bowls were fine for serving Rice Krispies, but I had the feeling that in the long run, they wouldn’t add much snap, crackle, or pop to my life.

  The next day, I got in touch with Tom Gilovich, a behavioral economist at Cornell who has done years of research on the connection between how we spend money and how happy we are. His big finding is that the objects we buy—cars, computers, and big-screen TVs—can seem exciting for a while, and you might be delighted the first time you watch Avatar at home in 3-D. But material possessions are never quite as satisfying as we think they’ll be. His research found (over and over again) that people get more lasting joy from experiences than from objects. Taking a vacation at the beach, going to a concert at Carnegie Hall, or throwing a family barbecue in the backyard is likely to bring an enduring satisfaction that the TV (alas) does not.

  The problem with stuff is that we get used to it. We want something and want it, but as soon as we have it, we stop noticing or stop caring. It’s the same problem of habituation that I mentioned earlier. We’re not ingrates—we’re just creatures of our nerve cells, which respond vigorously to new stimuli. When those brain neurons see something new, they get all charged up, but when they recognize a familiar form, they fire less frequently. From a survival standpoint, that makes sense. You don’t have to pay much attention when there’s a steady state, because things that have been around for a while are less likely to cause danger. So the neurons can stay quiet. But a new arrival on the scene, whether person or possession, is reason for full alert, and our neurons respond appropriately. Quick! Look up! Is that flying object a bird, a plane, or Superman?

  The stimulation of those nerve cells firing makes us feel excited and alive. It’s a good feeling, so we constantly seek out the unexpected stimuli that will get them charged. The state of heightened attention that once worked to keep us safe from charging tigers now makes us eager to buy home accessories online at midnight. Smart marketers (like those at One Kings Lane) change their sites frequently so our brain cells never fall into adaptation mode. In other words, all the pretty pillows flooding into our house aren’t really my fault. My neurons light up at what’s new and tell me buying is the right thing to do.

  Trying to battle our natural adaptation, we keep shopping and acquiring in what is clearly a game with no end. According to Gilovich, the possessions you accumulate just raise your expectations for more, and you’re really no better off than when you started. I dubbed it the Porsche in the Garage Syndrome in honor of a guy I knew years ago who talked endlessly about wanting a Porsche 911 Carrera—the smooth handling, the sleek lines, the admiring glances from people driving Hondas! He finally splurged and was completely thrilled the first time he slipped into the soft leather seat and roared from zero to a hundred in ten seconds. (Forget the speed limit—it’s a Porsche.) But after a few weeks of driving, he got as annoyed as always when traffic was heavy or he couldn’t find a place to park. The magic chariot he had dreamed about was now just a car sitting in his garage that needed an oil change. And who fantasizes about that?

  I first experienced a version of the syndrome when I was a little slip of a girl taking ballet classes—and the head teacher announced that I had mastered the pliés and pirouettes well enough to advance to a class en pointe. Toe shoes! I couldn’t have been more thrilled if Baryshnikov himself swept in and carried me away in his arms.

  But my mother objected, worried that toe shoes would ruin my feet. I cried that she was ruining my life. I begged. I pleaded. I tried to explain that if I had toe shoes, I would be forever happy and joy would reign in the universe. One day when I stayed home from school with a sore throat, I imagined that if I had toe shoes, I would tie them on to lie in bed and immediately feel better. In my mind, they acquired the powers of pixie dust.

  My mother finally gave in, and the day we bought the first pair remains vividly in my mind. The pink satin ribbons felt like gossamer in my fingers, and I strapped them lovingly around my ankles.

  The thrill lasted—at least an hour.

  Though the pointe shoes remained silky smooth and sweetly pink, they lost their magic. If I’d loved ballet, it would have been different, but it was only the toe shoes I loved. (I always knew that when I grew up, I’d be more likely to write stories about a prima ballerina than become one.) As with most possessions, they had more power when I wanted them than when I had them.

  So is there a way around the syndrome?

  The obvious answer is to keep upping the ante. When you’re tired of the Porsche, get a Ferrari. When toe shoes lose their luster, try . . . tutus? The problem is that it doesn’t work. Psychologists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” You buy one thing you want, and when it’s not quite satisfying enough, you buy another. And then another. Each may be fancier or more expensive, but the cycle never stops. You can keep upping all you want, but each time you set a new baseline, the urge for more starts all over again. As Professor Gilovich explained, “You reach one target and you want another.”

  My friend Lauren prepared for the follies of habituation when she got engaged some years ago and her now husband gave her a fabulous diamond to mark the occasion. The first time she flashed her four carats at me, I gasped.

  “Your ring is huge!” I said.

  “Everyone tells me that it gets smaller as you wear it,” she said with a laugh.

  Diamonds being one of the hardest minerals, you wouldn’t expect them to wash away like grains of sand. But our eyes adjust, so Lauren knew to be ready for an ever-shrinking stone. I hadn’t seen her in a while when we had lunch again not long ago. Her sparkling ring caught my eye and I told her that I’d almost forgotten how gorgeous it was. She looked surprised and held her hand out in front of her, as if studying the stone for the first time.

  “I never even notice it anymore,” she admitted.

  The not noticing anymore is why it’s so hard to be grateful for the things we own. I happened to walk by a shiny Apple store the day the iPhone 6 was first released, and long lines of people snaked around the corner, eager to replace the gizmo they had with the gizmo they wanted. Apple sold ten million phones in the first three days, and at least that many millions of people will probably line up when the next model is released. (They may be in line right now.) Whether it’s Apples or cereal, you can get heartburn trying to keep up with the next new thing you hope will make you happy.

  Gilovich had recently expanded his work to examine the connections between the stuff we buy and how grateful we feel. He did a variety of experiments to find out wh
at purchases could inspire gratitude, and his conclusion was that stuff—however fancy, shiny, or expensive—just wasn’t going to do it. Then he compared how people felt about money they’d put toward a material possession versus money they’d used for an important experience. Where did they get the most gratitude bang for the buck?

  “By and large it’s not an acquisition that leads to gratitude,” he told me. “People report feeling more gratitude for their experiences than for their material possessions. If you think about meals you’ve had with family members, great concerts you’ve seen, vacations you’ve had, you are much more likely to feel grateful that it was money well spent.”

  I asked Gilovich why it is (beyond habituation) that acquisitions don’t make us grateful. He pointed out that experiences define us in a way that objects really never do. You might like to think of yourself as a hiker, a skier, a dancer, or a concertgoer—and you can relish activities that support that image. But my friend Lauren would be horrified (and probably never talk to me again) if I referred to her as the woman with the big diamond ring, and a guy who tries to impress with his Porsche just comes across as sad. Enduring happiness—the kind that veers all the way to gratitude for life—needs something deeper and more substantive.

  Psychologists talk about the “endowment effect”—which means that once you possess something, you start to attribute all sorts of advantages to it. People given an inexpensive trinket like a pen or mug during an experiment immediately think of it as theirs and don’t want to trade. But even that only goes so far, because one big problem with trying to be grateful for stuff is that you’re always comparing what you own to what someone else does. You may be excited when you buy a new laptop computer, but when a friend shows you that hers is faster and lighter and makes animated movies better than Pixar, yours no longer seems so perfect. Some of your pleasure goes out the window. You could have bought a better one!