The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  Leno saw the cars as an experience in themselves, but possessions can also create experiences. When my terrific book editor Jill and her husband bought their first Volkswagen Jetta, they didn’t care about heated seats or a turbocharged engine—only what the car let them do. Suddenly they could visit far-flung family on weekends or drive friends home from dinner parties at their apartment in Queens. (“We might feel bad asking them to come out here, otherwise,” Jill explained.) For a vacation, they hopped in the Jetta and explored the countryside. The pleasure wasn’t the car, but the adventures the car brought them.

  My husband has a collection of vintage American postage stamps that he started as a kid and has expanded ever since. I walked in on him late one night as he studied a recently purchased 1858 five-cent Jefferson stamp under a magnifying lens, his eyes bright with excitement.

  “You look like a man in the throes of passion,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t trade my wife for a stamp—but this stamp does give me a lot of pleasure,” he admitted.

  So maybe we can experience the cosmic gratitude that Gilovich described through objects that inspire passion. We’re grateful when we feel a real connection—whether to a person, an experience, or a postage stamp. I could be grateful for the few objects that crossed over to experiences (or allowed them), but otherwise, I needed to take the lesson I learned when we moved—I was likely to be better off with less stuff than with more.

  So I found the receipts for my velvety towels, pale-green sheets, and yellow cereal bowls and headed back to Bloomingdale’s. The salesperson was nice about accepting returns. I kept the ceramic paring knife because I didn’t have to be grateful about everything I owned. Once in a while I just needed to be able to cut the cake.

  CHAPTER 6

  Money Matters—or Maybe It Doesn’t

  Grateful to get a new perspective on money

  Thankful to discover how I can make myself luckier!

  Grateful to stop measuring myself with money and just think of its practical value

  When I told my husband that I was going to focus on money this month for my year of gratitude, his lips puckered as if he’d just bitten into a bitter lime.

  “Talking about finances never puts you in a grateful mood,” he said.

  “That’s why I’m going to work on it,” I admitted.

  My husband uses various apps and computer programs to organize our savings and investments and expenses, and every couple of months, I ask him to print out the statements so we can go over them together. It never ends well. As a general rule, I get a shocked look on my face and say, “Is that all?”

  “What number were you hoping for?” he asked me last time.

  I didn’t really have one in mind. Just . . . more than that.

  So my new springtime resolution was to be grateful for what I had in the bank rather than what I didn’t. I decided to start by getting a little perspective on money—because it turns out that how grateful we are for what we earn is all a matter of perspective.

  Standard economics says a dollar is a dollar and it doesn’t matter how you get it or how many of them your neighbor has. But the newer breed of behavioral economists point out that how satisfied we are with our salaries depends a lot on what those around us are making. They’ve done studies and surveys and found that given a choice, most people would be happier earning $100,000 if their neighbors were taking in $75,000 than getting a raise to $110,000 if everyone else around earned $200,000. And asked to look at three years of salaries, most people would rather see the sum start modestly and go up every year, rather than start higher and go down. And they choose that even if the total over the three years was less. Apparently, when it comes to money, we may have dollars, but we don’t always have sense.

  A couple of years ago, a thirty-year-old bond trader named Sam Polk wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that many found infuriating. He explained that he had walked away from Wall Street after he got a $3.6 million bonus and was angry that it wasn’t more. “My guess is that ninety percent of Wall Street feels like they’re underpaid,” he explained later. He admitted that instead of seeing his salary in the context of the world as a whole, he was comparing himself only to the guy at the next trading desk. It’s pretty easy to decide that Mr. Polk was completely delusional. But behavioral economists say that we all have a similar response (though smaller bank accounts).

  Bond trader Polk understood there was something wrong. He decided he had a money addiction and realized that he was on a treadmill that would never make him happy. When he got off, he told one reporter that instead of setting some bizarrely high goal, “my challenge is to accept with total gratitude the life I have already.”

  I discussed this with my husband, who glibly suggested that I didn’t have Polk’s problem—because if I were addicted to money, I’d probably have a lot more of it. But we agreed that before we sat down to go over our finances this month, I would try to figure out what number would make me content. My theory was that I didn’t need a lot to feel grateful. I just needed enough money so I didn’t have to think about money.

  Trying to get a bigger view, I discovered that roughly one-third of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. Most of the poverty is in sub-Saharan Africa, so any of us living in a developed country should wake up every morning grateful for the good luck of where we were born. Back when I’d written those magazine articles with actor Matt Damon, I’d become interested in his charity, Water.org, and even spent time doing a project for them. Unlike many celebs, Damon wasn’t just a figurehead—he had been truly shocked when he learned that some 760 million people on the planet lacked access to clean water. Changing that became an important mission for him (and the subject of our first article together). He regularly went on late-night talk shows from David Letterman to Jimmy Kimmel to explain the need for toilets and running water. But he knew people would rather hear about his latest red-carpet escapades.

  “How many times can you repeat that a child dies every minute from a water-related illness?” he asked me wryly. On the one hand, he knew he couldn’t say it enough. On the other, he realized we don’t easily relate to the deprivations of extreme poverty. Accustomed to turning on a tap, we find it hard to imagine being in the sandals of someone who has to walk miles to a well.

  Looking for comparisons that were slightly easier to grasp, I discovered that economists at the United Nations International Labour Organization had taken a shot at figuring out the world’s average wage and came up with $1,480 a month, or just under $18,000 a year. That’s a bit more in a range we can imagine. (The calculation came with endless caveats and complications and counted only people who got a salary.) When the number crunchers at Gallup took a shot at finding median household incomes all over the world, they spun out numbers from a low of $673 per year in Burundi to highs of more than $50,000 a year in Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg. The United States and the UK came in somewhere around the $40,000 mark.

  Putting those together, I figured that the average person living in the United States (or the UK) had a standard of living about twice the world’s average. But as Garrison Keillor taught us in his stories from Lake Wobegon, we all expect to be above average. And like the guys on Wall Street, instead of comparing our standard of living to the whole world and feeling grateful, we compare ourselves to the person down the street and feel slightly bummed out. Unless you’re Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, frequently number one on the billionaires list, there’s someone better off than you. Think how poor Bill Gates and Warren Buffett feel in the years they slip to numbers two and three.*

  I have a delightful friend I’ll call Abby who is pretty and fun-loving with a sexy style that has always attracted men. Happily married now, she had stayed good friends with a guy she dated years ago. Through a combination of smarts (which he has) and extreme luck (that, too), he had become wildly successful. He picked Abby up one day to
take her to lunch, and as they sat in the backseat of his limousine, he opened the latest issue of Forbes to point out his name on the list of the four hundred richest people in the world. She congratulated him, but he continued flipping the pages of the magazine—and a moment later, he exploded in indignation when he noticed one of his competitors listed twenty places ahead of him. “How could that jerk possibly beat me!” he exclaimed.

  Since she had been his friend well before he became a master of the universe, she had a perspective on just how far he’d come. He obviously didn’t. Having a global business, an adoring wife and children, and fabulous homes in various locations around the world wasn’t enough—he wanted to be twenty places higher on the Forbes list.

  Why do we sabotage ourselves that way?

  It’s easy to laugh at Abby’s Forbes friend or be revolted by the Wall Street bond trader (before his reform), but on our own more modest levels, most of us are probably guilty of the same cutting comparisons. We feel a pang that the people next door can afford a bigger house or a fancier car or are remodeling the kitchen. You don’t want a Viking stove so you can boil eggs faster, but you want it because it costs more, and darn it, you deserve it. (I’ve happily kept my GE Café stove, thank you.) A friend of mine says that the curse of living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is that everyone she knows is richer than she is and eager to flaunt it. But no matter where you live, you can always find someone who has more money.

  A lot of people have done research into money—how we make it, how we feel about it, how it makes us feel—and some of the most interesting research I came across had been done by Paul Piff, an engagingly bright social psychologist now at the University of California, Irvine. Piff recognized how readily we overlook the advantages we’ve been given. In one of my favorite experiments, he invited people to play Monopoly—and made it very clear that the game was rigged. One of the two players (chosen randomly) started with twice as much cash as the other, earned twice as much for passing Go, and rolled two dice instead of one to move around the board twice as fast. Piff noticed that the “rich” players quickly took on signs of dominance, smacking their pieces (they always got the Rolls-Royce) aggressively around the board and celebrating (smugly) each success. When asked to describe the game afterward, the winners pointed out how clever they had been to buy certain properties and earn their victory. “Almost nobody attributed their success to the initial flip of a coin that got them into their position of privilege,” Piff told me with a laugh when we had a long and animated conversation about his work.

  Even when there’s no question that the world has been rigged in our favor, our instinct is to explain that we deserve what we got. Did the winning players appreciate that they had started with $2,000 instead of their opponent’s $1,000, or that they received $200 rather than $100 for passing Go? Well, sure—but that was less important to the outcome than how brilliantly they had played (or so they claimed!). Piff said that our minds tend to make sense of positive experiences in terms of internal attribution. “That’s antithetical to gratitude, which says I’m not necessarily entitled to the good things I have, but I’m lucky to have them.”

  An old Ray Charles song has the line “If it wasn’t for bad luck . . . I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” Funny, but also profoundly true about how most of us mistakenly feel. There’s no real answer to the question, “What am I worth?” so we take whatever we currently have as the baseline. From there, the only way to go is up, and if that doesn’t happen, we bemoan our bad luck. But it never occurs to us that some of our good fortune is also at least partly luck—and we should be grateful for it. Instead of thinking it unfair when something goes wrong, shouldn’t we just be grateful when something goes right?

  Piff created the Monopoly game for its obvious real-world parallels to so many people—from offspring of privileged families to just about anybody who has been helped along the way to wealth and doesn’t want to admit it. Piff told me that he remembered watching CNN sometime after the Wall Street bailouts and hearing interviews with guys cavorting with their colleagues in bars. They all explained that they had succeeded because of their own business acumen and know-how and that the bailouts had nothing to do with it. That the Treasury Department was spending up to $700 billion to save the situation that these guys had screwed up didn’t seem to affect their reasoning.

  “Wealth gives rise to an increased focus on oneself and a decreased focus on the external environment,” Piff said. “There’s a bias to construe the good things that happen in terms of what you did to deserve them.” And to forget to thank the people who helped you succeed.

  Fascinated by how money changed people, Piff did another study to compare the driving habits of people in expensive cars (like BMWs) versus economy models (like Toyotas). In California it’s against the law not to stop at a crosswalk, but watching at one busy intersection, he found that 50 percent of the people driving the BMW equivalents didn’t pause for pedestrians. Every one of those in modest cars followed the law and stopped.

  Between the BMW drivers and the Monopoly players, it became pretty clear to him that money gave people an undue sense of entitlement. Appreciative of others? Not very much. Their increased self-focus and self-satisfaction got in the way of compassion and sometimes plain old ethics. Told that a jar of candy was being saved for little children doing an experiment in another lab, most people didn’t touch it, but wealthy folks took whatever they wanted. Yup, they would steal candy from kids. Other studies have shown that the rich donate a smaller percentage of their earnings to charity than those less well-off. Piff suggests that people who feel entitled to everything they have are less likely to share it.

  Which is where gratitude comes in.

  Piff said that a “gratitude intervention” worked to mitigate the sense of entitlement and help people “focus on what the world has done for them, rather than just what they’ve done for the world.” Even simple reminders could have a significant effect. Having people think about assistance they’d received from others at some point in their lives might lead them to be more cooperative—and less likely to take candy from children.

  I teased Piff that he had become the rock star of social psychology—a talk he gave on money and entitlement has been seen some 2.5 million times on YouTube.

  “If I’m going to be a rock star, I have to do something about my hair,” he said with a laugh. “But really I think so many people watching is a testament to how resonant this issue is.”

  He was the first to say that most wealthy people have probably done a lot to contribute to their own success. “But we’ve all also been helped by others—even if it was just a parent who changed your diaper. A sense of gratitude changes your orientation from an internal focus to an external one and reminds you that the world has been good to you.”

  Back during the 2012 campaign, now senator Elizabeth Warren said in a speech that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” She urged gratitude for the advantages of doing business in America—the police and fire departments that protect our factories, the highways that let us move our goods. President Obama tried to make a similar point, but his slightly mangled version (“you didn’t build that”) became a Republican rallying cry. Once the politicking died down and the election was over, most people would probably agree that any businessperson living in America started with an advantage that many around the world would be happy to share. Beating your chest and announcing, “I built that!” could seem—unseemly.

  But money remained a very touchy subject. I now mentioned my gratitude project to just about everyone I met, and the responses were almost always positive. The unlikeliest people (including a cabdriver) told me that they kept gratitude journals, and most others concurred with the idea of being more grateful for family, friends, and everyday life. When I tentatively brought up money, though, gratitude didn’t come into the picture. People told me how hard they worked and that they�
�d earned every dime. I didn’t doubt it, because I felt that way myself. But if we’re all playing a rigged Monopoly game, shouldn’t we be a little humbler, and more grateful to the people, the country, and the circumstances that gave us our advantage?

  I went to discuss it with my friend Dr. Henry Jarecki, who is a generation older than me and one of the smartest people I know. He began his career as a psychiatrist, then moved into business, eventually starting many different companies and selling them for a fortune. He lives in an eighteen-thousand-square-foot town house in Manhattan, owns two islands in the British Virgin Islands, and has a private pilot to fly him to his other residences. His further riches include a wife he’s been with forever, four devoted sons (three of them successful movie directors), and legions of friends.

  Since he’s deeply thoughtful and reflective, I wondered if he had avoided the trap that Piff perceived of “internal attribution”—that is, assuming you deserve everything good that has happened to you. So I plopped down on a chair in his office and asked him if he felt grateful for his truly wonderful life. I wasn’t surprised that he took a moment to think about it.

  “Who would I be grateful to?” he asked finally. “Don’t you have to be grateful to someone?”

  “You could be grateful to the cosmos for all the twists your life has taken,” I suggested.