Links to other parts of this miniseries:
A.J. Jacobs on Gratitude – Part 1
A.J. Jacobs on Gratitude – Part 2
A.J. Jacobs on Gratitude – Part 4
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 2 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: A.J. Jacobs on Gratitude – Part 3
— From Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey by A.J. Jacobs
As part of the research A.J. Jacobs did when he was working on his gratitude project, he got in touch with author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman at the University of Pennsylvania. Kaufman taught a course on positive psychology and gratitude, and told Jacobs the following:
Gratitude has a lot to do with holding onto a moment as strongly as possible… 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.
Jacobs then, aptly says, “It’s hard to be grateful if we’re speeding through life, focusing on what’s next.”
While life tends to be a whirlwind for most of us, we should really give a second thought to slowing down and taking in both the small and big moments. In today’s video (below), A.J. shares that the very act of stopping to smell the proverbial roses is what seems to be one of the keys to gratitude.
However, as much as we’d like to change our crazy, fast-paced present for what sometimes seems to be a much more peaceful past, A. J. warns us not to long for a false illusion of a better time. “The good old days were not good at all,” he says.
And in the book he backs this up by emphasizing, “I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking.” He mentions that he used to write a monthly magazine column in which he would research “just how horrible the previous centuries were… disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous.”
He goes on to explain that he focused on food, but he also wrote about “childrearing (opium lozenges to calm kids), clothes (iron corsets to shape women’s waists, and jobs (nightmen, the eighteenth-century workers who would haul manure from houses).” And, both in the book as well as in the video, he shares a mantra that will make you cringe and be happy that we live in this day and age.
While there are indeed enormous challenges today that we must overcome, “the solution doesn’t lie in a return to yesteryear.” Nor does it lie in pinning our happiness to the other side of the spectrum—the future—via the so-called hedonic treadmill that he explains in the video.
Check out the 3rd video (4:03 min) in this miniseries to learn more about cultivating gratitude from A.J. Jacobs (here are videos 1 and 2 in case you haven’t seen them).
Which is your favorite way of practicing gratitude so far? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: As you are still enjoying Thanksgiving leftovers with your family—or simply during a family meal—do what A.J. did last year: “We held a family competition to see who could come up with the most obscure person on our dinner’s supply chain. My 12-year-old son thanked the farmer who grew the cranberries for the sauce (Not bad). Another relative thanked the trucker who drove the cranberries to the factory (Decent). Someone thanked the designer of the logo on the stop sign so the truck didn’t get in an accident (Getting there). My nephew thanked the miner in South America who got the copper for the wiring in the traffic lights. (Pretty good).” How fun is that?!
FUTURE: Whenever you feel overwhelmed by all the negativity in the news, take one minute to recognize something that goes very well in your life and truly savor the gratitude for such a wonderful thing.
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