Ingratitude

Writing for The Atlantic, Michael Mechanic parsed the findings of the most recent study on the perennial “Does Money Buy Happiness?” question. Recent polling from The Wall Street Journal and the University of Chicago points to a steep decline over the past quarter century in the percentage of American adults who view patriotism, religion, parenting, and community involvement as “very important.” The only priority tested whose perceived importance grew during that period was money.

Researchers definitively found, [in their original 2010 study], that the quadrupling of a person’s income had an effect on well-being roughly equal to the mood boost of a weekend “and less than a third as large as the [negative] effect of a headache.”

The authors also explain that “the difference between the medians of happiness at household incomes of $15,000 and $250,000 is about five points on a 100-point scale.” That’s “almost nothing,” one researcher said. With such a small difference, in fact, one could argue that “there is no practical effect of income at all!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The origin of the proverb “money can’t buy happiness” has its origins as far back as 1750 in the writings of Rousseau. But even so, people still think that it can.

Author and blogger Chris Winfield shares his thoughts on gratitude:

“Why did this have to happen to me?” It didn’t matter if it was something big (my dog gets cancer, good friend dies) or something little (flight is delayed, spilled something on my shirt). I was in a constant state of “poor me.” This all started to change once I began writing a gratitude list every single day for the past 34+ months and it has changed my life profoundly. Here are the 4 most important things I’ve learned on my gratitude journey:

1. It’s Hard at First: My mentor told me to text him three things that I am grateful for every day. Sounds pretty easy right? Well, it wasn’t. When you’ve lived most of your life not focusing on gratitude, it’s not so simple to change that.

2. There Is Always Something to Be Grateful For: No matter what was going on in my life (business problems, I was sick, someone cut me off in traffic) there was always something that I could find to be grateful for (my health, my daughter’s smile, etc.).

3. Gratitude Grows the More You Use It: My gratitude lists started off very basic and I struggled to find things to be grateful for (especially on the really tough days). But once I consistently took action, it became easier and easier.

4. It Can Help Stop Negative Thought Patterns: According to the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, the average person has about 70,000 thoughts each day! There’s one big problem with this — the vast majority of these thoughts are negative. Gratitude can work to stop these negative thought patterns by replacing it with something positive.

Research has shown that practicing gratitude boosts the immune system, bolsters resilience to stress, lowers depression, increases feelings of energy, determination, and strength, and even helps you sleep better at night.

In fact, few things have been more repeatedly and empirically vetted than the connection between gratitude and overall happiness and well-being.

In a survey done by Kaplan, she found that while “more than 90% of people think gratitude makes you happier and gives you a more fulfilled life ... less than half regularly express gratitude.”

After three days of unsuccessful attempts to lure her pet parrot, Jessie, off the roof of her home, a London resident called for help, first from an animal welfare agency, and then from firefighters. When the London Fire Brigade arrived on the scene, Jessie gave them a nasty surprise.

"****-off," she reportedly said.

Watch manager Chris Swallow explained the firefighters' protocol for the animal rescue.

"Our crew manager was the willing volunteer who went up the ladder to try and bring Jessie down. We were told that to bond with the parrot, you have to tell her 'I love you', which is exactly what the crew manager did. While Jessie responded 'I love you' back, we then discovered that she had a bit of a foul mouth and kept swearing, much to our amusement."

As it turned out, Jessie was fine. After a few minutes interacting with the crew manager, the Macaw parrot flew off, first to another roof and then onto a tree.

Embarrassed by her parrot's conduct, Jessie's owner uploaded to Twitter a video of her pet saying "Thank you."

Potential Preaching Angle: Ungratefulness can be a habit that spreads, even to those whom we think are not paying attention. Gratitude, on the other hand, is always useful, even when it's late.

According to a British survey, 40 percent of moms have received an unwanted Mother's Day gift, but most of them were too polite to complain. Here's a partial list of the 30 worst Mother's Day gifts (according to moms who actually received these gifts):

• Deodorant
• Fire extinguisher
• Cleaning supplies
• A stick of French bread
• Salad dressing
• Popcorn
• Ants (perhaps an ant farm for Mom)
• Hair dye
• Screwdriver
• Toilet roll
• Calculator
• Car parts

Another newspaper ran an article titled "20 awful Mother's Day cards that you absolutely should not buy." The article is clear: Do NOT buy these cards, but just in case you're curious here are a few examples:

• Mom, thanks for always checking up on me (with a picture of a cell phone with 24 unanswered calls from "Mom").
• Well I guess this Mother's Day card is late. Looks like someone wasn't raised properly.
• I'm awesome. You're welcome. To the luckiest Mom ever.
• Mom I love you loads. (A picture of a laundry basket overflowing with clothes.) Speaking of loads … can you do my laundry?

In his article "The Structure of Gratitude," New York Times columnist David Brooks notes what he's learning about thankfulness:

I'm sometimes grumpier when I stay at a nice hotel. I have certain expectations about the service that's going to be provided. I get impatient if I have to crawl around looking for a power outlet, if the shower controls are unfathomable, if the place considers itself too fancy to put a coffee machine in each room. I'm sometimes happier at a budget motel, where my expectations are lower, and where a functioning iron is a bonus and the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.

This little phenomenon shows how powerfully expectations structure our moods and emotions, none more so than the beautiful emotion of gratitude. Gratitude happens when some kindness exceeds expectations, when it is undeserved. Gratitude is a sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness.

We often hear someone say: "Well, I'm not very religious, but I'm a good person and that is what is most important." But is that true? Imagine a woman, a poor widow with an only son. She teaches him how she wants him to live, to always tell the truth, to work hard and to help the poor.

She makes very little money, but with her meager savings she is able to put him through college. Imagine that when he graduates, he hardly even speaks to her again. He occasionally sends a Christmas card, but he doesn't visit her, he won't even answer her phone calls or letters; he doesn't speak to her. But he lives just like she taught him—honestly, industriously, and charitably.

Would you say this was acceptable? Of course not. Wouldn't we say by living a "good life" but neglecting a relationship with the one to whom he owed everything he was doing something commendable?

In the same way, God created us and we owe him everything and we do not live for him but we "live a good life" it is not enough. We all owe a debt that must be paid.

Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington is best known for his roles in Glory, The Preacher's Wife, Remember the Titans, and Training Day. But the Hollywood A-lister has sounded more like a pastor when has spoken at events. Washington has publicly stated that he reads his Bible every day and that he strives to consistently "get up and speak of what God has done for him."

At a church banquet he urged his listeners to live in a constant attitude of gratitude for God's goodness:

Give thanks for blessings every day. Every day. Embrace gratitude. Encourage others. It is impossible to be grateful and hateful at the same time. I pray that you put your slippers way under your bed at night, so that when you wake in the morning you have to start on your knees to find them. And while you're down there, say "thank you." A bad attitude is like a flat tire. Until you change it, you're not going anywhere.

Mr. Otha Anders, of Ruston, Louisiana, spent 45 years bending down and collecting something most of us ignore—pennies. In October of 2015, the 73-year-old Anders, a supervisor for in-school suspended children, took them to his local bank—in 15 five-gallon jugs—and deposited a grand total of $5,136.14 worth of pennies into his account. The bank's coin machines took five hours to count all the pennies.

But what's truly moving about this story isn't Anders' thriftiness; it's his thankfulness. Each new penny on the ground served as a prompt to give thanks to God. As Anders told reporters:

I became convinced that spotting a lost or dropped penny was an additional God-given incentive reminding me to always be thankful. There have been days where I failed to pray and more often than not, a lost or dropped penny would show up to remind me.

How much would it take for us to have enough money? Remarkably, studies show that most people, regardless of income, answer the question the same way: We need about 10% more to feel comfortable. Ten percent will make a difference, and whether we earn $30,000 per year or $60,000 or $250,000 or a cool million, just 10% more is what we want.

When people are asked the same question over time, Loyola Marymount University Professor Christopher Kaczor reports "when they do get that 10%, which typically happens over the course of a few years, they want just another 10%, and so on, ad infinitum." This reality prompted British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere to make the following observation: "by its very nature [greed] is endless and never assuaged; and by being a form of the impulse to live, it ceases only with death."

The key to a happy and lasting marriage might be as simple as regularly expressing gratitude. So report researchers from the University of Georgia in a new study published in the journal Personal Relationships.

After interviewing 468 married individuals on relationship satisfaction, covering everything from communication habits to finances, they found that the "most consistent significant predictor" of happy marriages was whether one's spouse expressed gratitude. "Feeling appreciated and believing that your spouse values you directly influences how you feel about your marriage, how committed you are to it, and your belief that it will last," says study co-author Ted Futris. And that goes for good times but perhaps especially bad ones—when couples experience stress and their communication devolves into what the researchers call a demand/withdraw cycle (i.e., one partner demands or criticizes; the other tries to avoid a confrontation). Gratitude can disrupt this, acting as a buffer.

"What distinguishes the marriages that last from those that don't is not how often they argue, but how they argue and how they treat each other on a daily basis," says Futris. Adds lead author Allen Barton, the study "goes to show the power of the key to a happy and lasting marriage might be as simple as regularly expressing gratitude." So saying thank you is a "practical way couples can help strengthen their marriage."

Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about his childhood. Wouk was especially grateful for one simple pleasure: waking up to the sunlight streaming through his bedroom window. He said:

By luck, my childhood bedroom faced the sun. I grew up on Aldus Street in the Bronx, where my family lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up in an apartment way in the back. Each morning from my bed, I'd see a beam of sunlight with motes dancing through it pass through the window. I felt good right away. The morning sun is cheering, no matter what mood you're in … I do have the same excitement each morning when I see the sun. That sense of enjoying being alive is still very real. When you reach 100, you're glad you're alive. Very glad.

In 2012, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots football team, revealed to the world that Russian president Vladimir Putin stole one of Kraft's $25,000 Super Bowl rings. Don't feel too bad for Kraft—he has three more where that came from! But it's true: back in 2005, when Kraft was visiting Putin at the Kremlin, he made the mistake of showing the Russian leader one of his Super Bowl rings. Kraft took it out and handed it to the Russian leader, who put it on his finger and said, "I could kill someone with this ring"—because it was so massive. Then, according to Kraft, Putin put in in his pocket, his KGB guys surrounded him, and they walked out—with Kraft's ring! It even had Bob Kraft's name engraved on it!

Kraft talked to the State Department, and they encouraged him, in the interest of U.S.-Russian relations to lie and say that he gave it to Putin as a gift. But Kraft finally broke his silence in 2012.

But the point is this: Kraft did give Putin his ring—temporarily, to borrow for a few moments. He intended for Putin to use it for a few moments, put it on his finger, admire it. But he did not intend for Putin, once he took possession of it, to act as if this ring belonged to him!

Possible Preaching Angles: Isn't that what we're tempted to do—what we too often do—when it comes to stewardship. A "steward" is someone who manages finances, possessions, property, or real estate on behalf of someone else. Stewardship describes a Christian's relationship to all the good things that God has given us.

GQ magazine's interview with talk show host Stephen Colbert explored how he found gratitude in the midst of suffering ("The Late, Great Stephen Colbert.") When he was 10 years old, his father and two of his brothers, were killed in a plane crash. Young Stephen was the only child still at home with his mother in the years immediately following. When asked how he could experience such losses and not become angry or bitter, the GQ interview explored Colbert's faith:

[Colbert said], "I was raised in a Catholic tradition … That's my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with him in the next—the catechism. That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings."

"I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died. … And it was just me and Mom for a long time," he said. "And by her example I am not bitter … She was … broken, yes. Bitter, no." Colbert said that even in his mother's days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity.

Colbert described a letter from J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote, "What punishments of God are not gifts?" Colbert's eyes filled with tears as he said, "So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head." He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it "stopped me dead. I went, 'Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.' I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true."

Imagine you are in a small underground chamber, no bigger than a prison cell. The door is locked and the lights are switched out. It is not just dark; it's pitch black. And the silence is all-encompassing. Could any human, in fact, endure such total sensory deprivation without losing their sanity? That was what British scientists sought to discover in an extreme experiment that placed six volunteers into a total isolation chamber for 48 hours.

So, who would be brave, or foolish, enough to undergo a similar ordeal voluntarily? Step forward Adam Bloom, 37 who was confident he could cope well with the deprivation. But Bloom described what happened when the door was slammed shut:

I spent the first half an hour in the bunker talking, singing, and making jokes, but that quickly got boring … In the absence of a watch or sunlight, I'd totally lost track of time. I dozed on and off … but I had no idea whether it was day or night … At one point, I started singing and then I burst into tears. I can't remember the last time I cried.

After 40 hours he began to hallucinate. "I felt as though the room was taking off from underneath me. For the first time, I realized that the lack of stimulation was driving me close to insanity." But then for Bloom, there was an unexpected outcome—gratitude. Bloom explains:

When we'd arrived at the bunker before the experiment, I had thought it was all rather bleak. The exterior was all overgrown and the bunker was an eyesore. But when I left after 48 hours, I noticed how green the grass was, how blue the sky was, and hundreds of yellow buttercups. It was staggeringly beautiful. Even washing my hands under the [faucet] was amazing. I made a vow that I would never [again ignore] and not appreciate my surroundings.

As part of National Thank-You Week, research revealed that British businesses were split between "thankers" and "thank-nots." The thankers were those workplace leaders who recognize the importance of appreciating and motivating their employees, and the thank-nots were leaders who neglect to do so. When asked whether they thought bosses were better or worse at saying thank-you now than ten years before, 22 percent of those surveyed thought they had improved but 37 percent felt they had grown worse. Although half (51 percent) of the working population receive a thank-you once a month or more, only slightly fewer—44 percent—receive a thank-you just once every few months or less frequently.

Moira Clark, a professor of strategic marketing, comments,

My own research [reveals] that in high-performing companies, that is, those with high customer retention levels, staff are frequently … thanked. However, in low-performing companies, employees are punished, e.g., ignored or reprimanded, more frequently than they are [thanked].

Imagine you fall off the side of an ocean liner and, not knowing how to swim, begin to drown. Someone on the deck spots you, flailing in the water and throws you a life preserver. It lands directly in front of you and, just before losing consciousness, you grab hold for dear life. They pull you up onto the deck, and you cough the water out of your lungs. People gather around, rejoicing that you are safe and waiting expectantly while you regain your senses. After you finally catch your breath, you open your mouth and say: "Did you see the way I grabbed onto that life preserver? How tightly I held on to it? Did you notice the definition in my biceps and the dexterity of my wrists? I was all over that thing!"

Needless to say, it would be a bewildering and borderline insane response. To draw attention to the way you cooperated with the rescue effort denigrates the whole point of what happened, which is that you were saved. A much more likely chain of events is that you would immediately seek out the person who threw the life preserver, and you would thank them. Not just superficially, either. You would embrace them, ask them their name, invite them to dinner, maybe give them your cabin!

Gratitude is a natural response to salvation. It does not require coercion or encouragement; to the extent that the individual understands what has happened, gratitude will flow organically and abundantly from their heart. The precise form it takes will be different every time, but such is the nature of fruit.

In 1900 a Japanese writer named Natsume Soseki visited England for the first time. While he was there he was surprised to discover that few of the locals appreciated or even noticed all of the beauty that he saw. Soseki was so captivated by the snow that he invited some friends over for a "snow-viewing," but they just laughed at him. When he told another group of that the Japanese are deeply emotional about the moon, they looked at him with confusion. Then Soseki told the following story:

One day, when [my host] and I took a walk in the garden, I noted that the paths between the rows of trees were all thickly covered with [beautiful] moss. I offered a compliment, saying that these paths had magnificently acquired a look of age. Whereupon my host replied that he soon intended to get a gardener to scrape all this [ugly] moss away.