The Morning: Chain of gratitude
The good things in life are the result of a fantastic web that reaches back into the past.
The Morning
October 25, 2025

Good morning. The good things in our lives are the result of fantastic webs of interconnected prerequisites.

In an illustration, a butterfly flies out of a glass jar.
María Jesús Contreras

Personal history

Consider the gratitude journal, in which you write three things each day that you’re grateful for. It’s similar to the gratitude jar: Each time you think of something worth appreciating, you write it on a slip of paper and drop it in, to be read at the end of the year. These activities, in modern wellness vernacular, would be considered part of a gratitude practice, the consistent and intentional effort to acknowledge the good things in your life. Gratitude, it’s been shown, is good for our mental health, our relationships and maybe even our physical health.

I have my own version of a gratitude practice, and I find it so effective at shifting my perspective that I feel like I need a whole separate gratitude practice for gratitude itself. But I get a little uncomfortable talking about it because I’ve seen the same hashtags and semi-smug social media posts that you have, the same living-room art with cursive script on distressed wood about the “attitude of gratitude” The concept has been so commodified, overprocessed, merched-up, that it seems as if there’s little else to say about it — call it the platitude of gratitude.

Lately, however, I’ve been meditating on what I’m grateful for and the process has gotten a little more ornate. I will think of something small — say, this weird little deck of “wisdom cards” that I draw from each morning as a sort of daily fortune cookie. Then I think about how my friend Melanie gave me the deck and how generous and playful she is, and how lucky I am to know her. But I wouldn’t know her if I hadn’t taught creative writing with her in a summer program in the 1990s. I wouldn’t have had that job if my friend Alden hadn’t recommended me for it, and I wouldn’t know Alden if I hadn’t gone to graduate school with her, and I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school without the encouragement of my undergraduate writing professor, and I wouldn’t have taken her class if not for … you get the picture.

It’s almost a game, tracing the present-day gratitude back through all the causes and conditions that gave rise to it. It’s also immensely satisfying, and mystifying — look how many things had to transpire in order to bring this deck of cards into my life. Simple gratitude is focused on a one-to-one relationship: These cards make me happy. Thinking through this circuit of prerequisites amplifies the gratitude, scales it, brings me into contact with the multiple interdependent factors necessary to bring these cards into my life.

As with all things related to gratitude, this isn’t an original practice. Buddhists have the concept of dependent origination. In Judaism, there’s “recognizing the good.” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of “an inescapable network of mutuality.” We’re all connected, related, dependent on one another, but of course we forget this all the time. We forget that every action we take has a whole cascade of unintended consequences. We forget that we’re a factor in someone else’s circuit of gratitude, a link in innumerable chains. And so often we feel separate, lonely, disconnected. One way to challenge that feeling is to start with one small thing you’re grateful for. Then trace the gorgeous, improbable but very real sequence of variables that brought you the object of your gratitude. It may seem a little corny at first, but it works.

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The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford in the North Sea in September. Jonathan Klein/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced that the U.S. had struck another ship in the region, killing six. In all, the U.S. has killed 43 people in 10 strikes.
  • The White House has made no legal argument explaining its claim that it can summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs. Yet the campaign continues — a sign of the law’s weakness as a check on presidential power, Charlie Savage writes.
  • The U.S. announced economic sanctions on Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, after he criticized the operation in the Caribbean.

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  • Trump said a private donor — whom he described as a personal friend and a “patriot” — had given the government $130 million to help pay troops during the government shutdown. That comes to around $100 per service member.
  • Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, pleaded not guilty to fraud charges brought by Trump’s handpicked federal prosecutor in Virginia.
  • The Justice Department will monitor polling sites in California and New Jersey, two Democratic-led states with big races and issues on the ballot.

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Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Macall Polay/20th Century Studios, via Associated Press
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