Thank you to things

It is customary to thank people not things. After all, what does it matter if one doesn’t extend gratitude to the inanimate, not that they feel anything! But if gratitude is about how being grateful helps one’s own state of being then it shouldn’t matter that things won’t respond with a you-are-welcome.

Besides things in our lives have a complicated status between being and non-being. Alienated from the labour that produces and circulates them, the alienation of things stand in for the alienation between people. Seeing things for the effort, skill, imagination and resources that people have put in to produce them transforms things into what connects people who haven’t and will likely never meet.

For example, I will never know the people who made the couch I am sitting on as I type this. I am grateful to this couch. Much of my time at home is spent on this couch. It is the kind of couch that when I sit on it, I feel like it was specially shaped to hold exactly my body, exactly me. No matter how uncertain and indifferent the world, sitting here on this couch, I know I am exactly in my place in the universe