I say please and thank you to Claude.

It’s not because I think AI will become our overlords and reward us humans for politeness, and it’s not because I want different responses from Claude. I just do it, the same way I thank the barista at Starbucks for my latte or my husband for going to the dry cleaner. Claude, please can you look at this. Thank you, that’s exactly what I needed.

I’m not alone. And people love to point out that those extra words cost real electricity, that I’m being courteous to what’s effectively a matrix multiplication. At worst, I’ve been told that this is what it looks like when a person gets confused about what’s on the other end of the conversation.

But I think something else is going on. We teach kids please and thank you as manners. Manners are a social contract that is entirely about the other person. You say thank you so the other person feels seen, acknowledged, or appreciated. We don’t tell kids that saying thank you to a vending machine is necessary or important.

But maybe we should. At my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah I referred to gratitude as “an ancient cheat code.” Every spiritual tradition I know of has a significant dose of gratitude built in. Many include practices that require people to demonstrate gratitude, even when they aren’t in the mood. Enter the social scientists. Robert Emmons, who has spent his career on this, defines gratitude as an affirmation of goodness plus a recognition that the source of that goodness sits outside yourself: something good happened, and I didn’t generate it.

So he’s run an experiment on more than a thousand people. He’s instructed them to keep a journal, write down a few things they’re grateful for each day, and do it for a few weeks. The results? The people who do it sleep better, exercise more, report fewer aches, and score higher on basically every measure of well-being.

I’m ok at practicing gratitude. (And it is a practice, so says Brené Brown and many others.) I have a journal that I write in every few days; I practice certain Jewish rituals; I occasionally do yoga. Perhaps thanking Claude is good for me in the same way writing in my journal is good for me. Or perhaps it’s just a reflex. Either way, it’s another observation around my interactions with AI that helps me ensure I’m not the frog boiling in the pot.