Stop saying “I appreciate you." Just say "thanks," like a normal person.

This is a very long advice column!

The Calm Down Art Department aka ChatGPT

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…an advice column!

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but they’re always popular, and I’d like to get some more subscribers to raise my income so I have more money to exchange for an increased amount of goods and services. So put some money on the bedside table and let’s go for a ride.

Today, we’ve got three questions submitted directly to the Calm Down Advice Mill™. The first is about a tweet I sent that made people cry. The second is about therapy. The third is about restaurant etiquette and the lingering trauma of a denied recipe.

If you have a question for the unlicensed advice-givers at Calm Down, send it to: helphelphelp@calmdownben.com.

1) Am I Annoying People When I Say This Stupid Thing I Say? Why?

Dear Calm Down,

I saw your tweet about people saying “I appreciate you” instead of just saying “thanks.” I say that all the time—am I annoying?

— The Gratitude-Haver

Dear Annoying Person,

Yes.

But not in a catastrophic way. Just in the way that makes people privately roll their eyes when they close your email. You're not a monster. I don’t think you should be in jail or anything. You’re just participating in a slight, well-meaning linguistic trend that makes everything weirdly heavy.

Here’s the deal: “Thanks” is a perfectly engineered word. It is compact, correct, and socially graceful. It doesn’t require emotional intimacy. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It simply acknowledges a transaction and releases both parties with dignity intact.

But sometime in the past decade, “thanks” got downgraded. It became too thin. Too cold. Millennials like me were told that if we didn’t add an exclamation point, people would think we were mad. So we added one. Then people said that still seemed passive-aggressive, so we added a second. And then somewhere along the line, someone decided that even enthusiastic gratitude wasn’t enough—and now we have this weird full-sentence performance: “I appreciate you.”

I explicitly do not mean “’preciate you.” I had never encountered this phrase in the wild, but after sending that tweet, many people mentioned it in their replies. It’s apparently a real thing in the South. I cannot tell you with certainty how I would feel if someone said it to me, but I can imagine it would be less annoying. The fact that it is an informal offhand belies the affectation and over-enunciation that makes “I appreciate you” so grating.

But “I appreciate you” is therapy grammar.

It’s the linguistic equivalent of someone locking eyes with you after you reset their password and saying, “I see your worth.”

It’s not gratitude. It’s aesthetic gratitude. It’s gratitude that wants to be seen being grateful.

The first time I ever encountered it was in an email exchange from a colleague back when I worked at Mother Jones. They were friendly, competent, and entirely sane. But they ended a completely routine back-and-forth about edits with: “I appreciate you.”
Later that day, I began mentioning it to a colleague and said, “I love [name redacted], but you know what’s weird about them?” He instantly cut me off:

“I KNOW. It’s the ‘I appreciate you’ thing. It’s insane.”

We weren’t mad—we were confused. Because this wasn’t someone expressing appreciation for a grand favor. This was someone confirming a character count. It didn’t require feelings.

Fast forward ten years, and now I’m being “appreciated” by the guy at 7-Eleven after I buy a bottle of sparkling water. Not a joke, that is the situation that prompted my tweet. I was at a convenience store in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I handed him a Perrier. He scanned it. The price came up. I tapped my card. It said “approved.” I said “thanks,” and he said, “I appreciate you.”
No, you don’t.
You appreciate that I paid for my item and didn’t disrupt the flow of the establishment by pissing on the floor. Or to put it another way, you appreciate that I met the base-level expectation.

“I appreciate you” is what happens when emotional language gets commodified. “Thanks” is no longer enough because we’ve decided that functional speech is rude. Every sentence now has to come wrapped in faux intimacy. Everything has to sound like a podcast host reading an ad for Blue Apron. “I appreciate you” is how people talk when they’ve been trained to fear clarity and overcorrect by emoting at every turn.

And the worst part is that it doesn’t mean more. It means less!
Because now, when someone actually does appreciate you—you, not just some meaningless basic thing you did—you can’t tell. The phrase has been laundered so many times that it doesn’t hold any emotional weight.

So yes, you are annoying. But only in the way that people become annoying when they adopt social tics out of politeness, not thought. You don’t need to be beaten, unless it’s in the context of a code red, where the beating is a teaching tool. You need to recalibrate.

Say thanks. Say it plainly. Do it with a smile. (That’s what smiles are for!) Let the words mean what they mean, and let your tone do the rest. You’re not being rude. You’re being human.

And if someone gets offended that you didn’t affirm their cosmic worth for forwarding an invoice? They can start a gratitude circle in the breakroom.

—Ben

2) Is My Therapist Allowed To Hate Me?

Dear Calm Down,

I’m pretty sure my therapist doesn’t like me. She’s not rude or anything. I just get this vibe that she’s kind of bored with me. Am I imagining it? Is she allowed to feel that way?

— Paranoid on the Couch

Dear Whacko,