Thank you, universe, for providing me with all the money and wealth I need.

Gratitude with no clear addressee is a strange practice and a very old one. Something in it works regardless of what anyone believes is listening, which suggests most of the effect happens on the near side.

Saying thanks for what has arrived forces a brief inventory, and the inventory is nearly always longer than the mood preceding it had suggested.

Somebody with no religion in them at all still pauses at a table sometimes before eating. Not superstition. Just a refusal to let something be received without being noticed.