How to be grateful to someone – even when you really don’t want to
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At times, feeling personally grateful to someone can feel like a big ask – but there are other forms of gratitude.<br>Focus Pixel Art/Moment via Getty Images
https://theconversation.com/how-to-be-grateful-to-someone-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to-285311
https://theconversation.com/how-to-be-grateful-to-someone-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to-285311
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There are few greater feelings than the sense of heartfelt gratitude to another human being who has done you a solid. Sincere thanks and reciprocation are part of the glue that binds us in human relationships.
But sometimes you’re just not feeling it. You know that you have benefited from what someone has done for you, but you don’t really feel grateful to them for doing it. Most teenagers go through this period with their parents. Maybe you take your partner or colleague for granted.
For me, 14 years ago, it was my mother-in-law. She had upended her life to move from South Dakota to California to live with my wife and me to assist with childcare after our daughter was born; no other source of childcare fit with our demanding work schedules and my commute. She made a huge sacrifice that transformed our lives, but there were moments when I really struggled to feel grateful.
Since that time, I’ve come to devote much of my research as a philosopher to studying how the way that we interpret each other as people shapes our relationships. That work has helped me to understand why I struggled to be grateful – and taught me a little bit about how to do better.
Personal gratitude
I’ve found that the hardest part of feeling grateful to someone is the “to” part. It is one thing to be impersonally grateful that something happened and another thing to be personally grateful to someone for doing it. These are not the same.
Both forms of gratitude require seeing something as a benefit. And they both require a humble recognition of how easily things could have been otherwise. When the rain ends a drought, an atheist can feel grateful that the tomatoes will survive. But the atheist isn’t grateful “to” anyone for the rain.
Priests offer prayers to Varuna, the Hindu god of rain, as they stand in the Osman Sagar on the outskirts of Hyderabad, India, on July 16, 2013.<br>AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A
Personal gratitude requires more than impersonal gratitude. It is an example of what the philosopher Peter Strawson calls a “participant” attitude: an attitude that we have toward people, but not toward things. And a large theme in my work is that participant attitudes such as gratitude involve giving someone credit for what the attitude responds to.
But which benefits we give people credit for is complicated. As philosophers such as Tony Manela have argued, actions motivated primarily by money, self-interest or insecurity don’t merit personal gratitude, even when they benefit you. Actions motivated by love, generosity or concern, on the other hand – or other “pro-social” motives – do.
Sometimes people fail to feel gratitude because they take someone for granted, not noticing how easily they could have done otherwise. This wasn’t my problem with my mother-in-law. It was obvious that she didn’t have to move across the country to live with us.
But it was hard to avoid noticing that she had always wanted to live in California. Sometimes it is hard to feel grateful because of how we interpret someone’s motives. They could have done otherwise, but we don’t think their action was really “about us.”
Bad motives are easy to find
Sometimes ungenerous motives can help people to be generous. Your child’s kindergarten teacher isn’t a volunteer. They may be a naturally generous person – but still, they probably wouldn’t be working with your child on spelling, arithmetic and handling adversity if they weren’t getting a paycheck.
It’s still appropriate to be grateful to them. Their financial incentive to show up for work enables their generosity, rather than competing with it.
Your child’s teacher might be generous, but their job enables them to act on that generosity every day.<br>svetikd/E+ via Getty Images
Elementary school teachers are not alone. After all, people’s decisions are often driven by many factors: some that merit gratitude and others that don’t. So if you go looking for selfish motives, you are bound to find some.
Take your partner, for example. They do something that benefits you: buying you flowers, filling your tank with gas or finally taking their turn to wash the dishes. They are partly motivated by generosity, love or communal spirit. But, as in any close relationship, sometimes they may be hoping to get something out of it: reciprocation, maybe, or getting you off their back.
It matters which of these you interpret as their “true” motive: Seeing...