{"id":42879,"date":"2026-07-16T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=42879"},"modified":"2026-07-30T22:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T05:40:13","slug":"how-to-be-grateful-to-someone-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-to-be-grateful-to-someone-even-when-you-really-dont-want-to\/","title":{"rendered":"How to be grateful to someone \u2013 even when you really don\u2019t want to"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mark Schroeder<\/a>, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> in human relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometimes you\u2019re just not feeling it. You know that you have benefited from what someone has done for you, but you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since that time, I\u2019ve come to devote much of my research as a philosopher<\/a> to studying how the way that we interpret each other as people shapes our relationships<\/a>. That work has helped me to understand why I struggled to be grateful \u2013 and taught me a little bit about how to do better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personal gratitude<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve found that the hardest part of feeling grateful to someone is the \u201cto\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t grateful \u201cto\u201d anyone for the rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
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. AP Photo\/Mahesh Kumar A<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Personal gratitude requires more than impersonal gratitude. It is an example of what the philosopher Peter Strawson<\/a> calls a \u201cparticipant\u201d attitude<\/a>: 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<\/a> for what the attitude responds to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But which benefits we give people credit for is complicated. As philosophers such as Tony Manela<\/a> have argued, actions motivated primarily by money, self-interest or insecurity don\u2019t merit personal gratitude<\/a>, even when they benefit you. Actions motivated by love, generosity or concern, on the other hand \u2013 or other \u201cpro-social\u201d motives<\/a> \u2013 do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes people fail to feel gratitude because they take someone for granted, not noticing how easily they could have done otherwise. This wasn\u2019t my problem with my mother-in-law. It was obvious that she didn\u2019t have to move across the country to live with us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s motives. They could have done otherwise, but we don\u2019t think their action was really \u201cabout us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bad motives are easy to find<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes ungenerous motives can help people to be generous. Your child\u2019s kindergarten teacher isn\u2019t a volunteer. They may be a naturally generous person \u2013 but still, they probably wouldn\u2019t be working with your child on spelling, arithmetic and handling adversity if they weren\u2019t getting a paycheck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s still appropriate to be grateful to them. Their financial incentive to show up for work enables their generosity, rather than competing with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Your child\u2019s teacher might be generous, but their job enables them to act on that generosity every day. svetikd\/E+ via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Elementary school teachers are not alone. After all, people\u2019s decisions are often driven by many factors: some that merit gratitude and others that don\u2019t. So if you go looking for selfish motives, you are bound to find some<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>: reciprocation, maybe, or getting you off their back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It matters which of these you interpret as their \u201ctrue\u201d motive: Seeing it one way opens you up to gratitude, while the other precludes it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are \u2018true\u2019 motives?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The distinction between someone\u2019s \u201ctrue\u201d motive and the other motives that enable it looks like the distinction between causes and enabling conditions<\/a>. For example, when you drop a wine glass, the fragility of the glass enables the drop to cause the break, but it isn\u2019t itself a cause of the break \u2013 the drop is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of the falling glass, there\u2019s a clear, objective answer to what caused the break and what merely enabled it. But I believe that relating to people is deeply different than understanding physical things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key question in whether to be grateful to someone isn\u2019t about which motives count as \u201ccauses.\u201d It is about which cause we need to bring into focus in order to see the other person more clearly for who they are<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See it their way<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In other words, it\u2019s at least partly a matter of perspective. If someone does you a favor, but you know they\u2019re hoping for something in return, you can see that as their \u201ctrue\u201d motive. But you don\u2019t have to see it that way. Instead, you could see that motive<\/a> as the condition they need for their generosity to thrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shifting perspectives isn\u2019t easy. When you\u2019re doubting someone\u2019s motives<\/a>, their lack of generosity can feel obvious. But it helps to remember that people tend to believe they\u2019re acting generously<\/a>. If you want to respond with gratitude, try seeing them as they see themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if that doesn\u2019t work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the next best thing to being grateful to someone is being grateful for them. Starting there is a good way to remind yourself of why you value this relationship in the first place. And it can be enough to simply say \u201cThanks\u201d and mean it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Schroeder<\/a>, Professor of Philosophy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Schroeder, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences 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\u2019re just not feeling it. You know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":42880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42,10,36,15533,38],"tags":[16766,196,3805,885,891,886,860,457,6610,17945,386,4911],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42881,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42879\/revisions\/42881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}