by: F.R. Duplantier

Neglect of the established forms for expressing gratitude may be inadvertent or deliberate. The beneficiary of a gift may neglect to write a thank-you note because he is ignorant of the need for one, because he intends to thank his benefactor in person at some future encounter, or because the press of other obligations encourages him to put it off until he has forgotten about it. Or he may be truly unaware that he has anything to be thankful for, as is the protagonist of the Nabokov novel The Gift. In his Great Expectations, Charles Dickens tells the story of an ambitious youth who slights his true benefactor by mistakenly attributing his good fortune to someone more neatly fitting his preconceived notions of magnanimity.

Ingratitude may develop naturally from our human tendency to take things for granted. It is easy for us to assume as a matter of course that our parents will feed and clothe and school us, that our friends and relatives will stand by us in time of need, that a job will await us upon graduation, that regular promotions will be ours for the asking, that loving spouses will enter our lives when the time is right, and that loving children will care for us in our dotage. We can easily come to expect these privileges, to look upon them as ours by right, and to conclude that we deserve even more.

The misconstruction of privileges as rights is often an intermediate stage in their transformation into burdens. The bundle of joy that newlyweds long for becomes the due dividend of fertility drugs; this "right," in turn, becomes a daycare-incarcerated drag on the fast-paced careers of ambitious professionals. The petulant child who protests that he "didn't ask to be born" can make a better case for being put upon than the parent who regrets his birth, but both have lost whatever appreciation they may have had for the gift of life, have ceased even to take it for granted, and have adopted a self-defeating, self-sustaining attitude of resentment.

The self-pitier engages in a perverse sort of ledger manipulation, calculating as debits the family and friends, the educational and career opportunities, the affiliations with churches and social groups that should constitute his most valued assets. By undervaluing the gifts and overvaluing the obligations attached to them, he manages to convince himself that not only are they not worth having but that he would be better off without them.

It can be difficult to be grateful to someone who offers what is good for us when what is good for us is not what we want. Often we are grateful for the wrong things, the things that spoil us instead of the things that make us strong. As children we may appreciate the teacher who forgoes homework assignments, the parent who slips us cash without demanding labor in return, and the aunt who plies us with candy; as ignorant, penniless adults with mouths full of cavities, we may take the longer view.