Gratitude without otherness: The neoliberal drift of the encouragement to gratitude

Abstract

Gratitude is a positive emotion that most individuals experience when someone benefits them and which plays a fundamental role in personal relationships. Despite its ubiquity, the study of gratitude has occupied a relatively marginal role in the western tradition. It is true that several philosophers and theologians have devoted insightful reflections to it, and some psychologists have also done it, but few, if any, have made it central to their thought. However, the last two decades have witnessed an increasing attention to the study of the experience of gratitude. The terrain was opened up by the publication of the influential book The Psychology of Gratitude (Emmons & McCullough, 2004). One of its ideas started to circulate widely through a vast corpus of articles in positive psychology, self-help books, and posts on social media—that gratefulness contributes to happiness and to well-being and that this is a strong reason to try to feel grateful, the more often the better. The goal of this article is to examine this new account of gratitude through the views of highly influential motivational coach Tony Robbins to determine whether it complements the traditional western view on gratitude or whether they are rather mutually exclusive. In particular, the article argues that his account of gratitude, insofar as it promotes gratitude as an emotional technology to optimize one’s well-being and productivity, shares a neoliberal logic and its corresponding notion of the self, which sets it apart from previous accounts of gratitude, which are other-centered.