The Lack of Gratitude's Practice in a Hyper Individualist, Hyper Consumer, and Hyper Technologized Society

Abstract

This paper proposes to identify the gratitude practice of a group of 40 master students at Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, young people that have been raised in a society dominated by capitalist values: individualism, consume, competition, efficiency, and financial power. Research objectives have followed to analyse the gratitude level for their lives, to the investigated master students, to identify the important persons from their lives and the changes determined by the exercise of Gratitude Journal. Content analyse of the journals demonstrated the lack of gratitude practice of master students, their focus on negative aspects of their lives, the limited number of persons their feel gratitude for, the negative perception on today society, but also positive changes in their lives as a consequence of the exercise of Gratitude Journal completion (reflections considering their own live, the important persons and the importance of spending time with family, the satisfaction for making charitable activities).