What is the most ungrateful anyone has been to you or someone else?

The girls in my school who think it’s no big deal to break a 200$ phone. They assume their parents will just buy a new one right away. Spoiled and ungrateful.
Also, the girls who get all pissy because they were given a phone that isn’t an apple product, or they were given an older phone. I know kids who still have a flip phone and they don’t complain.

If you do things expecting gratitude, you will often be disappointed. So, just do things and walk away from it knowing you did something good. You did your part. True altruism has nothing to do with reward, and everything to do with doing what is right. That is satisfying enough. Any institution practicing “charity” and expects anything in return, is not a charitable institution. They are something else, and these institutions do a lot of good, but they cannot call themselves charitable or altruistic institutions.

As to teaching children to be grateful for what they have, that is another thing altogether. That is about learning to count your blessings and has more to guiding one toward a happy and satisfying life, than altruism and charity.

I will probably always regret being a little shit in the hospital when I was 17. I didn’t realize until I got home and googled “sepsis” how serious my condition had been, didn’t realize that my life had literally been saved. So I bitched about my every ache and pain and cried that I wanted to go home. I don’t remember if I ever even said thank you. I don’t know the name of the doctor who saved me.

^^LOL. Relax. Nurses and doctors know. Their empathy for the young who are often confused as to what is happening to them overrides any insult or bad behaviour by those young. Your behaviour was perfectly normal and understandable.

I don’t think there’s any situation where I can say it was the “most” ungrateful anyone has been to me.

I work in an office where they give out public assistance. Once I remember standing back and holding the door open for a young mom with a baby carriage. She walked through and didn’t say “thank you.” That was extremely annoying.

In typical circumstances, if I do big favors for people (like picking up something for them with my SUV) and they cook me a dinner, to me we’re even. I am not looking for them to kiss my ass with thanks. For kids, I realize not all kids write thank you notes. My daughter will say thank you for things but we don’t usually write notes.

I remember once my boss (who is also a good friend of mine) invited us to her house for a little Christmas gathering. She gave my daughter some gifts, among them were some Barbie socks. My daughter opened the package and said “boring!” I was mortified and we played it off. My friend understood sometimes kids say inappropriate things. Later on that day, when I was at my mom’s house, we gave my daughter a lesson in how when people give you things, even if you don’t like it, you have to pretend that you like it. Long story short my daughter had the socks on that evening (on her own, not with me prompting her) and I told my friend/boss that despite my daughter saying the Barbie socks were boring, she was wearing them!

When my husband’s daughter got married we didn’t have the money to buy her a nice wedding gift, so I presented her with an antique crystal and real silver serving bowl. I’d had it for years and it was one of my favorite pieces. I hated to give it up but it was the only thing I could come up with that was nice enough for a wedding gift.
She opened it, made a face of distaste, and set it aside. And that was that.

We had an employee who went out on sick leave. Because we cared we paid his full medical insurance for a year for him and his wife with zero work in return. When we finally told him we had to turn it over to Cobra his wife called and chewed me out trying to say that we were legally obligated to pay his insurance because he was sick. No good deed goes in punished. He never came back to work and tried to branch out on his own. He used our vendor contacts who kept calling us wondering when they were going to get paid for stuff he ordered on his own.
We had been friends and lost all our mutual friends over this. HE was the one with a reputation for integrity even though he had horrible credit and obviously never kept his promises to his debtors. This was over 10 years ago. Can you tell I’m still bitter? Must get over this.

Obligatory gift giving: such an expendable ritual.