What goes up must come down, and so it goes for gratitude.

Gratitude is the preferred prescription of late for everything from better health and sounder sleep to less anxiety and depression along with higher long-term satisfaction with life.

Even when we fake it, we can reap the rewards of being thankful.

But, great as gratitude may be, it can be a selfish act, says Barbara Ehrenreich, the founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Ehrenreich argues that those encouraging gratitude are not always doing so from a place of benevolence.

"Is gratitude always appropriate?" she asks in a new New York Times op-ed, titled "The Selfish Side of Gratitude". "The answer depends on who's giving it and who's getting it or, very commonly in our divided society, how much of the wealth gap it's expected to bridge.

"Suppose you were an $US8 [$11] an hour Walmart employee who saw her base pay elevated this year, by company fiat, to $US9 an hour," Ehrenreich continues. "Should you be grateful to the Waltons, who are the richest family in America? Or to Walmart's chief executive, whose annual base pay is close to $US1 million and whose home sits on nearly 100 acres [40 hectares] of land in Bentonville, Arkansas?

"Grateful people have been habitually dismissed as 'chumps,' and in this hypothetical case, the term would seem to apply."

Selfish motives aside, she insinuates that gratefulness can be an expression of smugness for the privileged.

"Janice Kaplan, the author of the memoir The Gratitude Diaries, ... spent a year appreciating her high-earning husband and successful grown children," she says, adding that the gratefulness research centre at the University of California, Berkeley, "does not fund projects to directly improve the lives of poor individuals, but it has spent a great deal ... to improve their attitudes".

Ehrenreich's end point is that all this sitting around and being grateful (smug?) does not require anyone to do anything or take any action that betters the world or those around us.

She offers an example of one yoga teacher's suggestion that we start a gratitude diary, say affirmations or write post-it notes to remind ourselves what we are thankful for.

"Who is interacting here?" Ehrenreich asks, "'You' and 'you'."

She continues:

"So it's possible to achieve the recommended levels of gratitude without spending a penny or uttering a word. All you have to do is to generate, within yourself, the good feelings associated with gratitude, and then bask in its warm, comforting glow. If there is any loving involved in this, it is self-love, and the current hoopla around gratitude is a celebration of onanism."

She suggests that the privileged should put their money where their grateful mouth is to turn onanism into solidarity.

It's an honourable notion, but perhaps she is missing a couple of points.

Practising a sense of gratitude – whether it's "selfishly" done on a post-it note, in a diary, in your head, or in a social media post – is surely a decent antidote to the sense of entitlement that is becoming "the defining characteristic of this generation of children".

In one 2011 study, students at Eastern Washington University were asked to imagine their own death in vivid detail.

"In a nutshell, what we found is that people felt much more grateful following the death reflection exercise," the study's lead author, psychology professor Phil Watkins said.

"Life itself, we have all the time, at least when we're alive, so we tend to take it for granted and not even notice or appreciate that ... what imagining your own death does is remind you 'wait a minute, this is a precious gift I have right now'."

A gift that we are more likely to want to treat with love, respect and care, not entitlement.

Additionally, research has found that feeling gratitude cultivates prosocial behaviour and a greater likelihood of us helping others, giving and being more loving within our relationships.

"With gratitude, people acknowledge the goodness in their lives. In the process, people usually recognise that the source of that goodness lies at least partially outside themselves," explains a Harvard Health letter in praise of gratitude. "As a result, gratitude also helps people connect to something larger than themselves as individuals – whether to other people, nature, or a higher power."

We suddenly – or slowly – start to appreciate our connection with everything and everyone around us with a different, deeper perspective.

Gratitude may well have a selfish side. Some people express their gratitude with thanks to those around them – and indeed some research has found that employees are more motivated to work for managers who thank them.

It is gratitude having a direct impact.

When we sit silently and give thanks though or write down our thoughts of thanks for our own sake, the impact may be indirect, but we should not underestimate the knock-on effect.

"Gratitude can be dismissed as touchy-feely, woo-woo thinking," says Susan Sarandon in a new documentary about the benefits of being thankful. "And that's where science comes in. Work, relationships, health, child-rearing all benefit from embracing gratitude."

In the end, gratitude is not about thinking of death or a celebration of onanism, it is about feeling that our life has been worth living.

And directly or indirectly, appreciating the beauty in our lives and the connections we have while we're here, makes us a happier, better, healthier, kinder people. Qualities our world could use more of right now.

There is nothing selfish or smug about that.