I deserve a great night’s sleep. Apparently. So I am repeatedly assured by a well-known bed manufacturer.

A holiday lettings company tells me I can get the holiday I deserve (presumably a wonderful one) for a reasonable price, if I just sign up with them.

In fact, whether they use the word or not, most adverts set out to convince us humble consumers that we deserve the very best, which is exactly what the latest deodorant, car or breakfast cereal will bring us.

The trouble is, after decades steeped in all-pervasive consumerism, we are ingrained with an unrealistic and unhealthy vision of what we can expect from life. We have begun to believe that the advertisers are right – we do deserve exactly what we want the moment we feel like it.

We don’t have to look far to see the effect this ‘deserve culture’ has on our society.

One of its key effects is to breed dissatisfaction and disaffection. There are a plethora of reports, the most recent one being The Good Childhood Inquiry, confirming our suspicions that our children – in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, in one of the wealthiest periods in history (credit-crunch notwithstanding) – are, in the report’s words, ‘anxious and troubled’.

The Good Childhood Inquiry cited the selfishness of parents as a key factor in children’s emotional distress, in part because most people of childbearing age have been immersed in the ‘deserve’ mindset since their own childhood.

Yet parents do not shoulder all the blame. Children’s values and expectations are also heavily shaped by the images they are bombarded with morning, noon and night. When they are constantly fed the line that good looks and talent bring wealth and popularity; that relationships are about getting great sex; that adults are out of touch and usually wrong about everything that matters; and that you can always get what you want through a combination of charm and good luck, is it any wonder that so many of them flounder when faced with the real world?

We’ve tried pleasing ourselves and seeking to get what we deserve for long enough now. It is clearly not working.  It has bred selfishness and disaffection, and selfish, disaffected individuals do not build strong, healthy societies. So can we try something new?

How about swapping our ‘deserve culture’ for a ‘gratitude culture’? Can we think about what we’ve been given – from our unique gifts and talents, to our families and friends, to our homes and health and jobs and education – with a sense of gratitude rather than entitlement?

Writing in The Guardian in 2006, philosopher Julian Baggini argued that along with some other ‘religious attitudes’, such as awe, reverence and humility, gratitude is ‘deeply important to how we live, for [it] determine[s] our entire orientation to the world around us.’

Although the expression of these attitudes might find a more natural focus in a person of faith, he continues, ‘they are compatible with even the most naturalistic cosmology’:

A theist, for example, has a clear object for their feeling of gratitude: the creator God. But an atheist can clearly have a sense of their own good fortune and an understanding that any period of prosperity may be impermanent.

When we are grateful for what we have, we are better equipped to cope when part of it is in trouble or taken away. And we are better able, and more motivated, to look outside ourselves and give something back to the world – not least because we have more time when we stop chasing after the next thing we think we deserve!

And we’re more likely to get that good night’s sleep.

Philippa Tachbrook is a marketing consultant.