A feeling of entitlement is rampant today because many people have bought into cultural and social media messages about what it takes to be happy — which actually makes them more miserable and unable to cope with challenges in life.
Entitlement can take one of two forms:
Our entitlement epidemic is rooted in a trend that began in the 1960s, when the self-esteem/exceptionalism philosophy spread through schools, churches and business development seminars. The focus became feeling good about yourself rather than trying, failing, learning, and accomplishing things.
In the sixties, researchers concluded that people who felt good about themselves tended to perform better and caused fewer problems for society. Psychologists and policymakers began promoting self-esteem in the hope it would lead to such things as better academic performance, less crime, greater employment and job performance.
In the next decade self-esteem approaches were adopted by teachers, parents, policymakers, and therapists, and were integrated by schools.
The results included such ills as grade inflation and participation awards. Business and motivational speakers taught that everyone could be successful. Church leaders taught that their members were special in God’s eyes and destined for greatness.
This has led to a lot of entitled behavior and has produced delusional people like a guy that the author calls Jimmy. Jimmy had myriad business ventures, which he bragged about nonstop. But he lacked results to back up his talk. In reality, he was a screw-up — but he felt good about himself. He discounted anyone who questioned him as being jealous of his success, and those who rejected his business proposals as “missing out” on a great opportunity. He had great self-confidence — he believed his own spin — but he never actually accomplished much.
Technology is another contributor to the entitlement epidemic. While educating and keeping us more connected, it seems to be exacerbating feelings of entitlement. Although we have access to unlimited information, technology makes it easy for us to focus only on information that makes us feel good. We feel increasingly entitled to be protected from anything that makes us uncomfortable. The more freedom we have to voice our opinions, the more some of us want to avoid or eliminate contrary views.
Entitlement is a problem because:
The real gauge of a person’s self-esteem is how they feel about their flaws and bad experiences, not how they feel about their positive experiences.
If you have genuine self-worth as opposed to baseless self-esteem you recognize your flaws (for instance, I’m not good with money), and work to fix them.
Another factor that can lead to feeling entitled is having experienced trauma in your life.
It develops this way:
This kind of entitlement stems from the belief that you’re terrible and everyone else is great, or that you’re great and everyone else is terrible. Either way, you feel unique and deserving of special treatment. You may alternate between these feelings, up one day and down the next. Both approaches to life are selfish.
People who feel they are perpetual victims may overreact emotionally to many things in life, or make selfish demands of others to protect their feelings.
The thing to realize is that your problems really aren’t that unique — millions of others have had traumatic experiences. Accepting this is a necessary step toward emotional health.
Technology has solved many problems but also has given us new, mental problems by flooding us with extreme information convincing us that the exceptional is normal.
That leaves a lot of average people feeling inadequate and insecure, with a distorted view of themselves. But they feel entitled to be noticed, so they become louder and more extreme (self-aggrandizing), or they obsess over celebrities (other-aggrandizing).
We’ve come to believe that being average is being a failure.
If they aren’t extraordinary, some people would rather be below average than just average. If you can’t be the best, being the most victimized and miserable makes you unique in your mind and garners attention — which seems preferable to being merely average.
But if everyone is deemed extraordinary, then no one would stand out.
In fact, you are probably average at most things that you do. If you excel at something, you’re still probably average or worse at other things.
Becoming exceptional takes enormous time and effort. Because of that, few people become outstanding at anything, let alone at multiple things. It’s not possible to excel at everything in life; brilliant people or celebrities often have major problems in other areas such as home life.
The few people who become outstanding do so because they realize they’re mediocre and go all out to improve themselves and excel at something. They obsess over improving themselves because they fear they’re not very good, which stems from a feeling of anti-entitlement.
To be emotionally healthy you need to accept that:
Accepting these realities eliminates the pressure and stress of feeling inadequate and always needing to compensate. You can do and achieve what you want, free of unrealistic expectations.
When you lower your expectations to a realistic level, you’ll have a greater appreciation for ordinary things like spending time with friends, helping someone, or pursuing something you enjoy. These are actually the important things.