Entitlement is believing discomfort is cruel and unnecessary trauma that can and should be eliminated
And it's everywhere. It's not just the purview of spoiled Gen Zs from wealthy families. It is embedded in the culture and we need to undo it.
There is much talk of Gen Zs being entitled. Not wanting to work. Believing they deserve to be promoted before they even start. Demanding Bs in class just for showing up. Insisting grades be based on effort not excellence. Throwing fits about the wrong hair dryer at Christmas. Being generally bratty and lazy.
I think Gen Z gets a bad wrap. I think the entitlement is far broader than Gen Z as a phenomenon. The belief that we should all be able to skate through a frictionless life, never be punished or traumatized with bad grades or being fired for a poor work product is everywhere. It really is not specific to 12-27 year old Americans.
Entitlement is an American cultural affliction across generations and geographies and even (to some extent) class. It’s everywhere. It’s embedded into our government institutions.
Here’s an example: there is much ballyhoo-ing right now on the Left about the fact that Trump has said he’ll abolish the Department of Education (he won’t, but hopefully he’ll diminish the power and influence). This is an organization that has only existed since 1980. Many of us attended school at a time when it didn’t exist. And we’re fine.
Here’s how they perform:
69% of 8th graders are not proficient in reading
30% are functionally illiterate
Only 27% of 8th graders are proficient in math. And 73% of 8th graders can’t do basic math.
So why is it controversial to disband this failing institution? Why should the Department of Education get to be funded, its employees paid government salaries, to do what amounts to nothing at best, and actively harming American students at worst? Isn’t this entitlement to believe the institution and its employees should get to keep doing this? I think so.
Entitlement is believing you are owed a life without discomfort. Without hard work. Without pain and sickness. That suffering or just unpleasantness is avoidable and to be avoided. That everything that happens in our lives should validate our amazing-ness.
I’d even go so far as to say that as we age there is a belief that even death can be averted. The crowing about how we don’t care when old people get sick (covid, anyone?) is somehow rooted in the idea that the old don’t need to get sick, to die. I’ve got news . . .
I don’t think this attitude exists only among the wealthy, though arguably they feel more entitled to avoiding life’s challenges. Like aging. And vacuuming. And having their kids attend a mediocre college that they can’t brag about to their friends — ahem, college admissions scandal anyone? I mean, the horror! Why not avoid the effort of instilling a work ethic in our children and just cheat and pay to go in the side door of universities worthy of bragging about? Then if the kids can’t do the work, just pay someone — a “tutor” — to do it for them! Effort and unpleasantness avoided for parent and child alike!
So yes, in as much as the wealthy raise their children in such a way that the kids never deal with any actual challenges — the parents swoop in and fix everything with money — its likely most prevalent amongst the wealthy. But the over-medicating of children to avoid minor anxiety (we used to call this “nerves”) is enjoyed by all! As is the grade inflation. It’s happening everywhere. Rich people are just better at averting discomfort because they can pay more to do it.
But that girl whining about the wrong hair dryer for Christmas didn’t seem to be from a wealthy family. She also isn’t American so it’s an affliction across western countries in all likelihood but I’ll focus on America because it’s where I live and where I see firsthand the entitlement writ large.
Entitlement — in my opinion — is expecting a frictionless life free from pain and suffering and even garden variety distress.
When did this happen?
I don’t know where it came from exactly. Several “movements” converged over the past few decades, it seems to me —
Big Pharma got us to believe through consumer advertising that being sad is “depression,” being shy is “social anxiety disorder,” and being nervous is medicate-able “anxiety.” Companies literally call it “demand creation” as in “create demand”; in Pharma this means inventing illnesses that require medication. The idea is that these normal feelings are actually disordered and can be melted away with pills and should be. According to Pfizer, anyway. Forget about building resilience by learning to deal with negative feelings. Just erase them.
“Gentle parenting” or the idea that yelling at your kids creates lasting trauma so get down on one knee and beg them to “use their words” when they are throwing a 5-alarm tantrum over nothing. And definitely never punish them. That creates more trauma.
Everyone gets a medal youth / parenting culture because not getting a medal is trauma. No one should ever feel they aren’t the best at everything!
“You can be anything you want!” if you just put it out into the universe — remember that book The Secret? (Pro-tip: you can’t be anything you want. We all suck at some things, some of us suck at more things than others.)
Merit lowering (eliminating?) standards that prioritize equal outcomes over equal opportunity.
Grade inflation because if your parents pay a lot of money to send you to Stanford or Yale or USC, Bs are simply out of the question. And what prof wants angry calls from dissatisfied parents? A- it is. Even for a shitty paper.
The “born in the wrong body” movement (see#1 above, Big Pharma) which asserts that puberty sucks and if you feel discomfort during puberty by God, you must be born in the wrong body rather than undergoing the humiliating, awkward transition to adulthood that every human since the beginning of time has undergone. Nah — can’t be regular puberty shit. You should block it to avoid going through the “wrong puberty” (one of the most unhinged medical assertions since ever) and then cut your dick off because dicks are trauma. (Note: the idea that a boy can “block” the wrong puberty — a male one — then simply take cross sex hormones and go through the right one is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Will he menstruate? No. That’s female puberty! It doesn’t become female puberty because he avoids the hairiness and muscle development of male puberty. He just remains a pre-pubescent boy.)
Morbidly obese? Take this pill. Why exercise or exercise restraint? That’s unpleasant.
Think you’re a girl but you’re really a boy? You should definitely get to compete in the girls’ category because validating your identity is of the utmost importance. To not do so would be trauma.
I’m sure there are more. But the general “vibe” in the culture is discomfort is preventable. Validating everyone is necessary otherwise maybe they’ll get sad. And death is annoying and pesky and who says an 87 year old shouldn’t have the same expectation to a lot of life years left as an 8 year old? We’re all equal!
What happened to the idea that without struggle there is no growth? Without pain there is no progress? I’m not one to fetishize suffering but I also know that the most rewarding things that have ever happened in my life have come at the end of a time of struggle. This is not a new idea. It’s biblical, for goodness sake. But it seems to have fallen by the wayside.
All of this is not to say we should inflict suffering. Closing schools for 19 months was bad. Kids should not endure unnecessary trauma to build resilience. But they should endure necessary challenge to build resilience. Otherwise, no resilience!
Puberty is hard but not so bad and totally necessary. Let’s stop talking about it like its a trauma. It’s normal. I think parents ignoring it for the most part worked pretty well. I’m gonna do that.
Getting a bad grade should make you work harder to get a better one. We should tell our kids this. And if a teacher gets a call from a pissed off parent about a grade he should tell that child’s parent that their kid needs to work harder.
Not making the team either prompts a kid to work harder to make it next time, or to figure out this sport isn’t her thing and move on to something more aligned with their natural talents. Or to just enjoy a rec league. All fine outcomes.
Sadness is a fact of life. If we are never sad how will we know happiness?
These are all such cliches it feels embarrassing to state them here in such a trite manner. But it also seems necessary at this moment.
I see my adult kids and their peers (early to mid twenties) searching and struggling and trying to figure it out. It’s a hard time. I was unhappy and lonely and couldn’t get a job for a few years after college. I did a lot of “temp” work — when that was a thing. I was a receptionist screwing up the complicated phones, always sending calls to the wrong person or hanging up entirely. I got coffee for whoever wanted it, cleaned up conference rooms. It was fine. Boring but fine. I never thought of it as beneath me. I went to Stanford but I didn’t know anything.
Then I got my first “real” job and made 16k a year and quickly realized that wasn’t enough to do anything but pay my rent and buy cheap groceries. Lots of Top Ramen, rice and beans. Even in 1994.
But now I look back at that time as one of the best times in my life. I was living on my own. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I was out there looking for romance. It was messy and glorious.
So I tell my kids to embrace the messy. You have a safety net. You’re extremely lucky. But you don’t have a discomfort eliminator.
Now go get ‘em.
This was another great post, Jennifer. I can relate to everything you've written (I'm just a little older than you). I, too, worked at shitty temp jobs after college, and my first full-time job paid $16k/year....but I was a new grown up and making my own decisions, I learned a ton, and it was freedom!
I recently had the experience of visiting my 28-yr old son in the big city where he lives. We had traveled 3 days cross-country by car to get there, arriving at dinner time. I had told him and his long-time girlfriend to figure out a place where we could go for an easy dinner nearby, our treat. When we arrived there were no dinner plans, no takeout ideas. Instead, "we'll do Doordash" was their plan. I hate this kind of culture: too busy/important to make your own food and hell, too important to even go out and pick it up! $70 later, we had three crappy salads delivered for dinner. Why are our young people so willing and able to spend that much money on food like this? To me, salad doesn't even qualify as "dinner." And I raised this kid. He always had jobs, worked his way through college, learned the value of money (I thought)...but yet, culturally in the big city and within his peers, even food should simply come to you without effort. Doordash is just another entitlement symptom. It's insane.
"The Secret" is an example of so-called New Thought, a 19th century spiritual idea that has rebranded itself many times, most recently in the notion of "manifesting." New Thought has informed the work of Mary Baker Eddy ("Christian Science"), Norman Vincent Peale ("Power of Positive Thinking"), a stadium-full of Oprah guests, and countless prosperity gospel preachers. It is most often associated with the "third leg" of American religion, or "alternative religion" in the US, which is the trend towards a la carte beliefs. More than a third of Americans now operate on a set of chosen precepts rather than join a mainstream church that tells them what to believe. These people are often confused with irreligion or atheism when they have in fact simply left "organized" religion behind.
The result is that all sorts of heresies become acceptable. People can be born in the wrong body, life is supposed to be fair, wishing makes it true, and so on. We blame all this on academic postmodernism, but of course postmodernism is the philosophy of atomized belief. Kids need structure and rules and an epistemic sense of their place in the universe. They are not little adults capable of picking out truth from falsity. I think this is an underrated part of the picture.