Entitlement

With the recent graduations of high school students across the country, let’s talk about one of my biggest pet-peeves.  Entitlement.  Now you may be asking what entitlement has to do with high school graduation.  In response to that I will pose a question to you:  Have you ever met the “youth of America?”  If the answer is no, then you get a mulligan for this one.  However if you have ever met today’s children, and by children I am also including recent college graduates from the last few years, you will be overwhelmed by the sense of entitlement that these individuals exhibit. 

This is not just a random observation of someone that is removed from the experience entirely.  I have actually had the opportunity (I would say pleasure but well, that would be a lie) to work with individuals that are of this mindset.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have also worked with individuals that bust their ass everyday and take nothing for granted.  They appreciate what they get and only think that they deserve more because they work hard for it.

It’s kind of funny because you can see a distinct divide between people that are around my age and older and those that are about two to three years younger than I am.  Now don’t get me wrong, I know that age is not the sole contributing factor to this epidemic.  It also has to do with the way someone is brought up and the trials that they have to experience themselves as they grow and mature.  For example, I remember when I was in fifth grade, a girl in my class mentioned that for Valentine’s Day that year her father got her a computer.  This was in 1995-1996.  This was before you could go pick up a decent computer for a kid for a couple hundred bucks.  So this floored me at the time that for Valentine’s Day (not even a real fucking holiday!) that this girl was able to get something like that from her father.  I think the most my brother’s or I would receive is a Valentine card (the kind with a cartoon character on it that kids would get in a big box to give out at class) from my grandmother and maybe a candy bar or something from my mother.  A computer?  Are you shitting me?

This brings me to my first point about entitlement.  It’s your fault parents.  Now I know, you want your kids to have a better life than you do.  I get that, and we all want that for our children.  A better life for your child does not mean that they go through the whole thing without actually experiencing anything, or learning the value of what they have.  Throw a little hardship at them once in a while, say no.  While they may be pissed at you for a minute, they will get over it quicker than you probably will, and if it is that big of a deal to them they will find a way to get it done.  They turn sixteen and want a car?  Great, get a fucking job and save your money to buy a car.  I got a car when I was sixteen but I had to buy it from my father.  I had to put the gas in it and keep it running.  To do this I got a job, on my sixteenth birthday and I have not stopped working since then.  I understand the value of a dollar and the commitment it requires to make a purchase, especially a big one.  Do I still make dumb purchases every now and then?  Sure, we all do, but I know that I cannot survive making consistently dumb purchases without finding more sources of income. 

This brings me back to the children that I have worked with that feel that the world owes them something.  It is especially true for recent college graduates, especially those from private institutions.  Regardless of the fact that their parents probably paid for their tuition or that they received other financial assistance along the way (that they will not have to pay back) they emerge from college with a diploma and the feeling that they should be automatically handed a check for a $40,000 a year job.  A girl that I worked with had this superiority complex after a short time on the job, feeling that the skill set that she exhibited warranted a hefty raise.  This was after a few months mind you.  At one point she was complaining about this to me in front of the rest of the crew that I oversaw (which she was already making as much if not more than many of them because of the position she was hired for) and I told her that maybe she was getting paid what she was worth.  This came as a surprise to her that someone was not going to just hand her a big fat raise because she was a cute girl that went to school at a private institution.  She went on to get a different job, one that she used me as a reference for, and I made sure to stress to the individual that called me for that reference that she will only be happy with her current pay grade until she gets it in her head that she isn’t.  This was not in an effort to keep her, mind you.  At that point I had thankfully moved on to a different position that did not necessitate dealing with people in a managerial capacity, so I could care less whether she stayed or not.  I just wanted to warn this other employer ahead of time.

This is why, if I am ever in the position of hiring someone, I will make sure that they are not a recent college graduate.  I know, it is against the law to avoid hiring someone based upon their age, but I don’t care.  If you force me to hire someone that young, they will only last a week or so under my employ, tops.  Then it will just be a revolving door of shitty employees until I tell them all to go to hell and do all the work myself.

Entitlement is not exclusive to young people though.  A lot of entitlement seems to have to deal with an individual’s title or the few letters that are associated with their name.  In case you are still confused I am talking about individuals in the medical and legal professions. This is not an indictment against everyone in those professions, I know individuals in each specialty that have shunned that kind of treatment because they realize how ridiculous it is to treat someone different based on the time and nature of their schooling.  However for every individual that “gets it” there are at least three times that amount of people that take those few letters before or after their name to heart. 

I have a general rule of thumb that I like to follow.  I don’t care who you are or what you do for a living, if you impress me and warrant my respect I will give it to you.  If you look for my respect without earning it, you will be laughed at until you leave.  I don’t care if you drive a shit truck for a living (not a crappy truck, but an actual truck used to haul shit) or if you are an investment banker with four homes and a mistress in each, you treat me with the respect of being a human being and I will provide you with the same.  Really, it all comes down to the fact that we are all the same, we are all human beings (except for the South, the jury is still out on that one) and if we all respect each other as human beings first and do not dwell on how much someone has or where they go to work every day, we will start to see a gradual shift to where we used to be as a country.

This comes back to children, especially those that are still in grade school.  If we can impose upon them the ideal that they are not any better than anyone else, then they will be able to shuck that sense of entitlement that has run rampant throughout society.  Like everything else it starts with the parents though.  If we stop babying our kids, and stop giving in to their every whim and desire and make them earn what they get, they will be less likely to just blindly take from others because of some false sense of entitlement.  Band together with me parents, we don’t have to let this country, hell this world, turn into a bunch of pricks and assholes, because really, outside of San Francisco who wants a bunch of pricks and assholes together in the same room.

Nik:  "I dated a girl in college whose father insisted on being called doctor. Not mister. His reasoning was: 'I didn't go to seven years of med school to be called mister.' To which I respond: "Sir, if you're cupping my stones and telling me to turn my head and cough, I'll call you doctor. But, while I'm just boning your daughter, you're just mister to me.'"
I never actually said that, but I've used it a handful of times in stories.

Gotta love that sense of entitlement.