Entitlement

"The world does not owe you a living. You owe the world a life."
--Ken Breadner

"Gimme, gimme never gets
Don't you know your manners yet?"
--schoolyard doggerel

I know of entirely too many people who are labouring under some giant misconceptions about how the world works.

I don't know any of them very well, mind you. I make it my business not to know such people well at all.

But oh, how you run across them. I've seen more than a few people who somehow managed to get jobs, then show up for them all shocked and put upon that they're expected to work. I'll never forget the guy who, on his first overnight shift at Sobeys, wondered when nap time was. The scary thing is there was another guy who worked nights there who, so far as I could tell, actually did punch in and go to sleep for seven and a half hours. He sure as hell didn't do any work.
It took several months to fire him. And that's what's wrong with that particular company. I don't know for certain, but I strongly suspect somebody sued them once for wrongful dismissal, and won. Because dead weight takes forever to prune, while (ahem) people with a work ethic go unappreciated.

Come to think of it, that's S.O.P. in any retail environment in my experience, and probably in lots of other places besides.

I had a boss once -- my direct supervisor! -- who made it his life's mission to do as little work as possible. He had thoroughly mastered the art of looking busy, so much so that (again) it took waaaaaaay too long for the people who mattered to even determine what (who) the problem was, much less do anything about it. This manager (!!!) who would come in on his day off to write a grocery order, as was expected of him. That would take him an hour, tops, and from that he'd somehow be owed a day. AND THEY'D GIVE IT TO HIM. OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

World's worst kept secret: I'm lazy. I'm actually lazier than most of the slackers I've coached and mentored, and believe you me that's saying something. But I work hard when I'm on the clock. You know why? Simple. If I slack off, time slows to a crawl. The faster I can make time go by, the sooner I get to go home. Wouldn't you rather be at home than at work? I would.

The entitlement culture is everywhere...and it's still spreading. It was bad enough that little Sam was supposed to get straight As for showing up at school, and that Pat couldn't be allowed to lose the baseball game because SELF ESTEEM...but now we're cultivating a culture where I'm entitled NEVER TO BE OFFENDED. If you say something I find offensive, I can ruin you.

Crazy. Where does it end? Is there a further step that can be taken? Thoughtcrime, I suppose. When do we start getting electric shocks  for thinking what a bitch she is, or telling a racist joke in our heads?


We all know where this came from: parents. Wikipedia tells us that helicopter parenting is the product of two social shifts: the economic boom of the 1980s, with its low unemployment and high disposable income; and the entirely misplaced (but remarkably persistent) perception of increased child endangerment.  The former had two first-order consequences:

• it allowed parents to spend more money on their kids than had hitherto been normal;
• and with the rise of two-parent employment, parents felt pressured to spend as much 'quality time' with their children as possible. In many cases this meant partial or total abandonment of the traditional parent role in favour of being the child's "best friend".  

And the paranoia that kids were in danger at every step of their existence? That would have been fuelled by the rise of 24/7 in-your-face media. The consequences of that have been incredibly far reaching:

• a huge spike in child and teen obesity, since physical activity could result in a (gasp) injury;
• a sharp decrease in self-reliance, since kids doing things for themselves might also result in injury;
• the rise of hyperparasitic parent-child relationships, where both parties act as parasites on each other
• and last but not least, that culture of entitlement. It becomes Mommy and Daddy's job to insulate Offspring from any physical or emotional shock. 

I know parents who drive their teenaged children to school each day; who cook their little darlings entirely different suppers from what the parents themselves eat, because "they don't like it"; who wake their teenaged, job-holding kids up in the morning because otherwise they wouldn't get out of bed and they'd miss their shift and be fired.

In my day (he wheezed)...well, I can't be sure it wouldn't have crossed my folks' minds to wake me up. Objectively, I think they might have done it once, with a strict warning that if I overslept my shift again, it'd be on me. They'd follow through on that, too. You bet your ass they would. And then I'd be fired, and I'd...well, I'd have bloody well LEARNED something from that experience, wouldn't I have?

We are living in a society where consequences are completely out of whack.  Egregious criminality such as robbing millions of hard-working citizens of their savings gets a pat on the wrist, or more likely a huge bonus; while an off-colour joke (or, on point, an accidental elbow) becomes grounds for nuclear warfare. Meanwhile, an entire generation of kids--two now--have been raised to expect...no, to DEMAND...that they not be allowed to fail. At anything. Ever.

I see it at work daily: we're treated like children. It grates. It grates even more when I'm forced to concede that some of us ARE children, whatever they look like. 

It's Neverland. We're living in Neverland, where nobody ever has to grow up.  I keep hoping for signs the pendulum has reached its apex and is about to start swinging back the other way. I haven't seen it yet, and damn it, I feel entitled to.