That barista DESERVES to be fired!

If you know me, and you probably don't (It's okay, I still love you), you know that I view entitlement as a four letter word.

If you listen to or watch or read or absorb the news via osmosis, you know that many, if not most people believe that they are owed something.

Freedom, food, water, marriage to someone with a matching 23rd pair of chromosomes, free healthcare, etc. are topping the list right now. You could choose any tangible benefit and add it to the list and be sure that somewhere out there is someone who thinks they are owed that thing.

Have you ever thought about the definition of entitlement? I feel like I could define it if I chose to, but that sounds like a lot of work when google is just one tab away...

"belief"

Tell me you can't read that without pause! You can? Oh. Um... Well, I guess I was wrong about you. Here, here's some free money. You inherently deserve this money, so here you go. Also, we are no longer friends. But since I have you here, can I ask you a couple of questions? Just kidding - this is going to be a very one sided conversation.


What do we, any of us, have a "right" to? Do I have a right to clean, fresh water? No! But I happened to pop out of a woman in a state with a very abundant naturally filtered water supply. Does that make me any more "deserving" of this resource than the residents of Flint, MI? No!

Am I deserving of fresh winter strawberries because I was raised on a strawberry farm? What about the (almost certainly illegal) immigrants who picked those strawberries, am I more deserving than they just because my family owned the farm? Please, tell me, I want to know.

No. Because...

Entitlement causes us to tell ourselves some pretty creative lies:

To believe that a person is entitled to something is to quantify their value according to material standards. I've talked about this before, but this feels like a new angle. In the engagement ring scenario (see, you should always click links when I reference them) the giver is placing a dollar amount on the purchase of his future wife as a material good, which sounds ridiculous until you click that link and read it. Entitlement culture provides another vantage of the dehumanizing nature of "stuff". In an entitlement scenario, the one who believes him/herself deserving of privilege or special treatment is placing a dollar amount not on another human, which is crazy enough, but on themselves! Which is more insane?

If I look at the metric that most adults consider when we consider "worth", I am "worth" just about nothing. My debt minus my assets just about balances out, which means my net is almost nil - and I'm okay with that! What are we if we value ourselves as nothing more than the things we own?

This is where the creative part of the lie comes in. If we tell ourselves that we deserve something, even if we never get that something because someone else never "gave us what we truly deserve", we have added self perceived "value" into our inner bank of self worth.

Remember that free latte you got because the idiot barista used milk instead of soy and you pitched a fit to the manager? No? That's understandable since I made that up, but you remember a parallel situation don't you? Here's one - The private jet that a certain preacher asked his followers to pay for. You remember that, right? People thought they were "owed" these things!

None of these things are inherently bad any more than they are inherently deserved. A jet is not a bad thing, and neither is a latte. But when entitlement gets thrown into the mix, the substance of those things changes because...

 If it cost you nothing, it cost someone else something:

The latte cost the coffee shop a dollar or two, but it might have cost that barista her job. Are you more deserving of your latte than that barista is deserving of her job? Did she "deserve to get fired" for that latte? 

That jet cost money. Money that was taken as an operating cost donation into a ministry. I don't personally follow Creflo Dollar (his last name is Dollar!), but if I did give to his ministry only to see him buy a private jet at that kind of cost - I would feel robbed. 

That thing that you took because you deserved it - that wasn't a gift. It wasn't given to you, it was taken by you and it was taken at a cost. You felt you deserved something, and it was therefore justified in your mind, it increased your perceived self worth. 

But someone payed for it. 

I'll write more about this at some point, but once I have to page down more than once to proofread an article I pretty much cut myself off. 

Have a great weekend!