The Entitlement Generation

Last night I had a long and stimulating conversation with a 40 year old man who had a thing or 2 to say about my generation and the generation after me. It was quite hilarious to hear him go on and on about us because truth be told, I agree with him completely. He got me thinking and in those rare moments in which I think, I blog.

One thing I completely agree with him on is this. Our generation seems to be stuck on stupid. We are obsessed with the idea that we are entitled to everything we receive. That we somehow deserve a certain level of comfort and amenities in our daily life. I completely disagree with this assumption.

I believe that we are entitled to the opportunity to live comfortably and beyond a basic lifestyle. Our founding fathers believed in the pursuit of happiness, not the promise of it. Something not earned is something not appreciated. It is this "entitlement" syndrome that is destroying our society. Take the financial crisis of the last few years and even more extended, the rising welfare and disability cost problems of the past 10-20 years.

As children, we (ages 25 and under mainly) were taught in school that we had rights and that we deserved every wonderful thing the world has to offer including money, success, and happiness. Our schools have adopted a policy of making our children feel good about themselves. While I agree that children should be given encouragement and compliments, they should not be pushed into a false understanding of the world and their place in it. Kid's these days leave high school expecting life to be handed to them and feeling like they actually mean something to the world. The cold hard truth is that they don't.

The world is an ugly place and if you want to succeed in it, you need to work at it. You need to work your fingers to the bone sometimes. Some of the happiest people in the world barely make what we would call a living but are happy because what they have, they have earned and they own. Millions and millions of my generation have been taught that they deserve to live beyond their means and so, as products of our upbringing we did exactly that. When large loans and credit cards were dangled in front of our faces by greedy credit companies we ate them up. After all we deserve it right?

Now the world is seeing a big financial recession. Finally the greed of credit companies and every day people trying to live beyond their means has caught up with us. It will take a year or 2 for the market to re adjust but it will survive. Americans and the rest of the world should use this as a lesson. We need to earn what we have. When you borrow and live beyond your means, it always catches up to you eventually.