How To Be Less Entitled
We all have some sense of entitlement.
Two great things in the video game industry happened recently. First there was a 13 year old who effectively “beat” Tetris by making it go to a kill screen.
That’s when the game can’t create any more blocks and just breaks down entirely.
The second and most notable thing is Activison Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick is no longer its CEO. Even though I don’t play any of that company’s games, I am aware of a lot of the problems that Blizzard has been running into with product launches due to Kotick’s involvement.
He is the major reason for why Overwatch 2 is basically a reskin of the original game. Sure there’s new content, but when the new content is locked behind battle passes or new features that would expand from the original game were removed for no reason, it makes sense why this game is poorly reviewed.
Between that and so many other instances of his influence ruining games, it’s ensured that fans of these established franchises and the workers who worked on these games and under Kotick made it very clear they did not like him.
And it’s resulted in when you google “Bobby Kotick” you’ll see a lot of pictures with him with obvious devil horns photoshopped on his head.
Like the orcas attacking and sinking yachts, it’s a small act of defiance. For Kotick, a small portion of his personal life is a bit trickier to deal with. The dude is rich and set for life financially.
But at the same time he’s lamented over the fact that dating is harder now. After all, his date is a single google search away from seeing his smug face adorned with horns and learn about how terrible he treats his former employees.
What Kotick did in his lament is play the victim card and it’s this act that us regular people roll our eyes at the extreme sense of entitlement this man has.
The thing is, we know plenty of people like this. Not necessarily all of them are wealthy white dudes complaining about their boats sinking or their dating life is too hard. But some are more niche examples.
You might know someone personally who has a small fortune and spends it all on frivolous things and does nothing with their lives. You might know someone who is always out every night having the time of their lives while throwing away every responsibility they have.
Entitlement doesn’t always boil down to elitists behaviour. It’s subtle and it’s something that we all have. It’s more like for us we don’t always recognize it. I remember when I initially talked about productivity, I thought it was easy to adopt certain strategies. I was entitled because I recognized I had so much free time on my hands and passed that expectation onto other people.
Never once realizing back then that every person has very different circumstances.
Entitlement is everywhere and it can really mess us up in how we view the world and how we make decisions. And reducing its influence just a little can make a huge difference in our lives. Here is how.
Recognize The Signs
One of the things about entitlement that we don’t realize is that there are two sides of entitlement. There is the obvious one where one will act and believe they are owed everything in the world. This behaviour is more recognized these days as we’re seeing rich people get punished in various ways.
We know people like Andrew Tate and Sam Bankman-Fried lived entitled lives because of how they conveyed themselves. Bankman-Fried showed off his video game skills which “wowed” investors while legions of people reposted Tate’s content on social media making him incredibly famous and wealthier.
We see a lot of that in full display when they’re playing the victim too.
You had Andrew Tate complain about having to eat bugs and cold food even though that’s not true. The dude had an internet connection from jail.
There were lawyers representing Sam Bankman-Fried, a man who scammed billions from so many, saying he was eating nothing but water and bread because he’s vegan and prison wasn’t providing the proper food.
We’re meant to feel sympathy for these people. That these small inconveniences to their lifestyle are meant to send us into an uproar as if their past deeds meant nothing.
This kind of behaviour is very obvious to tell. It’s narcissistic behaviour.
But that victim-like behaviour is the second form of entitlement. It’s conveying that the world is on top of them rather than the other way around. It’s meant to build up sympathy towards them and stir an emotion that someone is being unjustly punished.
Wealthy and widely recognized people are the common example of all this that makes it easy to detect.
But what if the person isn’t incredibly well off? What if it’s an average person in your town?
That’s much harder to detect. For both of those forms.
Sure, the person being on top of the world is easier to detect. These individuals have narcissistic tendencies in certain places of their lives. But it’s harder to tell when someone is playing the perpetual victim.
Recently my mom told me about a news report she saw where a young teenager wanted to provide supplies to the homeless shelter camp in Halifax. It was a nice gesture and the news covered one of the homeless women at the camp who said her feet were cold and were glad for the donated socks.
It’s a heartwarming piece but it’s a bit undermined by the fact the camera crew and reporter were talking to a woman who was smoking during that report and was clearly a heavy smoker.
I know that addiction is a slippery slope and one can’t simply quit at the turn of a dime. But that is entitlement. Here you have an homeless person who decided instead of getting socks to prepare for winter with the money she got from people to instead buy more smokes.
It’s a case where one’s values are twisted and thus behave in such a way that’s a bit odd. I’m not shaming the homeless person because I recognize their priorities are all twisted. But because their values are screwed up, this breeds entitlement.
There Are No Personal Problems
What these signs culminate into is that behaviour that I just described.
It’s the homeless person who instead of looking for work or is trying to make something of their lives, instead asks for money to get through the day and fuel their addiction.
It’s the extremely well off person with more money than they know what to do while still complaining that their yachts are getting attacked by orcas or their dating life is “too hard”.
But what entitlement does beyond screwing up our priorities is that it leads to a certain way of thinking.
For those on top of the world it inflates one’s ego to the point that they can do anything. That the problems faced before them is something only they can uniquely solve and improve. We see that famously with Donald Trump whose first campaign reinforced this idea that he was the only person who could “fix” America and that no one else could.
He whined as well when comedians made fun of him too saying that no other President in history was mistreated so poorly. Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy want to say hello.
But to lesser extreme extents this sense of entitlement results in people putting off particular problems because they’re “solved”. A good example is people who get a massive windfall.
A rich family member passing away or lottery winners get a huge amount of cash and instead of saving it for retirement, spend it all over a matter of years.
On the reverse, the entitlement for those under the world believes there is nothing they can do to change their situation. They’re stuck in their existing habits and don’t think that there is any other option to consider. They’re stuck and anything they try to do will result in failure or making matters worse.
People can flip between these things, but the important thing to keep in mind when it comes to our own entitlement is that these problems are nothing new.
As I’ve sort of implied, the type of problems that we’re all facing are not uniquely ours.
I know plenty of people that are in a similar situation to me where they’re barely scraping by. This isn’t just a “me” problem. Conversely, those who are on top of the world aren’t dealing with problems that no other person could solve.
Elon Musk wasn’t the sole qualified individual to “solve” California’s transportation issue. There is such a thing as government officials in California who could’ve worked on a solution too.
At the end of the day, recognizing signs is a start. But to mitigate a lot of the influence is for us to realize that our “personal problems” aren’t as personal as we think we are. There are more homeless people dealing with addiction beyond that one smoking lady. Just as there are more and smarter people out there who can make public transportation that much better than a man who exploits workers and is sitting on a pile of emeralds.
And recognizing that in our own personal lives can make us realize we’re not alone and keep our ego in check.
Remind Yourself All Situations Aren’t Unfair
All of this culminates into a simple reminder for ourselves: that the situations that we find ourselves in aren’t unfair, unique to us, or things other people wouldn’t understand.
The situations that we find ourselves in are a result of cause and effect. Those rich people in prison complaining about their new lifestyle shouldn’t warrant sympathy because that’s the life they chose. They stole from people, they exploited people. They did bad things and they know it.
This is just their response because for years they’ve inflated their egos to the point that they think they were special and that whatever they were trying to do was something never done before. That their punishment is unique to them.
The same can be said for those who are being victimized. People with bad habits who are stuck in a perpetual loop and can’t break out is nothing new. It’s a very predictable pattern with predictable results.
And if those results aren’t satisfactory to them well it’s certainly not unfair since they ended up in that situation and never bothered to change or adapt.
In order for us to grow and get out of those situations boils down to this reminder. It’s a strong reminder because it can also lead to us reflecting on our situation and figure out a way to get ourselves back on track.
To me, entitlement is just a problem of mismatched values. The deeper you get into that sense of entitlement, the more your values are messed up. And reflecting can help you recognize those things.
It’s not unfair that your values are so screwed up. You put yourself in that situation in the first place. But at the same time, you can work and change them around.
For a lot of us, we might not be on those extreme spectrums of entitlement. But I do believe we all have some level of this. After all, entitlement is closely tied to ego and we all have egos.
The objective itself isn’t to never have an ego, but rather to have more control over it and ensure that we’re going in the direction that we want to go in life. And we can all start doing that better when we realize that our problems aren’t unique to ourselves and that the situations we find ourselves in are due to our own actions for better or for worse.
And from that, we can better learn how to help other people and maybe help those we are closer to reorientate their priorities if not just a little bit.
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