Entitlement: what do you “deserve”?

A blogger who calls herself Green Yogurt recently posted about thoughts of entitlement, and how we seem to have too many such thoughts around. It’s a long post, as she says, and in the middle of it is this significant nugget:

Lately I’ve done a lot of interviews, which means sitting around, catching bits of other people’s interviews. My competition. And even though it’s happened frequently, I can’t help being surprised when in response to the “Why should I hire you?” question, the person has responded with “Because I’m a good person and I deserve it.”

Okay and we wonder why other countries hate us and think we’re spoiled? How are people raising children to think that if they recycle and say thank you once in a while, good things will come to them in life? Like jobs, and expensive purses. If you’re a good person, you know what I think you deserve? To walk around in life secure in the knowledge that you’re a good person! Personal satisfaction when you go to bed at night that you were the best person you could be. That’s it. The world does not owe you.

I think it’s worse than that, actually. We’re telling them that they don’t even have to recycle and say thank you. We’re telling them that they just have to think positively, applying the “law of attraction” (see the ridiculous, but best-selling, advertised-by-Oprah book, “The Secret”), and good things will come to them in life.

It’s to puke.

Oh, and if “the Secret” doesn’t work, we tell them that they just have to pray for it. I almost forgot that bit.

It doesn’t work that way. We have to work for it.