It took me more than 30 years to learn it, but since I did (more than 30 years ago), I’ve been saying this to anyone that would listen: Of all human frailties, a sense of entitlement seems to be the easiest to acquire.
I think of the months it took my teenage self to acquire a taste for beer and the years as an adult it took me to become habituated to harder stuff. And I can verify, with a five-minute tour through Google, that the time it took me to become habituated to those petty vices wasn’t unusual.
The same was true for acquiring a taste for art and poetry when I was a child. And for acquiring an enjoyment of crossword puzzles, music, martial arts, films, etc. We are not born with attachments to most of the beliefs and preferences we end up having as adults. It takes time and exposure and sometimes training for them to find roots in our brains.
But not so much for the feeling of being entitled. As any parent with a toddler knows all too well, it develops early in childhood – even before the child can speak. And it sets in quite strongly, even and perhaps especially if there is no logical reason to support it.
I learned this in my 30s with my first significant gift of charity, an amount that was a significant percentage of my net worth at the time. Not only did the giftee come to believe that he/she was entitled to the start-up capital I provided for a business that was never going to benefit me personally, he/she accused me of being selfish and insensitive when I declined to invest more money in it later.
I learned it again and again as I developed Fun Limón, my family’s community center in Nicaragua. I’m retelling some of those stories in The Challenge of Charity, one of the books I’m working on, which compares the investments and rewards of building a for-profit resort on one side of the street and a non-profit institution on the other.
But perhaps the most surprising examples of this phenomenon are when help is provided to people that don’t deserve help but feel entitled to it, only to display their disappointment with it afterwards.
One of the stories I’d tell you if we were having this discussion in my cigar bar would be about a homeless (presumably) lady I passed by in LA every morning for a week. Her manner of asking for help was so fetching that I gave her a five-dollar bill every time on my way to have a coffee. She thanked me the first day, less enthusiastically the second day, and on the third day she spoke the words, but they didn’t feel like they were connected to her heart. On the fourth day, I got nothing but a nod – the kind you might expect from a bank teller helping you deposit your money into your account.
On the fifth day, I reached into my pocket to find no five-dollar bills. Only three singles. I gave her all three. She looked at the three dollar bills in her hand, crumpled them into a ball, and threw it in my face!
I was reminded of that when I saw this online last night.
