Entitlement vs. Expectation

Frequently a shift in perspective is needed to let go of a painful relationship with life. Life just is what it is. We are the ones who attach meaning to these realities by how we learn or come to believe these things can or should relate to us. Everything in life exists for its own purposes that have nothing to do with us. We are not inherently relevant to anything in life. Relevance is something we create by how we choose to relate and participate with each thing or individual in life. Just because we naturally see everything as relating to us with us as the center hub of existence, nothing else sees us that way. We are the center point of our experience of life, but only we have that viewpoint. This is the appropriate perspective for us as we are the ones in charge of creating our experience in life. We are the authors of our life story. Where this becomes a source of infinite pain for us is when we mistakenly believe others should see us in that same way. They don’t and they can’t. Their experiences are seen through their eyes and ears, not ours. They can’t feel what we feel and they don’t have our history responsible for our reactions and emotions, our fears and desires. They are the center of their world just as we are the center of ours.

As much as this is an obvious observation from our adult perspective, it was not obvious to us when we were little. In fact, until about the age of seven, we don’t even grasp that other people have feelings of their own. Our brain is not mature enough to conceptualize that all the complex experiences of feelings and emotions and the thoughts wrapped around all that that we have going on inside us are also going on inside others unrelated to our existence. Up till that age, we are functionally narcissists without the ability to imagine others having feelings separate from us. Life is hard enough to understand without adding that all the people in our world have thoughts and feelings of their own. What is worse, all their feelings and thoughts are invisible to us. How are we supposed to know how to relate to them when we have no idea who they are on the inside? For most kids, this confusion makes the next 5 to 7 years a quiet time of trying hard to figure out the rules of life in a world full of unknown differences. Some kids have good parents as role models and they can figure out how the world works. Most of the rest of us are stuck with varying degrees of childhood narcissism running our beliefs about how the world works. This article focuses on one of those childhood beliefs that causes us a lot of suffering, entitlements.

What is an entitlement? An entitlement is a specific set of special privileges granted to an individual by the monarch of a land in exchange for an oath of fealty and a promise to support the monarch in some specific manner. On a practical level, this usually meant that the monarch gave lordship over a specific tract of land to this individual thus making them the landlord. They served as the local governing body, and security force, and collected the land rents from all the residents on that tract of land which they would split with the monarch. They held title to the land and were given a title name to show this like duke or marquess or earl. Simply put an entitlement is really being hired on as a property manager for the king or queen. Being the representative of the monarch of the day gave you power and privilege. These privileges came to be known as entitlements. Common folk were not entitled to anything, only royalty (the appointed property managers.)

When the USA was formed we eliminated the obvious royalty and allowed the idea of common man ownership of property. The formerly oppressed people who migrated loved the idea of owning their own property and fancied themselves having the privileges of royalty back home. We still pretend that today with our single family homes with a front lawn mimicking the acres of sheep grazing land around the castle homes of royalty. We even encoded the entitlement desire into our constitution with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as is obvious, such “rights” are not entitlements. No authority is hiring you to manage property for them and collect the rent from tenants for them. The specific contract making you a vassal of a monarch and willing to give up everything to support them is missing. That is essential to receiving a true entitlement. A true entitlement is a loan that you are expected to pay back forever by your service and the service of your children.

So how does this historical story of entitlements turn into a source of pain for us in our simple lives? I see a couple of different angles on this that are troublesome. One is the confusion between expectation and entitlement. Our relationship with the world is built on the models we form in our heads of how things work. Our beliefs about how things work are built upon repetitive experience. If we wake up every morning and find that the sun has risen in the east every morning then we expect that it will rise in the east tomorrow. If every time we tease our brother or sisters we get into trouble, then we expect that teasing will get us into trouble. When we put in a good day’s work, we expect to get paid for that work. We form cause-effect relationships in our heads to help us navigate unknown future situations. Our life is the unfoldment of the contractual relationships we form with others. We have such contracts with our society by forming agreements to follow certain rules. For example, we have all agreed to drive on the right side of the road in this country. We expect that others on the road will follow that contractual driving rule. No divine authority guarantees that everyone will do this, and other countries all drive on the left instead of the right. The essence of social expectations is the mutual agreement to behave in certain ways.

The modern usage of the term entitlement retains the idea of privilege granted by decree by some higher authority, but it completely fails to be functionally sustainable. Entitlements were invented to codify mutually beneficial relationships. The mutually beneficial part is what makes the whole thing work. Modern entitlements are a mindset of getting something for nothing just because you exist. This is contrary to natural law. You can’t get something from nothing. There must be an equal exchange for this process to be sustainable. But we use childhood magical thinking to believe that we can get something for nothing. It is the childhood magical thinking that creates a lot of pain in our lives because we truly believe that we are entitled to all sorts of things that don’t actually exist. And when we don’t get them, we are devastated. The damage is very deep because we are forced to conclude that if we don’t get something we believe we are entitled to then we are forced to conclude that there must be something wrong with us that is stopping the entitlement. It just does not occur to us that we are expecting something that does not exist.

Let’s take this practical example. We might believe that we are entitled to be treated with respect, no matter how we act. Not real. You are treated in direct relation to your actions. Respect is earned by acting respectfully to others first. You might believe that you are entitled to be financially supported without having to provide any valuable exchange. This is not sustainable. Money is just a convenient social mechanism for exchanging value. Without exchange, money ceases to have any meaning. Entitlements are used by people trying to make their childhood fantasies real. In childhood, it looked like we got supported just because we existed. But in truth, we were being supported as a type of investment in our future participation.

The ultimate cost of feeling entitled is our self-esteem. Our self-esteem is built out of our ability to build accurate models of reality which enable us to successfully navigate life. Our realistic expectations create our high self-esteem when we put those expectations into action because they work. Hanging on to childhood magical thinking causes us to chronically miscalculate how things will turn out. As a consequence, we become chronic failures and our self-esteem drops down a bottomless hole. No matter what transitory success we may grab by squeezing an entitlement out of others, we will always feel bad about ourselves and typically project that out to feeling bad about the world. The answer – build realistic solid expectations and dump entitlements.

Take care,

Ellen

We have been on a cleaning binge packing stuff up to put in Amber’s new store, Fremont Thrift, just around the corner from Elliott’s nutrition. Ellen used to love to collect scarves. She accumulated around a hundred of these lovely accessories, but never actually wore one. After all these years she has decided to let them go. Here she is holding just a few of her collection.

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“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

~Carl Sagan

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“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”

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“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

~Carl Sagan