Entitlement - How it Affects Our Finances, Our Relationships and Our Lives

In this post we are going to look at how entitlement works globally and see the factors behind our bank failures, our pension failures, our monetary institutions and then we'll bring it into a very personal level of how our attitudes of entitlement are bringing failures into our own lives. We'll appear at ways to reverse this. We'll appear at the issue of why our attitudes of entitlement are a luxury that we can no longer afford.

In the old days, on a global level, our standard of living was much lower. Our cars had been basic, our entertainment was significantly less pricey and in most economies around the world, families had been able to make it on one income.

Over the years, as our regular of living rose higher and greater, it now takes two incomes just to survive. Rather of utilizing one car for the family, now we see two vehicles or more for the household. Instead of just going to a movie and some location affordable for dinner for a special night out - now we have very pricey forms of entertainment.

In the old days, when we had a considerably lower standard of living individuals truly sat about in the evening and talked to 1 one other. They even read books. They listened to the radio and used their imagination to recreate the scenes in their heads. If you had a telephone, it was a luxury. Consumers produced appointments to see 1 one more, they did not sit on the phone for hours on finish. Nowadays, there is highly small individual interaction. Folks sit on cellphones, they do text messaging, they sit on their computers, they do instant messaging, emails or messageboards - and social interaction has turn into a factor of the past.

We are now leading very insular lives and the finish result is that we have extra cases of depression, particularly among teenagers and young adults. We see a lot more people today these days on anti-depressants than any other time in the history of mankind. This is a lot more than just being dissatisfied with your lot in life. It has additional to do with feeling a lack of purpose in your life. Having loved ones and pals about you to share the beneficial times and the poor times. This is about getting able to live your life with out having a single individual in your life. Anything and every thing that you can possibly want or need can be bought internet. You do not ever have to leave your residence. In so a large number of different techniques we can see the breakdown of the household and of the community coinciding with the breakdown of the economy.

The higher standard of living that we've grown accustomed to isn't actually about buying toilet paper in several colours, but it's basically separating ourselves from the household unit. Rather of listening to the radio and making use of our creative imagination, or reading a book and letting it take us to distinct locales, now we have to be entertained. Now we do not entertain ourselves. Now we require Television, video games, the net...but the worst component is that we have isolated ourselves from every single other.

Rather of conversation, we plant ourselves in front of TV's. Instead of board games that can be played with the family members, we're now playing games on the computers - we're having web based relationships that are ordinarily disappointing and we aren't reading books like we utilized to. Consumers used to have to create social skills. Now with contemporary technology and a lack of social interaction, social skills appear to be at the bottom of the list of priorities.

Sadly the ills of society cannot be reversed by waving a magic wand over them. As a rule people do not change unless they are forced to alter. So how do we get past this attitude of entitlement? That the world owes us a living? That if you don't have what you want that it is ok to steal?

How do we go back to the basics of child-rearing?
Where the parents made the guidelines and the young children obeyed them. How do we get parents to see that their permissive attitude is damaging their children? That it's not ok to whine and cry until you get your own way. That we're raising a generation of kids who are growing up to be irresponsible adults who are not held accountable for their actions.
These similar kids will grow up to be dissatisfied with life, blaming other people for their failures and not able to hold down a job.

So before we can fix the economy, we have to fix ourselves. We have to discover how to put back into the community what we have taken from it. We have to hold our bankers and our financial institutions accountable for every little thing. Our greed on a personal level corresponds with the greed on a corporate level. We have only to look at the enhance in shoplifting to the CEO's of major corporations who have stolen from their company's pension funds. Now that we're facing very especially hard times, we need to have to see how our attitude is causing our own destruction.

When the economy started to go down, a taxi driver in New York City was asked what he was going to do if people today didn't have enough funds to take taxis and he couldn't pay his bills. Without batting an eyelid and having to believe twice about it, he said "I'd steal."

I heard of a woman in her 40's who walked via the produce department of a supermarket and began to eat the grapes and cherries that were on display. She didn't pay for them, nor did she really feel guilty for having taken them. It was as if she had the correct to sample whatever goods were out there. Although security would not have been referred to as for pilfering grapes, specially since the goods would not be located on her, it is straightforward to see why a storeowner's losses would have to be passed onto its prospects.

When physicians and patients submit fraudulent insurance claims - those expenses are not just washed away - they get passed onto the other many people who are insured.

I lately heard of a man who went into the hospital and was there for close to a month. A neighbour of his was 1 of his golfing buddies, and he was also a doctor. And every day he came to the hospital, he said hello to his friend. They talked about gold, about politics, their hobbies... and not once did he talk about this man's medical complications.. and this man believed it was especially nice of his neighbour to drop by. When he got his bill from the hospital, he was completely outraged to see that that neighbour charged his insurance organization for each and every single stop by for the month that he was there.

Though most people would shrug their shoulders and not do anything about it for the reason that they did not have to pay for it out of their own pocket, this man called his insurance enterprise and reported the fraud. He then called this doctor friend of his and told him that if he didn't call the insurance provider and rectify his mistake, he was going to contact the media and commence an investigation. They lived in a little town and the physician realised that he would be forced out of business enterprise if he didn't drop the charges, which is likely the only reason he eventually notified the insurance organization that he was dropping those charges.

The entitlement problems we face nowadays can be traced back to the low standards we set for our children. The bar needs to be set higher, much higher. We are raising children who reach adulthood as grasping people taking whatever they can from whomever they wish with out stopping to question their actions.

I lately heard of a widow in her late 50's who sold the farm that she and her husband had owned for all of their marriage. She moved to a smaller place and planned on employing the profits from the sale as her retirement income. Her kids were so angry that they even refused to speak to her. They felt that the income from the sale was their inheritance and it should go to them. What kind of distorted thinking is that? She and her husband had worked the farm, had put in their life's power in that farm and she had just about every ideal to sell it and do whatever she wished with the money she received from it. Her adult children had been living their own lives, earning their own cash, and not supporting her. They weren't entitled to 1 cent, but they are trying to make her feel guilty for taking what she so rightfully earned.

In the US, they have been conducting surveys among middle management to upper-management staff who had been laid off when their company's downsized. There appears to be a growing trend amongst these people to try for a few months to come across other employment, but then shortly afterwards, they give up and stop looking since they can not come across a job that pays the very same type of income. What we see happening to these persons - they empty out their retirement funds, their pensions, their savings accounts, their family's savings accounts, and mortgage their houses to the hilt. They have decided not to appear for a job. If they cannot get the sort of income that they had been making, they are selecting to go on unemployment for on the other hand long it lasts and to live off every person else. Some of them are sending their spouses to work at menial jobs, others are collecting food stamps and welfare and this quantity is growing quickly. These are people today who are able-bodied and capable of working but who pick out not to - and society is supporting them.

You do not have to appear further than this to see how a country's economic crisis is irrevocably tied to the entitlement issues of its populace.

A couple of years ago, I heard of a teenager who asked her father for a car following she got her license. Her parents had been divorced and her father was trying to compensate for not getting in the home as a full-time dad. He did not have a great deal dollars so he got her a new Volkswagen. She was so angry that he did not get her a luxury car, that she deliberately rammed her vehicle into a stone wall and practically demolished it. Her father couldn't even claim on the insurance simply because it was deliberate. He ended up purchasing her a employed car so that she would have transportation. This father, as nicely-meaning as he possibly thought he was, only contributed to his daughter's sense of entitlement. Had I been that child's parent, I would in no way have bought her a replacement vehicle and I would have had her go out and get a job and pay back, every week from her salary, each penny of the amount of the new automobile that she had been given.

This disregard for property, for other people's monetary challenges, and for other people's feelings represents the sort of attitude that is running rampant amongst quite a few cultures. When parents accept this kind of behaviour from their young children, they are setting their young children up for failure as adults and of course this plays proper into the failure of the economy of countries about the world.

How can we expect our politicians, our bankers, our monetary institutions, our corporations, to exhibit a lot more accountability than we expect from our own children?

A lot of youngsters, single and married, move back household into their parents' residence because they cannot afford to make it on their own. At what point does a parent know that a child have to learn how to survive on their own and quit taking money from their parents? At what point do parents know when they are causing extra harm than beneficial by continuing to treat their offspring as children? When they continue to make life simple and easy for their youngsters, these young children will not know how to survive on their own when their parents die. It is far much better to teach young children moral and monetary responsibility when they are young than have to understand it the challenging way when they are older.

I had to discover this the hard way myself. My father kept on giving me funds, even when I was in my 30's and I never certainly learned how to be independent financially. It took me telling him that I did not have to have his assist (even when I really did at the time), and then I learned how to stand on my own two feet and how to earn and manage revenue effectively.

I could go on and on giving you examples of entitlement in just about every strata of society, but the ones that I have cited are ample demonstrations of how we're contributing to the downfall of our economy. We're doing this on the nearby level, the national level and the international level. We're taking the path of least resistance and though we're holding every person else accountable for their actions, we're taking no responsibility for our own.

It's time to reverse the status quo: Let's try an experiment: for 1 week, between this show and subsequent week's show, attempt denying yourself some thing 3 times a day. Understand how to say no to your self. Find out how to question your actions, how to observe them and question the validity of them.