Personal development is something that everyone must go through in life. You don’t have a choice. Either you study it and actively improve and assess yourself, or life will put you through hell and you learn the hard way. When you really look into the weeds and try to understand the advice of wise people, personal development is almost always the foundation of the advice. What is one thing that is common in pretty much all wise people? They almost never feel entitled to anything, something that cannot be said for a significant amount of younger people today. Honestly, becoming obsessed with personal development is probably the best way to destroy an entitlement mentality.
What is an entitlement mentality?
Entitlement is a very narcissistic characteristic by definition. To be entitled is to believe that oneself is inherently deserving of something and that they should be given special treatment for the sole reason that they exist.
Causes
Entitlement mentality has a lot to do with a person’s environment. If a person has been given essentially everything they have ever wanted, they expect to continue to receive what they want in the future. Recency bias is a fault that a person has to teach themselves out of, you see this with retail investors all the time as an example. Essentially, if (fill in the blank) has been happening for a long time, then it will continue into the future. This is a fallacy that wise people tend to be very aware of.
Another cause pertains to the person’s parents. If their parents solve their problems all the time, then the person will tend to expect their problems to always be solved by someone else. This concept involves all authority figures, not just parents. When a child can go to a parent, teacher, supervisor, etc., and that person will solve the problem for them, the child never learns to solve problems on their own. This is the same thing with solving conflicts. Soon people become adults and they are incapable of solving problems, so they end up calling the police for the smallest things or just never fix their problems. It shouldn’t seem too much of a stretch to extend this concept to self-defense.
Signs of entitlement mentality
A person who has an entitlement mentality is going to be rather self-centered and it will be rather obvious in conversation. If you notice, everything they want to talk about revolves around them. If they aren’t interested in what you are talking about, they will change the topic to something about them. Whenever you are excited about something they will either ignore it, give a superficial congratulations (or critique), or immediately start talking about how they did something similar, and how a similar event happened to them.
On a fundamental level, they believe they are the epitome of good and the antithesis of bad. If they behave well, they expect to be rewarded and if they behave poorly, they will blame someone else because they could never do wrong. This reinforces their belief that they are better than everyone else because if they believe they can do no wrong, only right, then naturally by their line of “logic” they are better than others. No mistake could ever be theirs.
Another trait of a person with an entitlement mentality is they are hypocritical. This is also known as having a double standard. Basically, they expect others to perform to a set standard that they do not believe applies to them because again, they are inherently better than everyone else, so their mere existence places them above the set standard.
Effect of Entitlement mentality and how to destroy it
Destroying the entitlement mentality can be difficult because entitled people do not want to change. Since they are entitled, they expect others to fix their problems, but the only way a person can destroy their entitlement mentality is to fix it themselves. This is where a significant amount of discipline and personal development is necessary because if a person cannot think about themselves in a mature manner, they will probably never be rid of their entitlement mentality.
However, life can change things in interesting way. Sometimes the effects of a person’s entitlement can help them realize they need to work on it. For example, a person’s sense of entitlement can ruin relationships, and maybe one of those relationship is actually dear to them. Maybe it’s a relationship with a close family member or friend, doesn’t really matter the exact example. However, this relationship failing might help them realize their problem and they might actually try to fix it themselves.
Also, life has a knack for kicking people in the teeth. It is from these times that a person tends to grow the most. This growth tends to manifest itself in wisdom, that in turn makes them realize how useless and destructive their sense of entitlement is.
Ultimately, they realize that they are not special, they can do wrong, and they do make mistakes. A large part of developing a sense of self-worth is being honest with oneself about negative traits and actively pursuing to improve on them. This is where self-confidence that is merited arises.
Conclusions
A major characteristic of a narcissist is an entitlement mentality. They tend to believe that they are better than other people due to an overabundance of un-merited self-confidence. This entitlement tends to make one hypocritical, self-centered, and manipulative. These traits tend to not bode well with that person’s future relationships, and this can cause some tragedy for them later in life. Maybe this tragedy will cause them to self-correct, maybe it won’t, but eventually they will become wiser and grow out of it, or you will become wiser and not let it negatively impact your life by probably just walking away.
To your wealth and future,
James Forsythe
