Many times in university I experienced peers making absurd demands of their professors — it should be obvious that they need to put the bare minimum effort into reading and thinking before expecting any engagement from their teachers. So what’s the motivation of this behavior?
It seemed like this behavior correlated with students who really didn’t want to be in university, they were in university because their parents wanted them to be there, and their parents wanted them to be there before it meant they could feel like they were successful and responsible. But where does that come from? Let’s keep following the chain of whys until it bottoms out.
A common pattern in my aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, is that they went through an individualistic, competitive and largely meritocratic education and job market. As a result, they see their own self-worth in very competitive, and therefore comparative terms. When you compete in a sport or a game, you’re inherently comparing your performance to others in prescribed terms. Conversely if you define self-worth on your own terms there’s no game, no competition, almost by definition. A pattern I’ve seen intimately with my older cousins, and less intimately among my friends, is that their parents mentally have never gotten out of this competition and can’t help but see their children as extensions of their own parental performance. Their children’s academic performance and achievements are really the parents’ achievement, not their own.
I was lucky to have contrast. My father needs my sister and my performance for his own self-worth, because our performance is an extension of his parental performance. My mother is zen and lives on her own terms. As a result I can see the difference, feel the contrast between their affection. As my father needs us for his own self-worth, his affection feels conditional. With conditionality there’s always a potential for loss, always a potential that my actions won’t fit, and always a chance that I could be disavowed for poor performance. With my mother, provided I’m aligned with some broader sense of moral integrity I was enough, which provides much more slack, it’s easier to reason about and follow.
I suspect the root of “millennial entitlement” is in this conditional love, related to how their parents see their own self-worth. If you have two parents who are using you for their own sense of self-worth, you can’t live your own life, you’re basically coerced into living their life and aspirations. Your achievements aren’t your own. Anything good you do, your parents will take credit for and show off to other parents they’re competing against, and anything bad you do will be scapegoated onto you. If my performance is linked to my parents’ self-esteem, anything I do wrong (according to their standards) could reflect on their own flawed performance. That would wound their self-esteem. It would hurt to think about. In these situations it’s emotionally easier for them to scapegoat me, blame it on my performance, not theirs.
And attempting to see things from their perspective, they try so hard. In the nuclear family there’s no redundancy. Parents are forced to helicopter because it’s fully on them to protect and prepare their children. This complicates things even further, the stresses and pressures of being isolated intermingle with self-worth: if my children don’t succeed it’s my fault, despite all my efforts.
I’ve seen this play out with my cousins in great depth, and have felt this with my father: it hurts deeply, and sours over time. You realize on some level (whether consciously or subconsciously) that you’ve been coerced into performance through conditional parental affection. I suspect that many “entitled” students are in university to do the bare minimum to satisfy this parental conditionality, they aren’t doing it for themselves. I bet they have no idea what they actually want for themselves, they’ve always been jumping through conditional hoops and never had the safety and slack to follow their own interests on their own terms. They feel a vague sense of unfairness, like they never win, they can never fully satisfy their parents’ standards, but also have no idea what they want for themselves.
So yes, that dilemma produces behaviors that come off as entitlement, no disagreement there. But the motivation and origins for it seem so very sad. It represents lives unlived out of fear of being unloved. That’s tragic. Moreover, when millennials are then blamed for it, it feels like the same scapegoating they’ve experienced the whole time. Parents disavow their children, blaming “poor performance” on them, on medicalized disorders (ADHD, autism, etc), on systems (teachers), but can’t look in the mirror at their own conditionality. It would hurt too much, it would be too painful to see that it originates in them, in their own struggle for self-worth and feeling worthwhile, despite all their hard-work and earnest desire to be good parents.
What’s an alternative to this? How can this situation be changed? Compassion. The most sour students are the ones deepest in this dilemma. I suspect they just want safety, just want some understanding that they are actually trying, but feel totally trapped. The parents are in the greatest need of compassion, the greatest need of a heart-to-heart. They’ve been in a rat race their entire life. They can’t see outside that tunnel-vision, perhaps because they don’t know how to define self-worth on their own terms, they require a game to win, to define it for them.
Being stuck in the game is the root of their denial and the root of their inability to see the bigger picture. These coalesce into the world we see today: huge big picture problems (global warming, unsustainable consumption, inequality, poverty of the soul, etc) and a total denial of dealing with them.
It’s amazing that following the whys can begin to relate everything.