Entitlement

When I ask people why they buy stuff, they tell me it’s because they need it, whatever IT is. That’s hardly ever true. Folks don’t need most of the stuff they buy. They want it.

It’s very easy to confuse needs with wants. You work hard and deserve nice things, right? Whether you’re thinking about buying a big-ticket item (We need a vacation) or smaller, impulse purchases (I need a super-dee-dooper latte), your sense of entitlement can muddy the waters when it comes to what you want and what you really need.

I did a workshop and my daughter Alex was along to help. A middle-aged woman couldn’t get her budget to balance and Alex pointed to her $200 a month cigarette habit. The woman said it was a need. Alex shook her head. “A need is something you must have to stay alive,” she said. Seriously, if you can’t balance your budget, what are you doing feeding your vices?

People who are raised in a first-world country like Canada may have a sense of entitlement simply because they have no idea how lucky they are. If you’ve never been hungry, never wondered where you would sleep, never had to go without shoes, then your sense of what is, by rights, your due may be askew.

If every winter your family went on vacation to a warmer clime, if every summer you went to camp, if each fall you started the new school year with a fresh wardrobe and all the school supplies you could imagine, why would you think you were entitled to any less as an adult.

This is a particular problem for people who were brought up in homes where they benefited from a higher income than they currently enjoy. Even if you haven’t got the income to support it, you have no idea why you can’t have everything you want when you want it. That’s entitlement!

People who watch a lot of TV, read flashy magazines and walk the malls have a sense of entitlement because they believe that everyone else has one so they can have one too.

But here’s the rub: a lot of those people are going into debt to have the lifestyle you crave, so what you’re craving isn’t real. It’s smoke and mirrors. Playing the keeping-up-with-the-Jones game is stupid at the best of times, but it’s suicidal if you’re doing it on credit.

If watching all that house porn is making you think you’re perfectly lovely home needs to be renovated, turn off the TV. You won’t die without granite countertops and a stainless steel fridge. And if hanging out with friends who are always going shopping is busting your budget, you’re going to have to find some new friends if you’re determined to live a real life.

If you don’t believe me when I say that the culture is influencing our sense of entitlement, just look at the sizes of the houses we’re living in now, compared to 50 or 60 years ago. Back then people were having more kids but living in houses far smaller than we’re willing to settle for today. $1,200 square foot homes have given way to 3,600 and 4,800 McMansions. Unfortunately, as our expectations have gone up, our ability to pay for them has been seriously challenged.

While we like to castigate the younger generation for their rampant sense of entitlement, it’s not just a problem of youth and immaturity. Because we live in a society where education is primarily free, we believe our children are so entitled to an education that they, and we, have to do very little for it. We feel entitled to a level of medical care for which we have very little appreciation. If we had to pay for our care, we might take our own health more seriously. So it’s not just our young’uns who feel entitled.

Our society has even created a whole new set of words to describe our sense of entitlement: words like “consumerism” and “shopaholics” and “affluenza” and “selfish capitalism” and “consumercide” and the counter “sustainable living” weren’t part of our grandparents’ vocabulary.

Have we become so addicted to having (instead of being) that we are not longer able to distinguish between needs and wants? Is acquisition of more stuff our new life’s blood?

Here’s a challenge. It’s based on the concept of “buy nothing day”, but is much more practical, personal and pointed. Pick one day of the week on which you will buy nothing. It doesn’t really matter which day it is. Just pick a day and commit to buying nothing on that day. Buy Nothing Monday should be dead easy. Buy Nothing Saturday is for those who are more committed to testing themselves.

How long can you keep your buy nothing day streak going? How hard is it? How much planning does it take?

How addicted to shopping are you? Challenge your family members, your co-workers, your friends to commit to a buy nothing day. The first person to break the streak has to cook dinner for everyone!