Why do people seem so entitled and selfish these days?

No, the boomers are the problem.

These days? Really, OP? Have you been in a coma?

Boomers were the most spoiled generation. Their WWII parents gave them everything. Me, me, me generation. Then they voted for Reagan. Whatever got them catered to like children. A bunch of brats who instilled their narcissism into their offspring.

Are we talking about in America or the entire world?

The boomers are no longer the problem. Boomers are fading away fast. What have the under 50 crowd done to help fractionalize society?

Boomers may have created part of the problem, but later generations sure are take it a running.

The problem is the Latch-Key Generation. Women felt incredible guilt about being in the workplace and not spending time with their children. They knew in their hearts "Quality Time, not quantity time" was utter bullshit; so, they spoiled their children rotten in order to compensate. In addition, parents increasingly relied on TV and by extension, Madison Avenue, to raise their children. It didn't tale long for children to know that they controlled the household. By the 1990s, children determined ALL major household purchases: automobiles, vacations, appliances, etc. The 1990s Nickelodeon Ad, "My mother makes more money than her father ever did, but she still need me to program the VCR." (featuring 8-10 year old children) is a snapshot of the problem. This snowballed into education being a consumer product just like "Barbie" and universities bowing to every child's wishes. Now everyone thinks they are a customer and "the customer is always right".

Isolation. In the past, society judged its members and expected people to adhere to a certain code of conduct.

If you messed up, your mom would hear about it from the lady down the street, your dad would hear about it at the Elks/Masonic/Kiwanis/Rotary/VFW meeting. The absolutely worst thing was to disgrace the family. You would hang your head in shame at church/temple. Some people messed up to such a degree they were ostracized forever. There were things (divorce, pregnancy, affairs, arrests) that were not discussed in polite company. ( My mother was famous for the line, “Not in front of the children, dear.” when certain topics were brought up by her sisters or our dad.)

Now, we don’t know our neighbors, America is a nation of people who don’t join organizations, we’ve traded real relationships for social media connections and the media is full of celebrities who act the fool and earn big money for it. Small talk is a lost art.

One man’s opinion.

Because they are, OP. Functionally illiterate and fucking dumb as a box of rocks, expecting special treatment for their made up syndromes and neuroses, fresh from social media apps.

The Baby Boomers (born 1945-1965) were spoiled to HELL by their parents, especially the earlier ones. Those in their 70s now are essentially spoiled children trying to pass as adults. Trump is the perfect example.

My boomer parents were selfish drunken assholes who cared more about their sex lives than anything else.

R10 It's not Boomers that require safe spaces, trigger warnings, and emotional support animals.

Erratum R12 WHO require

R11 - What do you care about and do so much about that it’s like the second coming to save humanity?

Talk to my kids about their lives, for one.

The boomers are also responsible for me having to endlessly hear about Bob stupid Dylan and his ersatz "art" crap.

Yeah, all us Boomers sure were spoiled all to hell when we we forced to go to Vietnam, where 50K Boomer boys died

Fuck-off, snowflakes, you'd fold and die if you were forced to go to war

Assholes

Good thing you were all such titty babies about it that the draft went away forever. And you were compensated by a youth full of the best sex and drugs. I grew up hearing about Ryan White.

My husband and I are both Late Gen X. I will say, it seems his boomer parents and my boomer parents all appear to be very emotionally immature. They all throw baby fits over what I see as minor inconveniences. I remember my dad once threw a hot dog at a wall because it didnt have mustard on it like he had ordered. My father in law once threw a fit when we went to drive around and see Christmas lights and the kids fell asleep in the back. The moms are even worse

Boomers were not spoiled as much as each successive generation because most mothers didn't work and there was little disposable income. Going to a restaurant was an infrequent treat. A vacation happened once a year and it was usually to a beach, lake or National Park, maybe Disneyland. Many families only had one car. When I was a baby (Generation Jones), my dad rode a bike to work while my mom used the car to ferry the older kids to school and little league, etc.

Boomers are where the rot started. I can't really blame their parents though, after growing up in the Depression and then WWII I can understand wanting to give your kids a much better experience. The problem is that with each generation more and more of us seem to never grow out of our childhoods.

The onset of the computer age enabled susceptible people (and others!) to be more and more self-absorbed. When it was getting underway, it was supposed that, due to increased facilities for communication, it would do the opposite and make people more broadly-based through online interaction; but no, it has enabled people to focus more closely and more continuously on their personal fads and quirks, to the exclusion of everything else. In due course, what had been personal choices became personal expectations . . . and here we are.

It started in the late 90s with the economic boom. Suddenly everyone had to have the best of everything. McMansions, SUVs minivans that cunts didn't know how to drive or park properly without causing issues for others. And it's only gotten worse.

The 90s were also when pitbulls began to be popularized as pets. And dog culture was slowly pushed on everyone whether we wanted it or not.

If there are no repercussions for behaving badly, then the offenders are of course entitled and emboldened. Social media allows for unchecked bad behavior to take hold and fester. Social media, by definition, is unchecked entitlement.

True R24. And the 90s is also when this garbage rap music culture that has become a pox on music an society as a whole started to take off. The 90s and the political leaders we had at that time are the source of most problems.

The 90s is when the GOP went from asshole cunts to lawless asshole cunts. Impeaching the president now means nothing.

QuoteWhat did you expect? "Welcome, sonny"? "Make yourself at home"? "Marry my daughter?" You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know...morons. View QuoteWell, Mongo

It never ceases to amaze me how some of you make EVERYTHING - and I mean absolutely EVERYTHING - about politics, specifically how evil Republicans are.

My God.

Because they are on their phones non-stop. Human interaction is consequently an annoyance.

Well I was referring to the Clintons R29. So no worries about my post.

It is worse than when I was growing up. People just don’t behave in a polite way in public. It’s a lot of younger people too so gen x and younger. It’s little things like not holding door or trying to run down pedestrians at crosswalks. And I’m a millennial so it’s not like I’m some old person criticisms the youth. I think society is collapsing.

Part of the problem is every generation hates each other and blames the other one for everything while trying to appear blameless themselves.

I don't think human nature has changed very much.

[quote]Why do people seem so entitled and selfish these days?

Because more of them can be seen through a more unfiltered lens of shamelessness.

A big part of the problem is this ridiculous and divisive practice of separating and naming each generation, so each one can blame the others for "this sad state of affairs."

Don't buy into this nonsense and help create a better future.

What is with the people who stop at the grocery store doors as they are exiting to peruse their receipt, and block everyone else from leaving the store? I just had someone do that again yesterday. Didn't say anything just waited for him to get out of the way.

How stupid do you have to be to do something like this?

R8 You hit the nail in the head. No one is invested in their neighbors anymore and I imagine the last two years have made things even worse. I’m lucky that most people on my street are elderly or have always worked from home so we have a pretty traditional dynamic.

People nowadays have no awareness or concern that their behavior affects others.

King Baby Syndrome is endemic

The constant blaming of boomers as if all boomers are rich. Never was the case just like they think all Americans were slave owners back in the day. Most of the people complaining just make blanket statements and have no sense of history at all. Too many people are afflicted with Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

It's been a slow drift into this behavior but Trumpy made it acceptable, which then opened the floodgates.

Agree with R8 and R42. It seems to be getting worse every day. People now take pleasure in acting aggressively and/or insulting others, lest they be considered a "cuck". There seems to be no road back to a more civilized society.

Humanity does not fundamentally change in the span of a few generations, so I think we should look to a combination of external factors:

- The cheap price of consumer goods (enabled by our willingness to look the other way on sweatshop labor) has driven materialism to new highs, leading to more widespread building of status for purchase, and the resulting feelings of status anxiety. More competition and less community.

- Electronics have added great stress to many peoples’ lives due to not being able to disengage and take a brain break (from work, from passive aggressive calls from Mom, from neighborhood feuds, etc). That daily stress increases poor treatment of the people and things around them.

- The chunk of people who only treated others well because of religion (like, out of fear of going to hell) has been freed from that constraint by the decline in religious belief (which is still likely a net good for society…).

- Automatic, monopolization, and the spread of corporate culture have taken the humanity and flexibility out of customer services that a lot of people use on a daily basis, the mood equivalent of wearing a hair shirt.

- A large portion of society (at least in the US) grew up observing that people who looked like them (white men) had social privilege over other types of people and that certain people in their lives like a wife would be there to cater to their needs. As equality and acceptance of gay people, women, people of color, etc have grown, some of these men feel discomfited and resentful of the clash in expectation vs reality, and act annoying in a day to day way because of it (hot dog throwing reminded me of this).

- Many people tailor their behavior to their environment—how they see the people around them acting. Our environment today spans the globe because mass media and the Internet allow us to see people everywhere on display, and more people watch when more shocking things are shown. So we all see people “like us” acting like wild beasts and it changes our context.

- All these things and others have led to a race to the bottom where the decline of behavior builds on itself.

I'm with R7. The really entitled, immature generation is the one with the guilty mothers. I'd add to that that they were also the generation where second-marriage dads were a big factor. Often a fair bit older than the mom, they had already fucked up one family so they too were indulgent with the second-round children.

The boomers weren't spoilt by their parents, who still didn't have a whole lot to give them. They were spoilt by their luck. They had good educations for cheap (for free in places where scholarships were plentiful) and they walked out of them into any job they wanted. Most of them were too young to be as scared as they could have been by the Cold War. If you assume that, then from the moment of their birth to the pandemic, the only big problem any of them had (in western countries) was the possibility of conscription to Vietnam.

This is where we start to see the bad behaviour. I do think they were remarkably selfish, and they could be because they outnumbered everyone else. I have a cynical view that the whole hippy-dippy Love and Peace racket was entirely prompted by their unwillingness to go to war, exacerbated by their wish to use lots of mind-altering substances. The unwillingness was perfectly reasonable - war is horrible and that one was stupid to beat the band - but pretending it was a social movement towards a world of love and peace was totally self-serving.

The reason I think this is that it was the same generation that was in charge of things in the 1980s and was behind the Greed is Good movement and the start of the Big Veer to the Right under Thatcher and Reagan. Clearly these two world views (hippy to Gekko) cannot coexist unless for self-serving purposes. Obviously not all Boomers were involved in both scenes, but enough of them must have been to make those the key themes of their decades.

^ I’m reminded by this post of how derisive George Harrison was after visiting San Francisco during the flower child era. He went there expecting a spiritual experience and ended up surrounded by what he thought were a bunch of spoiled druggies.

Of course, he’s also a good example of not practicing what he preached. He spent decades studying philosophies of peace and love while being a big grouch who cheated on his wife all over the world.

R45 The kids were scared of the cold war. We had to duck and cover. Early boomers had their mothers at home. And they always wanted us to play outside. It helped us become independent. I hated Reagan. AS a teen I threw rocks at his windows in his Newport house with a bunch of other kids and broke a lot of his windows when he was Gov of CA. the ww2 generation (my parents' generation) voted for him for president in big numbers

I had a conversation with my friend last night about his habit of leaving on all the lights and how wasteful and selfish it was. He was surprised that I would even challenge him and said we can’t all save the earth. We’re both in our early 60’s. So, I think it’s more than media doesn’t reinforce conservation or even polite behavior. They sell what is the most base and that’s now accepted.

As someone with lifelong low self esteem it’s comical to see how full of themselves everyone is. So pretentious, but I guess it’s a better way to go through life than thinking you’re less than everyone else.

Save it for Reddit, Eeyore!

America has always been an individualistic society. The boomers, the me generation. And then social media rockets these tendencies off the charts. The entire thing is organized around self expression and narcissism.

per the Trump thing.. we're in a time without consensus and fragmented media consumption. Looking at this chart, the next question is what do people trust? Answer: anything they wanna make up in their heads!

Both of my parents served in the USMC during WWII and my Dad continued to serve during the Korean Conflict. My grandfather served in the USMC during WWI. If drafted, I would have served in Vietnam myself. But Virtnam war ended before I was of age to go in. So don't go lecturing me about going to war. The Boomers grew up spoiled and are now entitled cunts, like my eldest sister, born in 1946.

We're doomed

Perhaps this is one of those paradoxes--the OP himself is entitled and selfish to expect other people to treat them so well, especially if they don't really know you.

The world has always been full of bad behavior. We just didn't put it in the forefront of our media and arts prior to now.

Also what constitutes "bad behavior" is totally cultural. Our culture is changing because of mass precarity and ruthless "free market" ideology infesting most of our institutions, well beyond the economic one that it barely belongs within.

@r53, Let me get this right, you're a Boomer who narrowly missed Vietnam and you're dumping on Boomers? Are you sure you weren't in Nam and are still suffering from PTSD?

I remember when we had 3 major television networks. Everyone was on the same page and we all had things in common. Music, entertainment, politics etc. There wasn't such a big difference between the two parties. It was a very homogenous society. There wasn't this kind of polarization and CEOs didn't make tons more money than the average worker.

What’s funny is you see a lot of young people who say all the right things but practice none of it in their actual lives. It’s like they don’t understand the concept of hypocrisy. Even social consciousness has become an artificial things. People pretend they care about the environment or marginalized people to seem cool but can’t even be bothered to recycle.

[quote] America has always been an individualistic society.

Individualistic yes but not narcissistic and self centered. You can be both individualistic and still part of the community and committed to the common good. Yes, America has had a lot of problems in our history, but at least our society, as a whole, was neither narcissistic nor self centered. But, we seem to be today.