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Harmful parenting styles lead to children that grow up to be debilitated and somehow it gets turned around to be called 'entitlement'. It's just shifting the blame from the bad parents to the child, like victim blaming.

Whenever someone uses the word "entitled", I just hear my mom.

People who participate in and contribute to society are entitled to things. They should have a sufficient wage, safe housing, food and clean water.

If I as a tax-paying, working member of society am not "entitled" to anything, why would I care about the perpetuation of the society?

If I'm not "entitled" to anything, why should I care about anything or anyone at all?

Because in the real world, the only transactional relationships you ought to have are ones that explicitly involve money. It's difficult to learn to start to relate to people in a non-transactional manner, but it's necessary to develop genuine relationships.

It's difficult to worry about higher-order emotions when your basic material needs aren't met.

Likewise, if the market price for housing and healthcare is unreasonably high, why would the populace continue to support capitalism?

   > People who participate in and contribute to society are entitled to things. They should have a sufficient wage, safe housing, food and clean water.

This is the /antiwork crowd we're talking about? The ones too emotionally stunted to even crawl out of bed and do anything productive because they've self-diagnosed as depressed/anxiety ridden/whatever?

No they're not entitled to anything. The ones that actually contribute to society are, but a huge chunk of them aren't. Which is fine, but then can't bitch about it and shouldn't expect anything in return. They can go live in the mountains or under a bridge.

Someone has to make you your nuggies at McDonald's homie. It's going to be someone, it might even be you. Half the workers at any McDonald's I've ever been to are elders who should be retired.

The level of isolation you are suffering from is profound and I hope you find a way out of it.

By the next time I bother to go to McDonalds, I'm sure the robots will at least not fuck my order up like the stoners always do. Not sure what the Marxist burger flippers will do now, but since they don't care, I guess I won't either.

> but damn if 20-somethings aren't emotionally fragile at a level the world has never seen before.

38 year old here.

I do wonder if the sense of "emotionally fragile" has something to do with how we (America? Canada?) had been accustomed to only having ppl speaking about emotions once they'd sorted it out. Maybe ppl talking more about their emotions earlier looks a lot like ppl talking about things they don't understand yet.

But maybe they're more likely to turn out as better ppl than you or I if they're communicating more and earlier and working things out, albeit with a whole lot of untenable conclusions while younger :)

> Is it possible maybe the problem is they are just a bit too entitled on average, and when things don't go perfectly they can't cope?

Maybe it's that things today are generally just worse than they used to be. It is generally harder to "cope" as a younger person than it was 20-40 years ago.

In the late seventies/early eighties we grew up believing we were going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Have you watched “The Day After” and “Threads”? Way worse on a child’s psyche than “Don’t Look Up” because doesn’t depict survival in an irradiated apocalypse of pain, wounds, death, and deprivation: everyone just gathers for a nice dinner and instant obliteration.

We Gen-X coped with the grim possibility of nuclear death, and then coped with death by AIDS, and then coped with the ever-increasing reality of global environmental failure, from ozone holes to acid rain to the heat death of the planet, and then coped with being kicked in the teeth by massive financial failures again and again and again.

Things have been worsening ever more rapidly my entire damn life and there’s no sign of it ever letting up. Yet somehow, still coping. I don’t think young people have it any worse than Gen-X has had it.

Grumble, woe is me, get off my lawn, etc.

They don’t, but Gen X had Boomer or Silent generation parents who mostly refused to relate emotionally. So punk, angst, grunge made its way into public communication instead.

Gen Z is lucky in a sense to have mostly Gen X or younger parents, who are like, yeah, it sucks, I feel you.

This is validating for Gen Z is a wonderful way and I hope that everyone complaining about emotional entitlement can come to understand that while it may be uncomfortable for them because they don’t speak the language, it is not a weakness, it is a strength.

   > it is not a weakness, it is a strength.

How so? They're all so depressed, and hopeless. What part of that is strong? How is that beneficial?

They are looking at the problem. You can’t solve anything if you pretend it doesn’t exist.

They haven't solved anything, and it appears there is no desire to solve because then they would stop being victims. It's just too comforting to be able to blame any shortcomings on something other than your own effort. Don't believe me? Find one that takes full accountability for themselves rather than blame society/parents/Elon/Chad from school etc. Nothing is ever their fault, have a conversation with them if you don't believe me. I talk to them everyday and it's an almost universal mass psychosis.

They are young. No generation is perfect, and they may yet fail to address it.

But still, if the issue isn’t even recognized then the only way it might be addressed is accidentally. At least they have a chance to look it head on.

> To be fair, I don't blame them.

I think it’s fair to say that the blame is on us, the current parents generation. We have formed todays youth differently than our parents formed us.

That's a cop out, and only reinforces their internalized belief that literally nothing is their own fault.

Find a Gen Z person who is fully accountable for their own actions and you will have located a unicorn. It's uncanny how in-sync that entire generation is with the idea that they are not only owed the world, but have no fault. They are crippled by the actions of "others" (whoever the others are doesn't matter - boomers, the rich, Trump, old people on scooters in Walmart...the who doesn't matter as long as they can point to someone else at fault for everything that hurts their feelings.

I don't know how you grow out of a collective psychosis like that. It's cult-like.

I wonder how much of this is just what we're seeing online. As we all know, a relatively small number of people post anything publicly.

That's the same tired stuff people said about Millennials and Gen Xers before them. The younger generations are vastly more open, honest, kind and generous than older generations. They just have significantly less tolerance for hateful people and "punching down". That rubs older generations the wrong way because they tend to hate (or fear) a lot of things and think it's funny/acceptable to punch down.

Boomers are a generation of narcissists. That’s just a fact that any non-narcissist that talks to one can instantly pick up on. My personal favorite boomer quote is “how can you be so selfish, think about me!” And of course if you make the mistake of telling a boomer narcissist about any challenge you face they’ll immediately go off about how they picked themselves up by their bootstraps and worked their way through college. Note that getting disowned used to be a real threat, but now it’s not because boomer parents aren’t planning to leave their kids or grandkids anything other than a reverse mortgage they’ll never be able to pay off anyhow.

No, they're too emotionally delicate to even function as adults. And it's a problem.

Do you have citations that genz are less functional than millennials at the same age? Genz don’t strike me as more emotionally delicate than I’d expect the average young adult. The millennials did the whole occupy Wall Street during the Great Recession, after all. Genz can have their moment too.

This is the kind of critical analysis I'd expect from someone who is too emotionally delicate to function as an adult.

That rubs older generations the wrong way because they tend to hate (or fear) a lot of things

Apparently this casual ageism is "punching up" and therefore fine.

I've always considered the "generations" thing to be more of a state of mind than strictly age-based. Plenty of younger people have a similar fear-based, tradition-bound outlook as actual Boomers.

Also, punching up/down is about status and older people do not automatically receive a higher status, so it's really not an example of "punching up".

I work with mostly gen Z. They are great but the definitely don't like working like grandpa. Ie stupid suits and ties, memos, pointless meetings, butts in chairs. If you let them be results driven, they fuckin show up.

Imagine thinking parents being responsible for how their children turn out is a cop out

You think 15 years old are capable of being responsible for the level of responsibility they developed? Guess they should have made better decisions for their development when they were 10

The age-old shitting on new generations is also an age-old acknowledgement of one's own failures

You’re mixing up “your responsibility to solve” with “you created this problem in the first place”

You don't see it as disrespectful to pretend Gen Z has no agency, no ability to actually solve their own self-induced problems?

Everything is someone else's fault? Is there anything they have brought about upon themselves that they can solve themselves, or are they helpless?

Why do you insist on missing the point? I never said they have no agency to solve their problems, only that they did not create the lion’s share of the problems.

The problems are mostly self-inflicted. Nobody is forcing them to all move to the same 5 cities and then wonder why houses are so expensive there. Nobody is forcing them to spend their lives on social media despite every study showing the negative impact it has on their mental health. Nobody is forcing them to self-isolate into echo chambers and remove key support from friends/family etc. due to misaligned beliefs or whatever excuse.

These are solved problems, so not fixing it is their own fault. But if you talk to them you'll see they don't want to solve problems, they want to be victims so they can do nothing and blame others for their own shortcomings.

I feel bad for the young people in that generation who aren't wired this way because their own peers are driving them to embrace negativity and toxicity and wear it as a badge. We used to tell people like that to fuck off, now they're embraced - it's creepy.

Fair points, especially on the “same five cities”. That’s what sorting job markets by raw salary combined with wanting “culture” gets. Compare relative salary to CoL instead. That and restrictive zoning to keep property values up so the geriatrics don’t retire in poverty.

> Is it possible maybe the problem is they are just a bit too entitled on average, and when things don't go perfectly they can't cope?

Precisely. The world has never been safer or as rich, and it seems like my generation is extremely lacking in independence.

Everyone has to be told to do things, it's like they have no concept of what to do without being commanded. I feel like many simply can't come up with answers on their own. No one can answer the question of how a person should their life. It's subjective. But like a muscle, it's completely atrophied. When you're never given independence, you don't recognize how to listen to your own desires or judgement.

For me this explains perfectly the underlying situation behind the overbearing paternalism (from society & government) that so many apparently desire now.

I think you hit the nail on the head, except that the word "entitled" is completely inappropriate to describe something entirely negative.

At your age, do you think that previous generations were any better?

The younger generation was growing into worst economy that their parents generation did. Unemployment was higher. Their education is also massively more expensive. The Healthcare detto.

It is just not true that they would be better off.

> And they're also all in therapy too and super in touch with their feelings and emotions which is supposed to help, but is actually likely to be a large part of the problem.

Can you elaborate on how going to therapy is “a large part of the problem.”

If you think you think you need therapy for every little thing, how exactly would you function as an adult? Adults develop coping skills. If you can't cope with anything, you can't function as an adult.

>> but damn if 20-somethings aren't emotionally fragile at a level the world has never seen before. And they're also all in therapy too and super in touch with their feelings and emotions which is supposed to help

They’ve probably seen enough older people drink themselves to literal death, along with other types of deaths of despair, & make a conscious choice to not want to end up that way. Whether or not it will work out in the long term, nobody can tell for certain - but at least they’re trying.

Fewer people are "drinking themselves to death" now than in previous generations, so that can't be it.

Maybe the issue is that they literally have had it too good, and were too coddled, and now they can't handle regular life. If that's the case, what is the solution? Treat kids worse, make them face more adversity like previous generations did?

I really hope you’re being sarcastic but I genuinely cannot tell so I guess I’ll reply.

>>Fewer people are "drinking themselves to death" now than in previous generations, so that can't be it.

Do you believe that we do not live in an age (with social media) in which it is much easier for anybody growing up to see exponentially a more examples of things I’ve mentioned? Just because things may be trending down, there is near infinitely more exposure.

Kids used to see a town drunk they were told to stay away from & generally that they deserved their fate. Now they can go on any social media & find people who had full ride scholarships that had to drop out of a STEM PhD & now can’t even get their most basic of human needs met because of a long untreated disability or other medical issues. This may come as a surprise to you - but many younger people find that to be depressing as fuck & don’t see a point when they can easily meet the same fate.

Just personal data: everybody I know who was treated as you suggest at the end now no longer speaks with or interacts their parents, whom regularly post things on Facebook like “I don’t know why none of my kids talk to me I was so good to them you all know I was waaah”

I personally find this to be funny, but it’s probably not best for society at large. We should probably attempt to fix the underlying issue - which all too often seems to be, don’t treat your kids like shit - especially in the 21st century where it’s not hard to see there’s greener pastures to be experienced, even when estranged from family.

Your entire post goes against the data which shows this generation was coddled (probably too much) and that they statistically have it better than any generation in the history of mankind.

If anything, it appears the problem is that they have had it too easy. They are in need of nothing, which leaves them to create their own problems, in need of solving of course.

The people with nearly no pathway to home ownership, a bachelors degree required for the most basic of jobs, & the least social mobility in over a century are “in need of nothing”

You clearly aren’t to be reasoned with. I also think you would benefit from therapy, but I digress.

No pathway to homeownership? Only if you insist on buying your dream home in your dream city where everyone of your peers also wants to live. Meanwhile right now I can link you to search results on Zillow showing thousands of starter homes (yes, still very much a thing) for under $100k in most metropolitan areas.

Is the problem that much of this generation thinks they're too good to live in a $100k house in a suburb of KC, St Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Little Rock, Dallas, etc. etc.? Or do they honestly believe this nonsense that there are literally no jobs outside of SF/Boston/NYC/LA/Seattle?

Because what it appears to be from all the evidence is just a lazy excuse to not try.

Yes, and a lot of those previous deaths was self medication due to mental health problems.

And the same goes for minor violent crimes committed by young people. And teenage pregnancies. Many of those were result of kids having issues and acting out. They are down now.

Also, my generation had it easier then current one. Economy was better, education cheaper, housing cheaper.

Homie, the things your parents did to you was abuse. The things you did to your kids, because your parents did them, was abuse. Your parents were probably self medicating with alcohol. What ever fault you have with the younger generation is on you and your generations behaviors.

You need to get out and actually listen to some people younger than you. It's clear you've never had an emotionally present conversation with a young person.

This sounds like something a high school kid would write. I interact with them daily, they literally "can't even". The entire generation is emotionally crippled, depressed, self-medicating (and diagnosing), and honestly appears incapable of functioning in society as an adult.

Have you stopped to consider how weird it is that you find that entire generation completely without fault? The first faultless generation? How convenient...