“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” — Mark Twain

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Thoughts on Today’s Quote

Entitlement, we see it a lot. People who don’t put out the effort needed to attain what they want, but expect it anyways. They expect the world, and the people in it, to just give to them.

We see it a lot here on Steemit. People posting how they have ‘poured their heart and soul’ into a post and didn’t get the value they should have had.

Really?

Do they realize that value is in their mind? It’s not actually a quantifiable value they can claim loss on. It doesn’t stop their sense of being entitled to rewards others didn’t see fit to give. Or maybe the post wasn’t seen because the creator didn’t feel the need to get known to others and actually earn their support.

We see entitlement manifest itself in many ways.

I used to see it in my young nephew who would explode in rage when he didn’t get help. He hadn’t asked for it, he just expected his need would be seen and filled. It took his mother repeatedly reminding him that those around him were not his servants, he needed to ask for help in order to receive it.

Don’t get me wrong, the lad can be a very kind and thoughtful person. He just had the idea in his younger days that the world would automatically jump to his aid and give him what he wanted.

I’m of an older generation where we were, for the most part, taught that what we wanted in life, we needed to earn. Even though some were born into a world of privilege, there was no entitlement by virtue of our birth. There would be disappointments in life and very often we wouldn’t get to even earn what we worked toward. When that happened, we were taught to either find another way to earn what we sought or adjust our expectations.

Gradually, I noticed that younger generations started insisting that everyone needs to get some part of every activity. Participation rewards for just showing up became increasingly common. An attitude that no child should come away from anything empty handed. No child should experience disappointment or failure.

Younger generations didn’t just fall out of the womb with their sense of entitlement. We gave it to them. We apparently remembered our own sense of hurt and disappointment when our expectations weren’t met when we were young. We rushed to ‘protect’ our children from those feelings. We avoided the pain of watching a child be disappointed in life.

They found that to be normal and the next generation did the same with their own children. They even took it further to make sure any perceived hurt would not be experienced. The sense of entitlement grew in successive generations.

A few generations along and people are seeing the pervasiveness of the sense of entitlement. They see the impact on our society in most areas and they wonder what to do about it.

Changing it is not easy. It means parents grasping the idea that neither they, nor their children, are entitled to anything they don’t work toward. It means the parents supporting their youngsters working toward what they want without jumping in and doing it for them.

It’s painful watching a youngster fail. It can be rewarding to see them encouraged to rise up with the knowledge that failure is temporary if they try again and again to find the path to their goal.

There is nothing wrong with having expectations of what you want from the world. Just remember, it’s your job to make it happen. Not the world’s job to deliver it to you.

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Who is Mark Twain?

Mark Twain is the pen name used by Samuel Clemons. The name is steamboat slang for twelve feet of water. He was the author of several books including two major American literature classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His tales explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy, a sharp eye for the truth, irreverent, funny, often satirical and an eagerness to deflate the pretentious.

Samuel Clemons was born in Missouri in November 1835. His father was a man who dreamed of wealth but could barely feed his family. He died suddenly in 1847 when Clemons was just 12 years of age. His death forced the family into an almost destitute situation and led to a move to Hannibal, Missouri.

Hannibal is on the shores of the Mississippi. It was a very colourful community, exposing Clemons to many experiences that would later become part of his stories and the locales within them.

Clemons left school at age 12 to go to work and try to help his mother support the family. He found work as an apprentice printer. At 15 he took a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor for a newspaper owned by his brother.

By 1859 he got his dream job. He became a licensed steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. He loved the job and it paid well until the Civil War halted civilian traffic in 1861. Clemons briefly joined the Confederate army until his unit disbanded two weeks after he joined.

He headed west to California and Nevada where he tried his hand at prospecting for silver and gold. When that didn’t work out for him he took a job at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise writing news stories, editorials and sketches. It was during this time he adopted his pen name, Mark Twain. He became very popular in the west.

In 1865 one of his tales was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country, spreading his popularity country wide. In 1867 he took a five month Mediterranean cruise writing humorous pieces for American papers. The cruise led to his book The Innocents Abroad being published in 1869 and it became a bestseller.

In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant thus raising his social status. Something he had yearned after for some time. He published his two American classics, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn around 1876.

The last fifteen years of his life brought him much public recognition and many honours including degrees from Oxford and Yale. He became a prominent celebrity at home and abroad.

Three of his children died of illnesses before they reached the age of 25. His wife died in 1904 after 34 years of marriage. The relationship with his remaining daughter, Clara, was strained. Clemons died in April 1910 at the age of 74.

*I will try to find information on the author of the quotes I share. I wont always be successful.

Don’t know about you, but I find it interesting to know who the person was that anyone took the time to record or quote that person.*

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About Coffee Time Meditation

I love being inspired by other people’s quotes. I thought I’d start sharing some quotes that inspire me along with my own thoughts the quote evokes within me. So, think of someone, like me, sitting quietly with the first fresh coffee of the day and mediating about the words of the quote. That would be me, or it could be you.

I invite you to share your own thoughts on the quote in the comments.

If you like this series, please upvote it and share with others.

Have a great day
Path to Success

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Past Coffee Time Meditations

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