There is a major concern I see many people express around the effects of wealth on both younger and adult children. This most charitably is spoken of in terms of “entitlement” but often is called by names such as “affluenza” or “entitlitis”. Often what characterizes these discussions is a disparagement of the children of the wealthy and the parents who raised them. Embedded in the conversations is a kind of pathologizing of a set of characteristics in others that reflects a good bit of superiority and condescension. Often discussions arise in a “blame the parents” focus that condemns them (as well as their children) for what seem to outside critics like obvious failures of parenting.
The Words We Use
If I had my druthers, I would ban all of the “cute” words that treat these issues as a kind of pseudo-disease. This sort of shallow labeling does a disservice not only to families and the complexity they face, but seem to demean us as professionals who should know better. To pathologize these situations is neither kind nor useful, and most often is simply a rather tawdry way to sell a few books.
I am even coming to see the word “entitlement“ as an unhelpful way to look at the phenomena the word tries to capture. To call someone entitled in practice often serves to reduce or dismiss the person and to fail to see the environmental complexity of the issues in which they live. Indeed, I most often hear this term used by the non-wealthy and the advisors to the wealthy – often in a manner that seems to be expressing a kind of moral superiority. When wealthy parents use the term of their own children, it seems most often rooted in a kind of shame and sense of real or impending failure.
This is not to say that the word is not useful or to insist on a kind of leaden linguistic “correctness”, but it is to say that the catchall use of the word “entitlement” can do more to feed ignorance and judgement than genuine insight, compassion and more effective engagement.
The Deeper Issues
Now that I have all that out of my system, I would like to address what I see these days as the deeper issues involved. There is no doubt that the culture of wealth creates its own “weather” and that children growing up in great affluence have to navigate that environment in ways that most of us will never understand. (See Grubman, Strangers in Paradise, 2014.) Moreover, there is no question that parents who use wealth to “soothe and smooth” the lives of their younger children are not doing them any favors as they grow into adulthood. The use of money to reduce challenges and insulate children from the vicissitudes of life can indeed quash a sense of confidence in their own abilities or prevent them from being truly connected to the world around them. More about all of that can be found here and here.
But the problem is far larger and more interesting than these issues of parenthood…
There is a particular flavor to systems of “entitlement” in our age that did not seem to exist in prior generations (or at least not to the same degree). People like Thomas de Zengotita and Meg Jay are drawing our attention to these broader cultural patterns. These are not so much individual issues as they are fundamentally part of the general zeitgeist of Millennial youth. While wealth can complicate these cultural phenomena even further, these are not problems solely of the wealthy. I would humbly suggest that to do individual work well, it is important to understand the patterns in which these individual issues are embedded and from which they arise.
From my vantage point, what is both different about this phenomena and what is driving it comes from a very simple observation: the Millennials are the first truly post-modern generation in history.
Optionality: The Constructed Reality of Millennials
What does being a member of the first truly post-modern generation actually mean? And more importantly, so what? Let’s start with the question of meaning. For the first time in history, an entire generation has grown up with the mindset that what we all consider “reality” is fundamentally a matter of social construct. In practical terms, this means that Millennials have been told and believe (to some degree) that they can make of themselves what they will (within some natural limits) and they have almost endless choices (within much broader limits). They can choose their friends, their vocations, their lifestyles, their communities, their culture, their education, their identity, their socio-economic achievement, their political causes, their partners, their contextual personaes, and so on…the list of choices out of which to construct a life appear almost infinite and profoundly variable and nuanced.
More importantly, the choices they make in this endless parade of choices define them: just think of diet alone to get a very small “taste” of this. Pescatarian? Vegetarian? Vegan? Omnivore? Fruitarian? Lacto-vegan? And so on. “You are what you eat” takes on an entirely new layer of meaning when these choices are considered not merely as a matter of nutrition but as a singular block of identity construction by which entire social networks will judge and evaluate that “you” and around which that “you” will construct other aspects of identity through other analogous blocks of choices. And this is just one tiny corner of one aspect of the endless set of self-defining issues out of which identity is constructed.
Millennials are continually making choices that define not inner “character” (as such choices seemed to be understood in a sort of fixed way by prior generations), but as a fluid and socially contextualized “identity” (and by extension over time, a subtler and more nuanced form of character as well). Those who don’t like who they are today can change that and largely remake themselves in very short order – they move, they change peer groups,they swap partners, switch jobs, pick up skills,follow trends, and so on. In the end, this reduces what we might call “identity” to a matter largely of pure “performance”. (See, de Zengotita, Mediated, 2006.) Such youth are experts in expressing their immediate authenticity – who they truly are in that authentic moment of existence – in a performative way. And, as it turns out, this level of performance and the optionality that drives it can be overwhelming.
On the Outside Looking In
Those of us who are Baby Boomers (as the first crudely mediated generation in history) have only the slightest inkling of what this might be like from the inside of the Millennial experience and while Gen Xers are closer to it, they are enough removed that it is largely foreign even to them. To illustrate by way of oversimplification, if the Greatest Generation was governed by fixed notions of right and wrong, and Baby Boomers by morally relative perspectives of cool and uncool, Gen Xers by even more fluid socially “appropriate” and “inappropriate”, the slang of the Millennials would suggest that they tend to judge social behavior on the basis of whether something is “awkward” or not – meaning it is psycho-dynamically fitting or unfitting as informed by social context. Notice that in this progression of slang lies a reflection of an evolution of moral situatedness in terms of social context. Notice the somatic and emotive nuances of these words – they evoke different emotional responses and they have different somatic expierences. It is not that one generation is more “moral” or inherently superior to the others, but that the ground for understanding what is moral has shifted radically to become something that is inherently culturally and psychodynamically embedded in intersubjective space – from a rule bound system of absolutes to a highly contextualized notions of fluid relationship and human connectivity.
Beyond Optionality.
At the same time as these shifts have occured, there is increasing evidence that those who are overwhelmed by this optionality in their twenties and don’t begin to take charge of it will suffer repercussions for decades to come. As the research is beginning to show, the notion that the twenties are a decade of undisciplined experimentation and “finding oneself” is increasingly turning out to be a very dangerous misconception. Those who build identity and make clear choices of differentiation in their twenties are much more likely to do well in careers, relationships and in personal health and psychological development.
Yet many people in their 20s are adrift. This is not only true of the children of the affluent – it is true of vast swaths of youth across society. Most of those in their 20s – across socio-economic spectra – are to one degree or another subject to this phenomena. In more extreme cases this goes well beyond a failure to launch to a breakdown in fundamental self-definition. Meg Jay (The Defining Decade, 2014) speaks of the importance of building “identity capital” in one’s 20s. She suggests that this process of forming identity through the judicious and conscious use of optionality in a context of diminishing time horizons, is about doing interesting and productive things in one’s twenties. These are things that could “go on a resume” and include more than merely gaining degrees or taking jobs. Many in their twenties are drifting from barista gig to barista gig waiting for their “real” lives to begin – supposedly in their thirties. Others go from relationship to relationship. And they often live in peer groups (tribes) that reinforce this drift. The problem is that the research shows (from both physiological and social points of view ) that what people do in their twenties defines the outcomes of their adult lives.
It also turns out that having too many choices (too much optionality) is actually counter-productive. Studies show that when people are confronted with more than about six choices they tend to do nothing at all. And when people do choose, if they choose poorly, they can actually narrow the number of choices remaining to them in a funnel like process that drives to inevitable outcomes. Conversely, making other choices actually can create more options and open more doors. In this way the metaphor of a video game is apt. As in a fast paced video game, Millennials are forced to choose between far more than six options multiple times a day – there are actually more choices and stimulation arising from those choices than the human mind can meaningfully process. (Is it any wonder that, under this continual barrage of decision making, our culture struggles with attention deficit disorder?) This over choice leads first to a kind of numbing paralysis – which often manifests as drift. When Millennials do make conscious choices, their doing so either narrows their future options (to the point of needing to “reset”) or opens them to greater options for success where they eventually “level up”. This analogy of video games, however, only gets us so far.
The problem is that resets are not always possible and time marches forward through the 20s in ways that make these resets harder and harder. What may appear as trivial choices in the grand sweep of options assaulting the person in their twenties can actually have substantial and irreversible consequences, only adding to the general sense of dread and the belief that it is better to do nothing than to make a mistake.
The Application.
This cultural phenomena of Millennial drift in the twenties leading to a degree of “lostness” in the thirties and forties is all very parallel to the problems we commonly label “entitlement”. To be sure, wealth does create more choices and opens more playgrounds. There can be less urgency to narrow optionality (just as urgency is often lacking for many in their generation who are waiting for “real life” to start only more so). The result is that this drift and failure to create a focused sense of self in the twenties results in major problems later in life in wealthy children, just as it does for their peers in the broader culture.
Fortunately, there is very good news embedded in all of this. As Meg Jay points out, the twenties are a developmental sweet spot. Personality is shaped more in this decade than any other. The brain is undergoing substantial re-wiring – more so than it does at any other time of life except for the first two years. Core experiences that shape adulthood are possible. All of this means that if young adults in their twenties spend time building identity capital, they are likely to be quite successful both in the intermediate and longer term. Postponing the development of these competencies and connections often leads to the drift we have come to call “entitlement”.
Hopefully this re-framing of “entitlement” in broader cultural trends that extend far beyond the wealthy but situates the children of the wealthy in their generational context will help those who are working with families to see the importance of the twenties as a decade of self-definition. This insight can shift the focus from a fixation on the role of money in identity formation to a more positive and expansive construction of identity (in which money plays a part, but perhaps not such a great part as we have assumed).
— March 9, 2014