The Entitlement Paradox – I’m not calling you entitled. Read.

When you live your life trying to act better than others and avoid feeling entitled, trying to constantly assess whether you’re good-looking enough for someone, whether you’re wealthy enough, young enough, you know, and trying not to ask for too much, you’re trapped in the Entitlement Paradox. You try to be a good person, better than others, at least, and that gives you a position of superiority. Your modesty will work against you. Your willingness to be a better person will attract those who take advantage of it.

When you try not to feel entitled but you feel superior to others, you attract inferior people who do feel entitled to yourself like flies to shit. You have to stop feeling so superior that you cannot reject the inferior. But I’m also going to ask you to go one step too far; it doesn’t matter what you’re entitled to; it’s about what you are even interested in. Don’t be so high-and-mighty you have to act as if you are happy with what you have or got if you’re not.

So you may no longer have the looks, you may not have the money or the success, but fuck it, if beautiful, talented, rich people are the only type you’re genuinely interested in, so fucking be it. Stop pretending like you have even a modicum of interest in mediocrity.

You can’t force people into interactions with you – let them go if they’re going.

You still won’t force anyone to be with you, give you opportunities, or accept your offer of yourself in any form, but fucking hell, you can stop wasting your time on people who will never interest you. You can also stop pretending like the loss of your looks doesn’t eat you up inside and do whatever you can to fix it and curse the rest of it to Hell. We get old and unfit, trying to fight the urge to get to the gym and act all body-obsessed. Fuck it. Be body-obsessed. Buy the beauty creams, and while you’re at it, book an appointment with the plastic surgeon, too, if you want. (Unless you really love natural beauty and would feel twice as defeated having to fix something, your call.)

When you avoid feeling entitled, you also simultaneously act like you’re not entitled… To anything. Not on love, loyalty, good treatment, whatever. You feel logically that those things should be a given, but when you’re so focused on avoiding feelings of entitlement, you can’t enjoy yourself when something is given to you. All you think about is, “Am I deserving?”

The opposite of the Nirvana: Hyi Vittu; Eww Fuck.

Grant you that there’s another end of this spectrum that will easily land you in Hyi Vittu (Eww Fuck,) the opposite of Nirvana, named by myself; a place reserved for people who take all of their gifts for granted. Who feel they have NO NEED to try. “You gave it to me. Therefore, it must mean you love me.” People who do not question any of it at all, ever. These people trust that their friends are their real friends, their clothes are theirs because they deserve them, and their status is given because they earned it. No matter how glaringly obvious it is that they got those things because people felt sorry for them or responsible for them.

These people don’t care they had to beg for something on their knees, if they get it, they believe they earned it because You Love Them. They don’t care if they look like a demon sculpted them out of horse shit, they still believe they’re deserving of all the sexual attention they get, no matter how… fake and well-meaning it was.

Strike a balance.

So. A balance has to be struck somewhere in between the two opposites.

Are you getting stuff, love, and attention because people fucking pity you or feel obligated to you out of their own sense of being a good person, or are you getting it because you enable fun, joy, and enjoyment in being around you?

However, ironically, people’s happiness and ability to trust that what they are getting is deserved relies on people like us to stop fearing we’re acting over entitled. For the most part, forget entitled, one way or another, and simply ask yourself if you’re even interested in the friendship, gift, love you’ve been offered?

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