Entitlement vs delayed gratification

Six months of Fruit Punch

There is a certain kind of entitlement that is hard to put into words. It’s an expression. An energy. A stink. I recently started watching Overcompensating, the new Amazon Prime comedy about a closeted high school jock’s first year of college, and there’s a gag one of the ‘mean girls’ parrots that captures the trait perfectly.

When one of the students applies to help out at a Charli XCX gig and is then offered a job chaperoning music talent on campus, the character in question excitedly replies, ‘Oh, I wanna do that!’. It’s essentially her only line; I can’t even find her name on IMDb. She just responds to everyone’s plans, ideas and achievements with ‘omg I wanna do that!’ as if worthy of everything without effort.

It’s something I observed a lot growing up whenever a jaded parent spoke about their long-lost career as a musician or a teenage boy swore he could have been a footballer if he hadn’t torn his ACL. I noticed it again as soon as I got to Bristol University and heard someone complain that the student paper hadn’t chased them down to become a columnist after they added their email to a mailing list during Fresher’s Week.

And in recent years, I’ve noticed it in myself. It manifests as a sort of passive engagement with your desires and ambitions. You might think about things you want to achieve or witness other people achieving them and instead of springing to action and giving it a proper try yourself, you just lean back and sigh and somehow feel wronged in the process. It’s a self-indulgent ‘oh well, it’s too late’ sensation otherwise known as an excuse to never leave the start mark.

By dissecting my own entitlement, which goes hand in hand with laziness, I have drawn a few conclusions. The first and perhaps most obvious is that achieving your goals is hard. Unless you are from a wealthy, privileged background – and sometimes even if you are – it takes persistence, resilience and a lot of work. It’s easy to compare yourself to someone succeeding at something without realising the effort they put in to get there, the luck they might have experienced, or the head start they were given by their network. You can’t run a marathon without entering the ballot, or, perhaps more accurately, without even putting your trainers on.

The second is that I only notice the people I envy or admire once they’ve crossed a certain success threshold. Up until that point, like a lot of people, I am guilty of finding public displays of effort cringe and embarrassing, but that opinion is itself cringe and embarrassing. This is by design. Social media is algorithmically created to make us judge others and feel bad about ourselves so that we keep using it. Ironically, wasting time scrolling through other people’s achievements is probably one of the biggest obstacles to achieving anything ourselves.

For a long time ‘trying’ has been out of favour, but I think the tides are beginning to turn. As proven by the gleeful ascent of Addison Rae, the ubiquity of Amelia Dimoldenberg, Dua Lipa’s trajectory as a dancer, and the popularity, nay existence, of Zumba classes.

The third is that given said social media gaze the stakes feel a lot higher because more people might see you flop or judge you for trying. It’s much safer to stay in your comfort zone and avoid any form of vulnerability, but it’s not exactly rewarding, and it’s certainly not productive.

All of this might explain my tendency to coast or hold back or say ‘Oh I wanna do that!’ without actually getting off my jacksie, but it doesn’t stop the original dreams and desires from existing. Scrolling on the sofa judging other people or imagining what could have been doesn’t supersede them either.

So what is the risk? The two plausible outcomes of trying are a) success b) failure with the satisfaction of knowing you tried something. Not to sound like Elizabeth Day, but an almost guaranteed third outcome, and possibly the most important one too, is the ability to #learnmoreaboutyourself.

We could probably all engage with our dreams and desires more, even in the smallest of ways. And it doesn’t have to have anything to do with material gain, it’s just about practice, persistence and pleasure. As Chris from the ‘PUMP’ class at Fitness First always tells us: ‘If you want to get good at anything, you have to be consistent.’

Writing this newsletter every week for six months has taught me that sometimes there is more to be gained from pursuing something than instant gratification. It has helped me carve out time for writing (and thinking) every week and that is something I am grateful for, even if it looks like self-inflicted volunteer work to the devil on my shoulder.

It turns out the club of people trying new things has a pretty simple entry requirement: a bit of effort. Who knew?

PS. Big thanks to anyone who likes/ shares/ recommends these posts or tells me when they’ve enjoyed them, I really appreciate it.