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Meet Generation Entitlement

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It was the kind of thing you never think will happen to you. My boyfriend and I were travelling through the UK and had booked into a hotel in the university city of Cambridge. The idea was to stay somewhere close to the river, where we could enjoy the Wind In The Willows scenery and see the students punting.

But when we arrived, a woman at the check-in desk said there had been a mistake. A big conference was in town and the hotel was actually booked out. So how about we take the penthouse for the price of a regular room, instead?

Ten minutes later, we were into a four-roomed suite with heated floors, a bath the size of a plunge pool and 270-degree views of not only the river, but the entire town. So we did what anyone would do: we put on fluffy robes and ordered room service.

Soon, we were propped up against feather-soft pillows on a six-person couch in front of a giant TV screen, eating burgers so huge they had to be reinforced with toothpicks. But after taking a couple of bites, I turned to my boyfriend with a scrunched-up face and complained, "The burger is too dry."

Yes, that's right. I was staying in a massive penthouse that I hadn't paid for, wearing a super-fluffy robe, and moaning about the food that had been brought directly to me on the couch.

Now, before writing me off as unbelievably spoilt, you should know that as soon as the words left my mouth, I realised that I sounded like a spoilt brat. Instead of being overjoyed at our rock-star room, I was critiquing a burger patty. What next? Would I be calling up room service and complaining there were no rose petals in the toilet bowl? Or demanding a limousine filled with white doves?

And yet that flicker of burger annoyance hinted at an underlying - and increasingly common - reality. Thanks to the modern entitlement mentality, we feel we deserve the best. That we should get what we want, when we want it. Preferably for little effort and little cost.

I know I'm not the only one to suffer such misplaced huffiness. A recent survey by UNICEF New Zealand found that our Kiwi neighbour's top "First World Problems" included slow internet access, the TV remote not working, and the barista not making coffee the way you like it. In the past week alone, I've heard friends complain that they didn't get the dessert they expected in a degustation (the kitchen ran out), that the massage they paid for didn't have enough essential oils, and that when you make soda water with a Sodastream it doesn't keep its bubbliness for very long.

Sydney-based social researcher Mark McCrindle has a diagnosis for our dissatisfaction. He calls it "expectation inflation" and explains that just as we've all been taught to expect that our smartphones will be upgraded every year, and that the power will double and the price will halve, we've come to expect this level of service and convenience in all areas of our lives.

So technology, of course, is part of the problem. In today's lightning fast, internet-driven world, social values like delayed gratification, patience and resilience - which were so highly prized by our grandparents 50 years ago - are decidedly out of fashion. There's little room and even less tolerance for sub-standard service. We know our rights as consumers and if we don't get the service we think we deserve? "We are prepared to push back," says McCrindle.

Indeed, a new, emboldened culture of critiquing now underpins our lives - and serves to fuel our sense of entitlement. Websites such as TripAdvisor and Urbanspoon have opened up travel and food reviewing to everybody, not just the experts. On Amazon, we can add our views on everything from books to DVDs and washing machines. On Twitter, three million-plus Australian users tweet their opinions on whatever they want. It is not just possible, but completely legitimate to voice your unhappiness or outrage over a product or an experience. We are all critics, all of the time.

At the same time, technology is increasing our expectations of what is possible. Recently, I was making dinner while listening to a playlist of 10 years' worth of Martha Wainwright songs that I had created - free of charge - on the music-streaming website Spotify. By the time the food was ready and on the table, I had listened to a good 30 minutes of music. As the wine was being poured, a brief ad for an insurance company was played. I indignantly swapped to another (free) music site. How dare Spotify disrupt my dining ambience with an ad about "better value" health cover!

As a kid, I remember leaping to the tape deck if the radio was playing a favourite song so I could record it on a blank cassette. And how precious and expensive CDs used to be. Now you can find pretty much any song you want on the internet, anytime you want it. And more often than not, you don't have to pay for it.

There is similar choice - and impatience - with what we watch on TV. Love Game Of Thrones, but don't have a Foxtel subscription? No matter. Last year, Australians led the world for internet piracy, with half a million illegal downloads per episode. Then there's iTunes, which allows us to watch movies on demand (no more trudging to the video shop), and the fact that hit TV shows overseas are "fast-tracked" to Australia. The idea that we might have to wait for a week - let alone a few months - to watch something has become completely ridiculous.

Technology has become so advanced, so quickly, that we often fail to be impressed by things we should be. I always get irritated at the supermarket because my phone inexplicably loses reception in the freezer section. Never mind that 20 years ago the idea that we would all have our own portable "computer phones" would have seemed like something out of The Jetsons.

Comedian Louis CK has argued that we should be way, way more patient with the modern world. In a YouTube video that went viral last year he said: "Give [your phone] a second. It's going to space! We live in an amazing, amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoilt idiots." He has a similar dig at a man who once sat next to him on a plane that had wifi (yes, an actual internet connection on a flying plane). When the wifi cut out, the man was completely and expletively annoyed. "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago," observes Louis CK.

As technology increases our expectations and reduces our ability to be amazed, it also gives us the opportunity to see how other people are holidaying, eating and living. Facebook is awash with postcard-worthy shots of friends' travels to exotic places (even if the shot or the location wasn't that great to begin with, there's always a flattering filter to fix this). On Instagram, we see arty pictures of people's\0x2028lunches ("radish is the perfect accompaniment to locally smoked trout with wilted kale and ponzu!") or the fabulous new pair of designer shoes a colleague has just bought.

It's all too easy to make an "unfair comparison" with our own lives, says McCrindle. Particularly, when we don't just see what friends are doing, we see what famous people are up to as well.

Images of celebrities in their "downtime" have increasingly flooded our social media feeds - from Lily Allen's elaborate new manicure to photos of Kim Kardashian prancing about a South-East Asian beach in a kaftan. Add to this the avalanche of paparazzi images on online news sites, and the result is that celebrities "have become more everyday to us", says Professor P. David Marshall, personal chair in New Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Victoria's Deakin University, and author of Celebrity And Power. We now have a regular and intimate window into their lives - as if they really are our friends - which leads to "extraordinary expectations" about our own, he says.

If the technological world we inhabit is very different from the one our parents lived in when they were young, so, too, are the economic and social spheres. Young people today have more disposable income to spend. The fact that Australians are having children later and having fewer when they do, coupled with wage rises, means "people are more happy to spend [money] on lifestyle pursuits", says McCrindle.

And if we are concentrating more on lifestyle factors, then we will be more critical of them. As political philosopher Tim Soutphommasane has written, "Our houses are getting bigger. We dine out at restaurants more frequently. Overseas holidays are now the norm and no longer the exception. Expectations about comfortable and prosperous living have become all-consuming."

While it is certainly true that young people are faced with a horrendously expensive housing market, they are also far more likely to be educated and have a greater earning potential than their parents. One in 10 people born before 1945 have a university degree compared to one in five Baby Boomers and one in three for Generation Y. Four decades ago, 70 per cent of the workforce worked in a blue collar job. Today that has dropped to 30 per cent. With more and more people earning a white collar salary, expectations have changed. Today's young people think they will start off their financial lives where their parents are ending theirs, says McCrindle.

Generation Y has long been viewed as "entitled" when it comes to their careers, and US psychology professor Jean Twenge has infamously labelled those under 35 as "Generation Me" - a group that was brought up to feel individually special. "Young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves," says Professor Twenge, who adds that it has been drummed into Gen Y that they should never settle for second best, whether at work, in love, or life more broadly.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why many commentators believe we're in the grip of a narcissism epidemic. According to one US study, 70 per cent of students today score higher on narcissism and lower on empathy in psychology tests than the average student did 30 years ago.* No wonder we get so irritated when the internet is slow or we don't get the perfect burger.

According to Louis CK, we need to go back to a time "where we're walking around with a donkey" to remind us how amazing modern life has become. Thankfully, McCrindle has a less drastic idea: "Maybe we can move from an entitlement era to a gratefulness era."

Did I ever tell you about the time I stayed in a hotel and got upgraded to the penthouse? How lucky is that?

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