A couple of things:
1. There is no higher sense of entitlement among Gen Y and Millennials. Someone wrote a book (with no well designed, empirical data mind you) that said that the youth of today are spoiled and entitled. So there became a controversy. Then they decided to actually do well designed studies on the matter. Guess what they found (I already gave you a hint) there was no difference of a sense of entitlement among the younger generation and older generations. This is a common fallacy that has been studied for a long time in social psychology. Everyone thinks there generation was better. They just do. We have documents going back to Ancient Greek among the Sophists and Socrates arguing about the entitlement and willful ignorance of the youth. Every generation goes through it and thinks they are better than anyone else. The only generation in the history of anyone doing this research that might have had less entitlement was the so-called "Greatest Generation" that went through the Great Depression and WWII. And that was probably because they went through the Great Depression and WWII. Otherwise there is no difference among generations.
2. There was a study that there was a higher sense of entitlement among pot smokers. But it was not smoking pot that did that. It was the other way around. People who have a higher sense of entitlement are more likely to smoke pot. So it was not causal but an association. According to this study people who are entitled also like to smoke pot. Probably because those entitle don't care if they break the law (they may actually enjoy it). I'm willing to bet that if pot became legal like alcohol there would be no difference.
3. To
@Elmgrovegnome the reason they seem so entitle, methinks, is because of the type of business you run. The type of business that you have is more likely to take manual laborers who are not well educated/have a sense of delayed gratification. Those people are more likely to be entitled, which is why you have such a negative image of that generation.
I love the greatest generation. My Grandparents were the quintessential Greatest Generation. They had some money after a lifetime of hard work, Grandpa worked in a nitro-glycerin factory pushing the "angel cart" and doing lead smelting, but they never squandered. My grandmother gambled for the first time in her 80's on nickle slots once a month with her Red Hatters and thought it was a scandal.
They had cooking pans dating from the 50's because they gave up almost all of theirs to the war effort. But they still had pans from the 50's. No need to replace them, Grandpa would just take them out to the workshop and grind off the age with wire brushes. No need for no-stick, these old pots will do just fine.
Those people were smart. Yes, it came from having to do without, but they were the ones who knew it could all come crashing down at any time. When you have next to nothing, you fix that pan or you have no pan.
They could feed themselves off nature and repair anything they owned. Nothing was disposable. When they died they willed cremation so they wouldn't be a financial burden on the people they gave their life savings to.
When they were starting out as a ticket girl and deckhand on a Mississippi paddle boat they were dirt poor, so my grandfather built a house in East St Louis out of cinder blocks and it's still standing today. He built it in his time off and bought the materials from finished new home sites and ran plumbing, electric, everything.
The reason they landed in East St. Louis is my Grandpa, who was from Morgan City Louisiana, got drunk and whooped a passenger's ass for being fresh with my Grandma and they were thrown off in STL. There were two things you didn't get between with gramps, one was his whiskey, the other got him thrown off a river boat.
So, you can blame that fight on having to put up with me.
True story.
