The capacity to feel entitled is an important and underappreciated feature of our psychological repertoire. It unquestionably serves a crucial purpose; however, it comes at a cost that is easy to overlook and difficult to overstate (but, once again, I remain undeterred).
One of my patients nailed the subjective experience of unfulfilled entitlement in what I consider a nearly poetic way: “I’m not living the life I deserve, and I know exactly who is living the life I’m entitled to.” That sentence captures, in a single breath, the conviction, the resentment, and the comparison that make entitlement one of the most common — and most commonly unexamined — obstacles in the pursuit of happiness.
Entitlement is a state of mind, meaning it has an affective component (a feeling) and a cognitive component (a narrative). The narrative of entitlement is closely related to the ideas of fairness and justice. It comes down to the conviction that someone deserves to have something; that having it is right (and a right) and not getting it is wrong (the someone in question is usually the Self, but entitlement can be projected onto others — one can feel entitled on someone else’s behalf).
The satisfactory fulfillment of an entitlement elicits a distinctive positive state of mind — a sense that things are in their proper place, that the order of things is intact — which supports acceptance. When entitlement is frustrated — when one does not receive what one believes one deserves — the state of mind that follows is equally distinctive, but negative: something is wrong. Not merely unpleasant or disappointing, but wrong; a discovery of a flaw in reality perceived through a self-centered lens. This invariably amounts to an obstacle to acceptance (as discussed in the Acceptance chapter, it is difficult to accept a reality that registers as broken; more on this below). The perception of one’s entitlement being withheld generates tension, resentment, and typically, an emphatic demand for correction. It readily escalates into frustration, anger, or despair.
Entitlement is inseparable from fairness. Fairness is, in effect, the assessment of whether an entitlement has been honored — one cannot evaluate fairness without a prior sense of what one is entitled to. A sensitivity to both shows up remarkably early in life. By age three or four, normally developing children protest unfairness quickly and loudly, well before they possess the intellectual apparatus to understand what fairness means as a concept (Blake et al., 2015; Li et al., 2016; LoBue et al., 2011). This is revealing — the sensitivity to unfairness and unfulfilled entitlement is not learned through reasoning; it is hard-wired. The brain comes equipped with specialized emotional circuitry that generates a quick, automatic verdict: I’m not getting what I deserve! This verdict registers not as a thought but as a painful feeling — it hurts to be treated unfairly. It is a specific, recognizable pain to have withheld that which one believes one is entitled to receive.
The fact that this sensitivity is hard-wired rather than learned is significant. Emotional responses, as discussed elsewhere, are fast but imprecise — they generate conclusions about reality without the cumbersome, slower process of rational analysis. In most cases, the imprecision is recognized as such: one can feel anxious and simultaneously suspect the anxiety is disproportionate. Entitlement is more treacherous. When the entitlement circuitry fires, the conclusion it generates — that one is being cheated, that something is wrong — does not announce itself as a feeling. It presents itself as a perception of fact. This makes it particularly resistant to self-examination. Typically, one doesn’t entertain the idea, “I feel entitled to more, I should examine the facts associated with this feeling.” It is much more common to jump to the conclusion “I am not getting what I deserve” and run with it as a self-evident truth. Given its weighty consequences, the feelings-driven verdict should be treated with skepticism; moreover, a rational — mindful — examination of one’s entitlements deserves recognition not merely as prudent but as a necessity (Grubbs & Exline, 2016).
There is a third scenario worth noting: When one receives more than one believes they are entitled to, i.e., when a situation registers as better than fair. The typical response is gratitude, which powerfully promotes acceptance. (For a detailed discussion, see the Gratitude chapter in the Practice section.) Feeling treated better-than-fairly can also trigger emotions such as guilt and inadequacy (which, although important, are outside the scope of the present discussion).
The triad is worth reviewing: fulfilled entitlement supports calm; frustrated entitlement fuels resentment and anger; exceeded entitlement generates gratitude (or inadequacy). The stakes associated with each option are high, raising the question: Why does this capacity exist at all? What is the evolutionary benefit of wiring a brain for entitlement?
The answer, broadly, is that it supports a uniquely human achievement: the formation of a complex cooperative society. Our species is far from being the strongest, fastest, or most durable species on the planet. Our operative advantage is the capacity to form and sustain collaborative, hierarchical networks — societies — in which individuals contribute to and benefit from the collective. These networks depend on a shared, largely unspoken agreement: each participant is entitled to receive something (protection, reward, belonging) in return for contributing something (labor, adherence to a code of conduct, some form of taxation). When this mutual entitlement is honored, the system holds. When it is violated, a secondary entitlement activates: the wronged party — individual or collective — becomes entitled to corrective action, which we call justice. The evolutionary genius of hard-wiring this entire sequence into the brain as an emotional sensitivity is that it makes the system operational long before any individual member is capable of reasoning through the logic of social contracts. A four-year-old who has never heard the word ‘fairness’ is likely to scream if given fewer cookies than the child beside her. That scream, triggered by her pain, is a demand for fulfillment of her entitlement, as scripted in the invisible social contract.
This is a huge benefit. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the cost is staggering. It shows up in three levels. The first is typically misperceived as a depressive disorder (self-deprecatingly considered by some as a ‘first-world problem’). In over three decades of clinical practice, I have encountered countless people who live with a chronic, low-grade bitterness — a persistent sense of being cheated out of the life they were entitled to. I think the phenomenon is endemic, at least in Western culture.
Most of these individuals do not meet DSM criteria for a clinical diagnosis (which, unfortunately, is largely ignored by today’s mental health industry). What they suffer from is a form of failure to thrive — a sustained deflation of mood rooted in the conviction that one is entitled to do well in the pursuit of happiness and, inexplicably, is failing at it.
Modern culture seems to weaponize this sensation. The advertising industry and, more recently, social media bombard us with images of people who appear to be blissfully fulfilled — rubbing my patient’s face with images of people living the life she felt entitled to (Vogel et al., 2014; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023).
The covert message is that if you were receiving what you are entitled to, you would not have to contend with suffering. You would be happy. Of course, the message is false, but it has become relentless, and the feelings-driven circuitry that evaluates entitlement is poorly equipped to distinguish a curated Instagram feed from evidence of cosmic injustice.
Given the cost, the urgent need to examine our entitlements rationally is inarguable. Two fundamentally different domains of entitlement need to be examined: the first is interpersonal — what might be called contractual entitlement. In this domain, entitlement is linked to agreements between people. This agreement can be explicit or implicit, and, more problematically, real or imagined.
A child is entitled to care from the parent who brought her into the world. One is entitled to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and to fidelity where fidelity is promised.
Examination of a contractual entitlement is straightforward: first, the contract must be identified. As I said, it can be — and often is — merely imagined. For example, when the neighbor who recently moved into the house next door paves over the beautiful flower bed the previous owner meticulously kept for years, it may breed the resentment of unfulfilled entitlement; but the rose garden has never been promised — there is no contract there to violate, no matter how badly the roses are missed. Normally, the discovery that one’s sense of unfulfilled entitlement is rooted in an imagined contract goes a long way to shake it off.
When a contract is identified, the next question is whether it is implicit or explicit. Implicit contracts deserve verification. On examination, many are revealed as one-sided, rendering them essentially imagined. For example, a physician may believe that receiving gratitude is part of the implicit contract with their patient, particularly when the treatment is successful. In fact, it is not — the physician is entitled to the (insured) patient’s co-pay; their gratitude is nice, but it’s not an entitlement. As a physician, I have been impressed by how easy it is to overlook this and, as a result, to feel somewhat resentful when a patient who’s doing well is not particularly grateful. Exploring the steps leading up to this resentment is likely to reveal the one-sided nature of this implicit agreement, thereby exposing it as imaginary, which, in turn, typically evaporates the associated tension.
When a contract is real (be it implicit or explicit), the next step is to carefully review whether the parties have honored their respective obligations and draw a conclusion based on the findings rather than on the initial emotional verdict. If the contract has been honored, the sense of frustrated entitlement is unfounded; this recognition normally alleviates the pain of a frustrated entitlement. If the contract has been violated, the frustration is legitimate, and one is entitled to pursue corrective action — justice.
The second domain is another matter entirely. It embodies what might be called ‘cosmic entitlement’ — the sense that one is entitled to receive something from Life itself. Not from a specific person or an entity who made a specific promise, but from the Universe, from Reality. There is no contract to consult here, no agreement anyone signed. And yet the feeling is extraordinarily common. My patient, who knew exactly who was living the life she was entitled to, was not accusing a specific person of violating a specific agreement. She was accusing Life of shortchanging her.
This could be dismissed as a simple case of overgeneralization — the interpersonal entitlement circuitry misfiring when aimed at the cosmos. But the sheer prevalence of the phenomenon suggests it is worth a second look. Could there actually be something a human being is legitimately entitled to receive — simply for showing up to this life as an owner-operator of a human brain?
I propose that the answer is yes. That every human being is entitled to three things from the Universe, simply by virtue of possessing a human brain. Moreover, the Universe (being what the Universe is) delivers on all three, without exception. The three cosmic entitlements are as follows:
First, we are entitled to live in a universe that follows rules. The human brain is a meaning-dependent pattern-recognition device. It needs reality to make sense. For this, the incoming data representing reality must operate according to consistent principles — rules — that can be defined, learned, and relied upon. We refer to these as the Laws of Nature. An apparent breakdown in these laws — an event that defies the rules as the brain understands them — is profoundly destabilizing, bordering on unbearable. The clinical state referred to as a ‘psychotic break’ — an invariably horrific experience — is an extreme, heartbreaking example (and even this objectively follows neurophysiological rules, but not subjectively).
Under normal conditions, this entitlement is always fulfilled. The laws of nature do not take days off. Reality follows its rules with absolute consistency, whether or not we understand them, whether or not what they produce meets our preferences.
Second, we are entitled to the non-discriminatory application of these rules. The human brain is deeply invested in comparison — in evaluating the experience of the Self relative to the experience of others. If the laws of nature were applied selectively — if gravity impacted you more than your neighbor — the resulting sense of injustice would be intolerable. And indeed, the laws of nature are never discriminatory. They operate identically for every human being, in every location, at every moment (as discussed in the Laws chapter). The outcomes produced by these laws can feel profoundly unequal. A child born with a genetic disease, a family whose home is destroyed by an earthquake while their neighbors’ house stands intact — these may feel like discrimination, which adds immeasurable suffering to an already difficult-to-bear experience. But the laws that produced these outcomes were not applied selectively. The feeling that they were is precisely the kind of feelings-driven verdict this chapter urges one to examine.
Third, we are entitled to a thing of beauty in every frame of consciousness. The human brain responds to beauty in a way that no other species appears to match — not merely as a sensory preference but as something closer to a need (aesthetic values are real values, as discussed in the Values chapter).
To be clear, this entitlement is to the availability of beauty, not to the guaranteed experience of it. Beauty is always present; the question is whether one can see it. Viktor Frankl, writing of his time in Auschwitz, observed that the stars at night were beautiful, even from the concentration camp (Frankl, 1946/2006). The stars did not cease to exist because the circumstances were monstrous. But the prisoners had to look up at the night’s sky with an eye for its beauty, which, I imagine, was more than many were able to do.
[Sidebar: As a medical student, I used to wonder why visitors brought flowers to patients in the hospital — the flowers always seemed to get in the way of my clumsy attempts to perform my scut work. Many years later, I understood the reason behind the custom: having flowers by one’s bedside made it a little easier to find the thing of beauty one is entitled to in every frame. Later still, when I was a patient myself, armed with the idea that there must be a thing of beauty in every frame, I looked for it deliberately. Looking for it I saw it — in the grace of the cleaning person, the poised movement of a nurse, even the shape of a well-designed medical device. The thing of beauty was always there. If one is too ill — too deep in the grip of a severe depression, a psychotic episode, an annihilating pain — to look for it, that person’s problem is bigger than one of entitlement, and is outside the scope of this chapter. But otherwise, beauty is available in every frame. The key is to remember to look for it.]
The functional benefit of this framework comes to the surface whenever one feels that Life is not delivering what one is entitled to. If you find yourself there, check the three cosmic entitlements: Are the laws of nature still operating consistently? Are they being applied non-discriminatorily? Is there a thing of beauty available in this frame of consciousness? The answer, on examination, is invariably yes. The Universe always holds up its end.
And still, one might check all three and still feel cheated. The conviction that one deserves more — more success, more recognition, more happiness, more love — simply for being who they are is not a rare occurrence.
When non-negotiable, this conviction brings us to the territory of narcissism. Conceptually, narcissism presents in two recognizable forms. In the first, the person harbors a deep, typically unconscious conviction that they are less worthy than others, and attempts to compensate for it by demanding what they imagine a truly worthy person would receive — as if obtaining the entitlement could retroactively remedy the lack of self-worth. In the second, the person genuinely believes they are superior in their self-worth, and that being extraordinarily worthy entitles them to extraordinary treatment. Both forms exist on a continuum. (At the heart of both is a disturbance in the perception of sameness — the failure to recognize that there’s a single value to each and every human being — no one has a greater or a lesser value than anyone else, as discussed in the Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem and the Laws chapters.)
Beyond a point on the continuum, the phenomenon qualifies for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder — a serious, painful, and notoriously difficult-to-treat mental disorder (and exploring it is outside the scope of this work). Short of crossing that clinical line, virtually everyone is capable of passing thoughts of either flavor. The notion that one deserves something — simply for being who one is — shows up, in mild and transient forms, in nearly every human life.
The mindful response to thoughts of this nature is a simple acknowledgment: you are right that you deserve something simply for showing up as an owner-operator of a human brain. Owning and operating the device is, in its way, a real burden. The three cosmic entitlements address the features of that ownership: the brain needs reality to make sense — hence the rules. The brain responds combatively when it experiences discrimination against the Self — hence the non-discrimination clause. The brain responds positively to beauty — hence the third entitlement. These are fulfilled, always. And, if you believe you are entitled to more than that — simply for being you — think again.
REFERENCES
Blake, P. R., McAuliffe, K., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T. C., Barry, O., Bowie, A., … & Warneken, F. (2015). The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies. Nature, 528(7581), 258–261. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16167
Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.
Grubbs, J. B., & Exline, J. J. (2016). Trait entitlement: A cognitive-personality source of vulnerability to psychological distress. Psychological Bulletin, 142(11), 1204–1226. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000063
Li, J., Wang, W., Yu, J., & Zhu, L. (2016). Young children’s development of fairness preference. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1274. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01274
LoBue, V., Nishida, T., Chiong, C., DeLoache, J. S., & Haidt, J. (2011). When getting something good is bad: Even three-year-olds react to inequality. Social Development, 20(1), 154–170. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00560.x
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2023). Social media and youth mental health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html
Vogel, E. A., Rose, J. P., Roberts, L. R., & Eckles, K. (2014). Social comparison, social media, and self-esteem. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 3(4), 206–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000047
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