This time I’d like to pull on your coat tails about something that’s been bugging me and my friends for a while. We’ve all noticed that younger (or newer) tattooists seem to be suffering from the same plague of narcissism that’s happening all over the planet.
“I want to be a tattooists but I don’t want to learn all the boring stuff like cleaning and all that. Just the stuff that looks good on my instagram.”
“I don’t want to start as the junior and work my way up. I can already draw”
“Why can’t you just give me all your skills and knowledge for free so that I can do exactly what you do, right now”
It’s a worrying trend thats got me thinking, ‘when did they all get so entitled?’
Insane levels of entitlement have become something of a hot topic recently, especially since the pandemic. Moms calling the cops because they didn’t get ‘their spot’ on the beach, shoppers ‘firing’ other shoppers for not helping them find what they’re looking for, people calling 999 because they’ve lost their car keys etc etc. I’m sure you’ve seen the endless ‘Karen’ or ‘Ken’ videos. You get my drift…
So this month I want to scratch at this a little and see what I can figure out. Of course, it’s beyond the scope of both this column and my inteligence to fix the worlds problems but I may be able to shed a little light and in turn help a few of you become better human beings. And if you’re outraged please call ‘my manager’. His number is at the front of this magazine.
On a serious note I don’t want you to think that this is just another example of an old(er) guy shouting at the clouds. I’m not going to tell you things were better when I was young (because they actually weren’t) but I would like to explain growing up in the ‘olden days’ to you so that you can understand the fundamental differences in the way that my generation was raised and the way they affect my/our world view. It’s called context.
The World Doesn’t Owe YOU Anything.
I hit my early teens in the 80’s. For the record, the 1980’s were nothing like a Duran Duran video. They looked just like the 70’s where from where I was sitting.
By the time I left school the world was so fucked we didn’t have the idea that life owed us anything. Not a fucking thing. The only way to survive it was to go out and get it for yourself. We were implicitly being offered a very different kind of narrative that that of the modern day.
One that would help us make sense of the inevitable stress and suffering of adolescence. ‘If you just stay the course, just keep working hard to discover and actualise your own unique potentials you’ll eventually become your own unique person. Then with a little luck things will get easier with time, the Sun will arrive you’ll have stayed the course, refused to be defeated by what you’re going through and become the master of your own destiny.
That narrative was essentially a beacon of hope for a lot of us even during the dark and dismal days of a difficult adolescence. It helped us resist – among other things – feeling entitled to immediate gratification.
For my generation Tattooing was and still is a journey. It’s like climbing, the higher you go, the harder it gets but the view keeps getting better and better. It’s to be enjoyed not endured. But I suspect that, for todays tattooers, it’s simply a destination.
What does the World Owe You?
It seems to me that – at this point – in history the biggest impediment to experiencing life holistically would be our excessive sense of entitlement. Basically it seems that entitlement has become the predominant form of anti-holism in our era. So I think it’s worthwhile to explore the nature of entitlement using two psychological constructs – which also correspond to two fundamental worldviews.
One of these worldviews has to do with what psychologists call an internal locus of control and the other with an external locus of control.
Internal Locus of Control
When we see life in terms of an internal locus of control the main forces that determine the quality of our lives lie within us and under our control.
For instance, when we see life this way, fulfilling our desires is mostly the product of things like our initiative, our courage, our talents, our willingness to work hard and our luck. From this point of view what we’re entitled to in this life is mainly a function of those factors. In essence were entitled to what we earn through our own efforts and abilities. So if I’m a talented artists in a popular artform and I have the initiative and diligence to work hard to bring my talent to its full fruition and if I’m lucky enough to get noticed along the way, well then I’m entitled to quite a lot to. A big salary for instance and lots of public adulation.
On the other hand if I have very little natural talent for anything the world wants and if I’m unwilling to work hard to develop myself in any area and if I’m not particularly lucky well then according to the logic of an internal locus of control I’m not entitled to very much at all. I would need to first suck it up (buttercup) and then work hard to develop myself in some way that’s valuable to the world. Only then could I claim to be entitled to something.
Whether we’re fulfilled or not in this life is mostly our own doing. We become genuinely empowered in this life in direct proportion to the degree that we’re willing to accept that reality and then to make it real in the concrete moments of our lives. The rest amounts to little more than an array of evasions and excuses which ultimately only perpetuates our disempowerment.
Of course it’s obvious (to me) that not everyone sees life that way. So let’s look at the alternative, which would be an external locus of control.
External Locus of Control.
According to this worldview, the main forces that determine the quality of our lives lie outside of ourselves. In how fair the world is for instance or in what the government happens to be doing today or and whether we happen to like the person who’s currently Prime Minister, irrespective of who.
From the perspective of an external locus of control life is not primarily about nurturing and actualising our own inner capacities, but about getting the world to provide what we want because it’s the external world that’s mostly in control of the quality of our lives, not ourselves.
Of course there are many common ways of trying to get the world to give us what we think we deserve we can badger and pester the world into giving it to us for instance we can try to shame the world into giving us what we think it owes us perhaps by using accusatory rhetoric or try to shame the successful and privileged people. Or we can beg for it maybe by adopting some sort of woeful victim narrative or we can just resort to outright theft.
It’s mostly a question of emphasis. Whether we live our lives mostly in terms of an internal locus of control or mostly in terms of an external locus of control and consequently whether we see entitlement mostly in terms of what we’ve earned or mostly in terms of what the world owes us.
Self Absorbed Barbarians
Of course any number of things have changed in the last 40 years. The ubiquity of social media and related technologies is one obvious difference another seems to be the higher proportion of young people who are now being prescribed powerful psychoactive drugs.
But I suspect that a big part of the equation also has to do with entitlement.
Like addiction and shallow sense gratification, enraged, entitled barbarism is one of the things that tends to take over when a meaningful orientation to life is absent. I sense it’s also an important factor in a lot of the chronic outrage and self-righteous virtue signalling we commonly see in the world these days on both sides of the political spectrum.
For instance think about how entitled we have to feel before it makes a perverse kind of sense to go around telling everyone else what words they’re allowed to say what values they’re allowed to have and what emotions and behaviours are the ‘appropriate’ ones for any given situation.
The point, of course, is that while rampant entitlement is probably not the only causal factor in complex social phenomena like overweening outrage and virtue signalling. It certainly seems to be playing a significant role and all of that would be fine except for the fact that it doesn’t seem to be making our world any better.
It’s doing quite the opposite actually it’s not healing the various lines of fracture that separate us and it’s not making us stronger only more insular self-absorbed and divided. It does this mostly by keeping our attention and energy fixated on promoting our own semi tribal affiliations and investments.
Rather than on building a bold and brilliant destiny for the ourselves. By ourselves, with our own hands and talents and not by standing on the shoulders of giants stealing every idea and pretending you deserve to be here.
Become The Change. Fix Yourself First.
I suppose that at this point the question inevitably becomes “what is to be done?” Of course if we’re seeing all of this from the perspective of an external locus of control then we’re pretty much fucked. Trying to get someone else to do something about the problem, like trying to influence politicians and public policy for instance. Perhaps by some form of activism.
However if we’re seeing all of this from the perspective of an internal locus of control then there’s a lot we can do ourselves and it pretty much starts with Gandhi’s famous dictum that we must learn to be the change we wish to see in the world. In essence each one of us can become a living beacon of hope for the people around us. A living breathing object lesson in what real empowerment looks and feels like.
Because – and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this – the established tattooists of the world aren’t going to do that for you. In fact they’re not even going to make it easy for you to do it yourselves. Mostly because it’s not in their interest to give away their knowledge to someone who won’t even repay them a little by working in their shop for a couple of years.
All things considered, perhaps the tattoo world would be better served if we could keep our sense of entitlement relatively lean and modest if we could learn to live with more dignity, equanimity and humility and less entitled outrage and resentment. “Nose down, work hard, they feed you”. Y’know?
Maybe then we could really help the tattoo world grow and transcend itself, by loving it exactly as it is with all of its faults intact rather than by trying to berate and coerce it into being something it’s obviously not. Just simply enjoy the journey based on where you are on the path instead of trying to become what you are not too quickly and without any real knowledge or experience.
Until next time, stay purple, Ponyboy.