The Weight of Entitlement

What does it mean for us human beings to live, to be truly alive? At the ground level is survival, or maintenance of the “vital heat,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. Until food supports your body’s internal combustion and clothing and shelter conserve your vital heat, balance and happiness are luxuries you can’t consider. And if you have a family to support, only when their vital heat is secured can you look up from the ground. But throughout history and across cultures, once their basic needs are met, people take a philosophical turn towards purpose, meaning and the pursuit of happiness. Civilization begins.

The fact that we can even ask questions about quality of life and balance belies a position of immense privilege. For most of us in developed countries, our lives overflow with material blessings. But countless opportunities for gratitude go floating by each day as we strain after more and more things that we supposedly need. There’s no end to our pursuit of security when the borders of necessity and luxury are never marked out and held firm.

In Walden, which might as well have been called Living, Thoreau reflected on what we’ve lost as our so-called necessities have expanded:

“The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

When it comes to quality of life, what are our rights and entitlements? Before answering this question, we would do well to remember that the universe owes us nothing. Let that sink in for a minute. Though countless voices tell us otherwise, you and I are not entitled to peace, happiness or abundance. We certainly have the right and should be free to pursue these good and wholesome things. It’s wrong to withhold them from law-abiding citizens willfully. Our basic rights are inalienable; this is why society begins to break down when we trample or deny them. But outside of legal semantics, rights and entitlements are not the same. Our belief that the universe owes us a certain level of privilege is a recipe for heartbreak and disaster. It comes from ego expectation, which is one of the ways we build up what Thomas Merton and Eckhart Tolle called the false self. Expectations lead to disappointment, disdain, and disillusionment. When we worship happiness and demand that the universe serve our every whim, we become blind to our abundance. Indeed, happiness becomes utterly impossible. We crave more and richer food but cannot taste the morsels in our mouths. We become so preoccupied with the question of what’s next that we fail to ask where, what and who we are. How can we discern what’s next when we ignore our ontological questions?

In his wise and luminous New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton describes this false self as a mirage:

“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

“This is the person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God – because Truth, Light – knows nothing about him. And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.

“My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.”

Earlier in the book, he says,

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. …

“In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die.

“The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie.”

This false self is the mask, the parody of personhood that the ego creates. Or rather, the ego’s work is more of a distortion of what already exists than a true creation. The distortion is sin itself, the unnatural nature we inherit that drives us to do the very things we don’t want to do. Ego and personality are deeply linked. Various definitions of personality abound, but I describe it as the thick outer layer of motivations and defensive strategies which encase the perfect soul, that it may survive in an imperfect world. Personality is both a tool that helps us navigate life and a limitation that narrows our worldview. It’s not who we really are, but rather an addition to our essential self.

God creates each of us to reflect specific aspects of his nature, or what Enneagram teachers call Holy Ideas. It is pure, scandalous grace that love and hardship cause growth, growth causes the cuticle of personality to crack, and through these cracks our God-likeness – our true self – shines. Virtue develops and healing, however partial, begins. God and God alone can complete this process. Now we live in faith, believing in his finished work and unfulfilled promises. In the next world we will live undimmed. If we choose to get out of God’s way, death is the final cracking and shattering that releases our true selves into perfect freedom and peace.

Most psychologists agree that personality is part nature and part nurture. At the foundation of personality is a set of deep fears and desires that develop throughout early childhood and crystallize around age six or seven. While our personalities can undergo radical change throughout our lives, those basic fears and desires never leave us. We can’t shed or change them at a fundamental level, and it’s futile to try. As The Enneagram Institute’s cofounder Russ Hudson says, “The problem isn’t that we have an ego, but that we think we are our ego” (emphasis mine). While personalities are inherently limiting, I believe they are somewhat separate from and much smaller than our eternal souls. This is important: you and I are more than our personalities. When we embrace this fact, our egos can slowly but surely shrink to a manageable size. We identify our illusions and start to see the world as it truly is.

When I see that nothing is an entitlement, every moment, every breath, every crumb is a gift I receive with gratitude. As I appreciate more, I strive less. I start to work smarter rather than harder. I begin to get clear about just how much effort is required to live, grow and serve. From that serene vantage point, I can see the false duality in the notion of work/life balance. Instead, I look for ways to create a joyful harmony between work, rest, and play – because all of it is life and because the triad of work, rest and play are deeply interdependent. When we neglect one point of this triad, the other two suffer. When I’m attentive to all areas of life and the interplay between them, I can start to move with grace through shifting seasons without grasping or fretting. Eventually, my life will look less fractured and frantic, more coherent and calm. I will become what God made me to be: a human being, not a human doing. My actions will spring from a center of presence and stillness.

But we never have enough when we believe the lie that society owes us a laundry list of entitlements. We’re insatiable. Constantly looking across fences and envying the supposed bounty of our neighbors, we become anxious, embittered, overworked and depressed. Though our anxious toil may yield more and bigger houses, vacations, cars, clothes, likes, followers, our capacity for appreciation will be stymied by a lack of gratitude.

For the true self to expand, the false ego must shrink. To enjoy riches, I must cultivate a poor spirit. If ego runs my life, I can amass all the wealth in the world yet never enjoy any of it. And if I believe I can create a meaningful, sustainable living without relying on other people, I might actually starve.

Ego is fueled by pride, i.e., the belief that we alone can save ourselves and that we can become entirely self-sufficient and free from needs, flaws or weaknesses. Pride overvalues the ego and undervalues the spirit.

Pride running rampant rejects even the possibility of a soul and thereby cuts the self off from true community. Souls shrivel or thrive in proportion to their reliance on each other. The false freedom and egocentric individualism that modern society has embraced are choking our communities and impoverishing our souls.

We have no power until we recognize our need to rely on a power greater than ourselves.

Unless we abandon the ego’s kingdom of grasping and move into the soul’s kingdom of being, desperation will be the defining characteristic of our lives.