“I will do.”

Entitlement sure has come a long way, or so it seems. I remember my father telling me several times how spoiled my generation is—coming at me with sound bites he gleaned from work as if to start and win a debate competition that I never signed up for. At a time when I worked primarily with millennials who were entering the workplace straight from college, I kept hearing the same side conversations about how entitled they all were. Most recently a young relative confided in me that she was tired of being told how she doesn't appreciate the good life she has. Hearing her say this made me think that accusations of entitlement are a tradition handed down from one generation to the next. A comparative rant from an older generation convinced the young never struggled like they did.

As it turns out, this shit is old. Ancient. Before pants were invented, Aristotle wrote of the young "they think they know everything, and confidently affirm it, and this is the cause of their excess in everything." Closer to home, and timeline, every American generation has taken its turn in the dunk tank. The flappers of the 1920s were reckless and spoiled. Tom Wolfe branded the Boomers the Me Decade in 1976. Time magazine put millennials on the cover in 2013 under the headline The Me Me Me Generation. Which The Atlantic called out as the pot calling the kettle black in Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation. During my research I discovered a study from 2019 that shows adults believe kids today lack whatever trait the adults value most in themselves, partly because they misremember their own youth. More importantly, these accusations are statements, not an invitation to have a conversation where different perspectives are shared in an effort to create a mutual understanding. That's the bullshit of this tradition that I can't stand.

Historical hand-me-downs aside, there's a real source of entitlement in America, and it's getting worse. It stems from a statement that has become too prevalent in our society: "I will do."

There are variations you might recognize—"I will have…" or "I'm gonna do…"—but they are all making the same declaration that turns what should be a human interaction into an in-humane action. No questions, just announcements. The person standing there with the notepad isn't part of the sentence. In fact, they aren't a person at that point but just a part of the infrastructure. Nothing to grant, no room for them at all. The order is already a fact and the server is just being notified. And the worst part is how few people notice, and fewer still care. This simple, callous habit says, "do as I say because that's what you are paid to do."

There's a theory in crime prevention called broken windows. If a window gets broken and nobody fixes it, that's a signal that nobody cares, nobody is watching. So more windows get broken and crime in general escalates from there. "I will do" is a broken window. A small dismissal of the person taking the order repeated a few billion times a day, never fixed because nobody sees it as broken. The real consequence is that it teaches that the person taking your order doesn't need to be considered. And the entitlement escalates from there. Snapped fingers. The voice raised over a wrong order delivered to a twenty-year-old making minimum wage. The demand to see the manager to correct gastronomical injustice. This is where real entitlement lives and builds, not in the generational finger-wagging. It's grammatical disregard—the erasure of a person built into the sentence itself. And the repair costs nothing. Asking "May I" instead of declaring "I will do" puts the person back in the sentence and keeps our interactions human.