Day Twenty Nine - Entitlement and Caring About the Thoughts of Others

When a person focuses on the thoughts of others he is probably not focusing on his own thoughts. Furthermore, in order for one to be entitled to something, one must be aware of what one wants, and therefore focused on one's own thoughts. In order to be happy, one must have a proper sense of entitlement. However, an over sized sense of entitlement can turn into selfishness just as an undersized sense of entitlement can turn into unnecessary humiliation and paranoia. This system seems to work in favor of the over sized sense of entitlement, because a person with an undersized sense of entitlement will think that any attempt to enlarge his sense of entitlement will be selfish (thus knocking his sense of entitlement back down to size - for in his mind, he is not entitled to be selfish because being selfish is wrong). Conversely (I suppose) a person with an over sized sense of entitlement will think that any attempt to decrease his sense of entitlement would be unfair (for in his mind he is entitled to feel entitled).

Taking myself as an example, I have problems in my life and they all relate to a low sense of entitlement. Because of this, I tend to make decisions based on what I think others will approve of. Because I tend not to consider my own wishes (or am not even aware of my own wishes) I end up in situations where I don't want to be and become resentful, depressed etc. Up until recently I have been looking at the problem of "why am I not happy?" from the perspective of "I am not happy because I am not doing what I want to do". If this were true then the simple solution would be to start doing what I want to do. However, the problem is that I do not feel entitled to do what I want to do. So, even if I were able to do what I wanted to do I would feel guilty doing it and therefore what I wanted to do would not be a pleasurable experience.

Therefore, the solution seemingly is to start feeling entitled to do what I want to do. I am not sure how to do this but I think the answer might involve meditation and prayer. If only I had an instructor.