UMC Entitlement Creep

Will these high-functioning, useless children will ever amount to anything?

It’s not a stretch to call S.C. Gwynne one of the most-successful writers in the English language of this century. He’s also my friend, and periodically we go walking around the dammed up portion of the Colorado River that runs through the center of our town, and he tells me stories about life among in the wealthy enclave he’s called home for decades. Recently he submitted the following to share with all of you. This is his second contribution to The Experiment.

by S. C. Gwynne

My wife and I were walking in our neighborhood after the Thanksgiving weekend and came upon what has become a familiar sight: several houses being hung with Christmas lights by a commercial service. We walked a bit farther down the street and came upon a commercial truck whose sign offered to clean up your dog’s poop in your yard. Our reaction: we hadn’t seen that one before. On the next block we came upon another service, this one offering to hose out your trash cans on garbage day. We hadn’t seen that one before, either. 

I am not claiming here to have discovered a hitherto unknown secret of the universe. It’s not news that people in Solidly Upper Middle Class neighborhoods like mine can afford to hire out such services. 

But I do see a trend. I call it Upper Middle Class Entitlement Creep.©

Let me explain. 

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I call it Upper Middle Class Entitlement Creep.©

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I grew up in a SUMC neighborhood in New Canaan, Connecticut, a suburb of New York City, the exact socio-economic and ethnic equivalent of the west-side Austin neighborhood of Lost Creek where I now live. (I have sparse evidence for this, but I think most of the households in my ‘hood earn $200,000-$400,000 a year. In Connecticut in the 1960s the numbers were probably $25,000-$45,000.) In New Canaan homeowners generally cut their own lawns, or if they did not, the archetypal freckle-faced kid named Billy from down the street did it for them. Most of them trimmed their own bushes, mucked out their own gutters, mulched their own gardens, raked their own leaves, cleaned their own pools, trimmed their own dogs, put up and took down their own Christmas lights, cleaned their own houses, hosed out their own trash cans. Hiring out such services was something that rich people did. My neighbors did not see themselves as rich, just as an enhanced and slightly more privileged version of the Great American Middle Class.

Lost Creekers have a very different self-concept. Many do not cut their lawns, mulch their gardens, clean their pools and gutters, clean their houses, etc. etc. They seem to draw the line at professional cooks. That’s something for the next income group up, I guess, the Executive Estates crowd from Barton Creek. But who knows? If you are willing to pay someone to hose out your trash can and hang your Christmas lights, why not consider a personal chef? Not everyone is this way, of course. I have friends who, like me, still cut their lawns, clean their houses, rake leaves, wipe their own bottoms, etc.  But contracting for such services has become far, far more common than it was even fifteen years ago, along with the feeling that if you make $300k a year you are damn well entitled to never have to do household chores. 

You might think that I feel morally superior to such people. I don’t. If my neighbors want to use their hard-earned money to give themselves more time front of screens and less time in the mulch pile, I say God bless them. It’s a free country.

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God bless them. It’s a free country.

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 But I do worry about their kids, and it is in the lives of their children that the entitlement creep finds its greatest effect. Consider what a hypothetical ten-year-old in this neighborhood sees. His parents often work in front of computers, making plenty of money but producing no visible work product. He simply sees them staring at a screen. Maybe on a zoom call. The work itself is intangible. He can’t see it or touch it. He can’t possibly guess what is happening on those screens.

And because his parents hire it all out, the 10-year-old never sees his parents doing useful work around the house. He sees them making cappuccinos, watching Netflix, reading fly-fishing catalogs, driving Suburbans, enjoying the fruits of the labor he can’t see or understand.

Nor is anything expected of him in the way of chores—something all the kids I knew in New Canaan had to do. UMC kids don’t have such duties anymore, in case you haven’t noticed. A few years ago a family moved onto our street from a small town and soon their 14-year-old boy was observed actually cutting their lawn. This was seen as something of a miracle. It became a neighborhood joke. The kid just didn’t get it, we laughed, didn’t understand that Westlake kids do not cut lawns. Sure enough, he cut the lawn twice, and was never seen cutting it again. Needless to say, there are no freckle-faced kids in Lost Creek looking to make a couple of bucks painting fences or cutting lawns. There is no such thing. The last time that happened was 20 years ago, when a neighbor’s child offered to power-wash our driveway. 

The kids here are too busy for that. They do homework. They play sports on their semi-professionalized select teams, traveling to Houston for weekend tournaments. They take piano lessons, work with college prep tutors, and attend expensive summer camps. They spend a lot of time in front of screens, large and small. Like their parents, they do little visible work, unless playing video games can be seen as preparation for high-paying careers. The high school kids in my neighborhood refuse to ride the bus to school. They drive their own cars, purchased with money invisibly gathered on parental computer screens. The newest and hottest trend in my neighborhood consists of parents driving elementary school students to the bus stop in expensive, high-tech golf carts. The distances involved usually amount to a few suburban blocks. Walking is not even expected of their children.

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Will these high-functioning, useless children will ever amount to anything?

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A few years ago when we were out of town our daughter cut our front lawn. A neighbor, seeing this apparent oddity, mistook her for hired labor. She later complimented us on having our house sitter cut the lawn. We replied that the weirdly non-ethnic labor they saw was actually our blood kin, and that she had an engineering degree. The neighbor just gave us this blank, uncomprehending look, as though we had said something nonsensical.

(Okay, I did feel a small frisson of moral superiority.)

I personally have no idea whether these high-functioning, useless children will ever amount to anything. Maybe growing up with no idea of what work or a work product looks like is the best thing that could happen to them. Maybe what we really need to compete with the Chinese is a generation of uber-entitled Marie Antoinettes. 

S.C. “Sam” Gwynne is the author of two acclaimed books on American history: Empire of the Summer Moon, which spent 82 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Texas and Oklahoma book prizes; and Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, which was published in September 2014. It was also a New York Times Bestseller and was named a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pen Literary Award for Biography. His book The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, was published in September 2016, and was named to a number of “top ten” sports book lists. Follow him on Twitter at @scgwynne.

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