There have been many people who classified this modern generation as being the “Entitled Generation” and to each person that has made that statement, “Entitled” to them, can mean a lot of different things.
This includes, but is not limited to, the generation being filled with Narcissists, or not believing in the idea of hard work,time, and effort to achieve a goal, or just generally feeling like we deserve certain things simply because.. All of which is partly true.
We’re narcissistic because we’re the generation that grows up receiving trophies and being told “great job” despite being on the losing team in a sporting event. It’s hard to convince us about the rewards of hard work and effort when the media is telling us about the latest overnight successful sensation who has seemingly shot to the top with little to no effort despite that almost never being the case. We feel like we deserve things because, unfortunately, a lot of our parents or mentors have showered us with immense praise for displaying even the slightest skill above mediocrity, even when our attention span falters, and we never do anything to build upon said skill and actually become really good at it.
I don’t mean to say that this generation’s common personality quirks are the results of the previous generation’s chickens coming home to roost, but you can’t project a star struck, ADD riddled and instant gratification environment and not expect the ones who are raised in that environment to come out exactly like that.. But that’s another conversation for another time.
For me, I find that my problem is that there are way too many things that I can easily become pretty good at doing. Everyone definitely has their own unique skill set, with certain things that they seem to pick up and master faster than others, but not many people find or at least make time to become great at any one specific thing.
For example, I’d like to think that I’m a fairly skilled writer. I’m not exactly slinging out emotion inducing literary masterpieces with these blogs, but given the consistent flow of response that I’ve gotten this past two years, I think it would be fair to assume that I have some level of talent.
I also love to act (obviously) and I love to make music. Acting, Music, and Writing are passions of mine that I try to pursue with any amount of free time that I can give. The problem that I have is that they are each so very time consuming, that it’s hard to decide where most of my creative energies should go to. Luckily, acting and music are at least two worlds that cross over (sometimes more than they should) whereas writing seems to be its own entity in its own subculture. At times, I feel torn over my passions because it seems like I’m giving all of my attention to one particular thing and shunning the other(s) and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I’ve tried to gauge where I should place most of my focus out of these particular talents, based on people’s reactions to my efforts. I can’t say the same about writing, but I definitely know if my music was to take off for example, I could put most of my efforts into that until it opens the doors to introduce people more to my abilities as an actor or my abilities as a writer.
It just seems like the more I try to juggle these three efforts, and balance them, that then leads to an almost balanced response for the masses, where the reaction to one output isn’t significantly better than the other.. Do any of you all creative minded individuals experience the same feelings?
