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“Why can’t you just tell me the answer if you know the answer?” A reply I got from one of my students.

These replies aren’t new to me. I have encountered such situations in my previous tutor sessions and also in my workplace with my younger colleagues. I have to admit that my thinking feels old now. Do you know why I know? Because I once said similar things to my parents and colleagues.

It is an interesting conundrum. I feel like the younger generation wants everything to be given to them, to which I feel it’s entitled. The thing is the older generation said the same thing about me when I came into the workforce. How the tables have turned. I feel like it’s better in the long term to understand something through your mind and reasoning, rather than being given the answers.

As I reflect on this, I realized that my generation and the younger generations grew up much more comfortable compared to the older generations. Food, electricity, water, education, leisure, and vacations were regular things for us (this was not so for the older generations). Pretty much until our university life, the road was essentially already paved for us to walk on.

I can see why we fall into this mindset of having things being given to us. We have had it for the majority of our lives. Now, I know there are many also that grew up with very little of the things that were mentioned. And it is here, that I thought hard about this topic. I think for the majority of us, we did not starve on a day-to-day basis.

Schooling is universal in Malaysia, while some rural areas still struggle with that. We mainly focused on studying all the way, while our parents shielded us away from the hardships of the real world.

I remembered when I first entered my first job, I complained about why things were so messy in terms of data and files. Then, I got taken down to reality, when my big boss looked me straight in the eye and said, “Either you work, or I will get someone else to. Make your choice”. In a sense, I was lucky that someone told me straight to my face the first week. Things are messy in the real world, and I took things for granted before this as my parents and teachers worked very hard so that I walked comfortably in the path they paved for me.

And it hit me that I as a parent would probably do the same thing for my children – make sure that they grow up comfortably and they get everything that I can provide them with. However, I do realize the folly of this and there is a fine line here. The experiences of Generation Z coming out to the workforce are similar to millennials (me), in that they expect things to be proper because many things were proper growing up.

How do I draw the line then? What is the line between entitlement and being humble enough to acknowledge that the world is messy and that we need to humble ourselves and adapt to it?