Noisy, Rude and Reckless

The day after Thanksgiving I invited my neighbor over in the evening for a glass of red wine and some cheese and crackers.  He is a relatively new neighbor who bought the adjacent property to carry on an Airbnb enterprise started many years ago by our previous neighbors.  All his units had been full the previous weekend, including his house which was occupied for three nights by eight young people (four females and four males) in their early twenties.  He described them as “young kids from rich families who arrived in two bullet-proof suburbans and who requested a personal cook/housekeeper.”  He proceeded to tell me how they had been noisy, rude, and reckless to the point one of his guests in another unit complained.  They proceeded to “trash” his house leaving behind discarded food, broken wine glasses, and a broken glass door.  They also stole a couple of towels.

I woke up early the next morning thinking about those young people.  What did they possess and what did they lack?  They possessed an attitude of entitlement–that they had a right to have what they wanted and to use whatever they wanted in whatever way they chose.  They possessed an attitude of privilege–that they had the right to do what they wanted without accountability or consequences.  They possessed an attitude of superiority–that their needs and wants were more important than anyone else’s and that at best, people should leave them alone and at worst, that other people were there to serve them.

What did these young people lack?  They lacked a sense of personal responsibility.  They lacked respect for the belongings of others.  They lacked appreciation for the rights of others to have a peaceful, safe, and comfortable space.  They lacked a sense of the sacred–that is, they had no understanding of the value of the world around them or of others who might happen to be in their life space. They lacked self-awareness, oblivious to the adverse impact of their behavior on their physical environment and the people around them. 

Sadly, these eight young people are crippled.  However, their crippling is not physical, it is psychological.  They have not grown up.  They are not competent, responsible, self-aware, disciplined, productive, conscientious adults.  They are living a lifestyle of self-indulgence.  This will most likely be their modus operandi for the rest of their lives unless something dramatic happens to wake them up.  Or maybe, someone will see that these young people are on a life trajectory that will likely be tragic and that someone will step in with “tough love.”  Tough love is a combination of respect, kindness, consequences, and vision.  It is the parenting these young people needed when they were preschoolers.  The kind of parenting that facilitates successfully resolving the four tasks of growing up.  (See “Are You Grown Up?” or please read “The Marshmallow Studies” which addresses the fundamental task of going from undisciplined to disciplined.) 

Will these young people change?  Will they grow up?  Unfortunately, the odds are slim, but with the right intervention at the right time change is always possible.