A City of Entitlement.

A City of Entitlement.

I was in the gym yesterday and while I’m never at a loss to find ‘humor’ in the gym I was struck by something that is almost a pandemic in this city, entitlement. To review, in case you’re not overly familiar with the use of Entitlement in this case:

Entitlement - the right to have something; something that one is entitled to (or believes that one is entitled to (source Wikipedia).

In this case what I’m referencing is the over arcing sense of entitlement that I see in this city and yesterday was a stark reminder. While working through my circuit in the gym a gentleman, who had previously noted that I was working in the area, began his client on one of the machines I was using. No big deal this is remedied quickly via the simple request, “Can I work in?” The trainer looked at me and said, ‘sure,’ and then returned to his conversation with his client who remained sitting on the bench. Not a big deal I’ll head somewhere else and finish but it struck me as odd that in an empty gym the ability to share wasn’t put into play.

You’ll see this in other aspects of life here, the train for example, of where our ‘sense of entitlement’ hinders the flow of life. The train will pull to the doors of a station and there will be people behind me who need to get out, I will step off the train turning quickly to place my foot in front of the sensor so everyone can get off and then back on quickly and someone who is standing on the platform will begin to force their way onto the train against the flow of people and seemingly oblivious to the people who stepped off the train to make room for people to leave. I was actually shocked a few years ago when I found myself stranded on the platform unable to return to my spot because of this.

Calgary, we need to drop the sense of entitlement and work on being nicer and kinder.