Behaving badly seems to be becoming the national sport in the UK. Read today in the Sunday Times some stories about people’s bad behaviour in the theatre: peeing in the theatre, making mobile phone calls when the play is on etc. Living in the centre of a small town in the UK I witness frequently people’s bad behaviour in public. Sometimes I decide to speak up about it and the reactions of the culprits is even more interesting.

The general trend is that people feel completely entitled to behave the way they want to behave: I need to use the toilet therefore it is perfectly OK for me to take a pee in someone’s front porch. This ‘entitlement belief’ is based on the idea that if we want something WE HAVE TO HAVE IT. Desires are no longer aims we have to work for, wishes are not longer preferences that we can make real in a considerate manner. Doing what we want and to hell with the consequences seems to be the name of today’s game. It is of course all based on an intolerance to frustration or as one of my learned colleagues would call it: I-can’t-stand-it-is, a disease of our time. When things feel unpleasant, when there is a challenge, we demand that it be made right immediately, we no longer learn to accept that we might have to wait, may have to endure some frustration in order to get what we want.