Expectations

Texan99 and others have noted that many of the federal workers who have been dismissed or laid off are expressing an unusual amount of outrage, as if their jobs were supposed to be untouchable, a given in the world unless they screwed up on a personal level. I commented there, and for that side of the story it might be better if you also commented there rather than here, as that conversation has already started. But that is too connected to the news, currently outside my remit.  

I think the spiritual aspect of what we expect is more interesting at the moment anyway.  What people come to expect, they grow to feel they deserve.  We deserve not to have an accident or traffic jam detain us on the way to work.  It is unfair when the supermarket is out of our type of tomatoes. There is always enough snow our vacation week at the resort, but this year we were cheated somehow. Our flights are delayed, the lights were against us when we were in a hurry, the phones should work.

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear... They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. (CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters Chap XXI)

Perhaps related: The more you give people the less grateful they are.