Let’s get it right out of the way, single mothers do often have a lot to deal with. It’s not easy, looking after kids alone and trying to fend for themselves at the same time. However, as the old adage goes, if you make the bed, you lay in it. So trying to have random people subsidize the consequences of your own actions is deeply entitled.

Unfortunately, a feeling of entitlement is very often wholly unrelated to the things we might think would make someone entitled to benefits, station, ability, or even disability. Instead, particularly entitled people tend to have very poor social skills, which means that everyone who has to deal with them ends up getting unreasonable demands from the most undeserving people. Entitlement is linked with poor emotional regulation skills, so many of these single moms do sincerely believe they deserve what they are asking for and are more likely to get angry at a refusal. 

Sometimes entitlement can come from the belief that the universe owes you something. After all, being a single mom is unlikely to be the main choice of lifestyle for these women. So they may rationalize their situation with the belief that because they have gone through hardships, they are owed a break by karma, God, or some other cosmic arbitrator. This tends to cause some amount of anger when it crashes into the reality that a seller won’t just give away free things. 

This behavior isn’t just limited to single moms, in fact, they at least have a reason to try and ask for a discount. But there are just as many random people online who simply decide to get free or discounted things because they feel like it. Entire online communities are dedicated to sharing and documenting these encounters, for example, the “Choosing Beggars” subreddit. The risk of being shamed and immortalized online doesn’t seem to stop most of these individuals, so at least we can get a nice laugh out of the situation. 

If you are not familiar with the term choosing beggar, it’s just a play on the old saying that “beggars can’t be choosers.” Simply put, if you are asking for a free thing, you should be grateful for what you get and not start making demands. Unfortunately, as this list and the aforementioned subreddit demonstrate, there are people who believe they absolutely can and should be choosers and will try to negotiate from a position of zero power. Brave, misguided, but you can’t knock their confidence. 

There is a sort of twisted logic to just trying to guilt people into free stuff. Normally, begging has some shame attached to it, but doing it online creates a bit of a barrier. Similarly, digital communication lets people reach a much larger audience, so many of these choosing beggars seem to believe that if you just cast a net wide enough, someone will send you money. I’m not sure who they are envisioning, as I have never sent a random person money or free stuff, but statistically, there must be a few individuals who do it. 

So instead of trying a normal barging approach or accepting the (limited) help someone might give you, a lot of these people adopt a gambling strategy and just try to win big. This could be the result of overconfidence, as our brains, unfortunately, often overestimate our own role in our success while underestimating just how often we are to blame for our failures. So without sufficient self-awareness, people build up a massively inflated sense of self that translates into a breathtakingly misguided self-confidence. 

So in the case of these moms, we can see the interaction of a number of forces. First, the entitlement, the belief that they should just get stuff because they are forced to shoulder the burden of motherhood alone. Remember, entitlement also limits emotional regulation skills, so these types of people will at the same time likely suffer the overconfidence and inflated sense of self that could lead a person to truly believe they deserve free things and that any who stand in their way must just be greedy and evil. So remember to keep some Facebook marketplace sellers in your prayers.