And millennials, as a charming side effect of their wondrous sense of entitlement, don’t take any shit.

In the penultimate paragraph of this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/11/the-secret-actress-netflix-gender-equality-hollywood-pay-gap

I'm seeing this term, sense of entitlement, used with millennials a lot recently. It always seems to be disparaging or to shut down an argument.

Why? Where did it come from?

When I've seen it used it is normally a baby boomer that uses it and they seem to want to maintain the status quo, which pretty much means protecting their entitlement. Do millennials have a greater sense of entitlement than previous generations?

It's not actually all that new. It used to be things like: "Kids these days don't know what (hard) labour is!" or "In my youth you were grateful if you got penny for doing the lawn!"
It's generational whinging and partially, as you guessed, trying to shut down the other side.

The millennials are up against and are fed bullshit about how "Lucky they have it" by their elders.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/04/why-are-the-baby-boomers-desperate-to-make-us-millennials-hate-ourselves

Whereas this article shows how truly screwed they are compared to the baby boomers.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/10/five-markers-of-adulthood-millenials-have-had-to-give-up-on

infiniteentropy wrote:When I've seen it used it is normally a baby boomer that uses it and they seem to want to maintain the status quo, which pretty much means protecting their entitlement. Do millennials have a greater sense of entitlement than previous generations?

I think you could make a case that the generation with the biggest sense of entitlement is those in retirement now. There's a massive gap between what pensions (most) western countries can afford via pension contributions and what pension entitlements pensioners have. We're living in the aftermath of a pyramid scheme.

This is why pension ages are rising (especially for women). It seems slightly bizarre that someone who got a literal entitlement to retire at 60 would actually think someone who will have to work to 68, or even to 70 or beyond is entitled. To be fair, in my general experience they actually don't though.

I see a sense of entitlement thing, in as much as I don't see why millenials should feel entitled to what their parents had. The baby boomers got lucky. That luck didn't last to our generation.

I'm just glad I live in a generation where there is no expectation that I get married, have kids and settle down. I'd be up shit creek if I succumbed to that pressure.

Additional considerations in trying to answer this seriously, should include shifts in what kind of behavior is lauded by the general public, and/or by the established authorities.

For example, we appear to be in a time right now, where it is extra popular to express oneself with expansive and extra rude verbiage. There have been times in the recent past, when anyone who did so was huffily ignored, or even ordered to shut up and learn to express themselves in a more civilized way.

In short, a SEEMING sense of entitlement, can in reality be the person asking for the exact same things as always, but doing so much more intensely, even rudely or negatively.

Generations are fictive. There is nothing special about people born 2000-2010 vs. those born 1998-2008.

Round numbers aren't special, just a result of us using a particular base (base 10 in this case). If we had used base 9, other numbers would be round and 'decades' would only be 9 years.

The beginning year of our time counting is arbitrary, so this year may as well have been 2013 or 2018.

Honestly, the people with entitlement complexes, who think if you just work hard enough a rewarding job and a home and a car and a family and swanky vacations will be yours, seem to be the two generations before the millennials to me.

Millennials can't afford to go to university and even after they have and are in huge debt, the job market is oversaturated by people of their qualifications and even if they do get a job in their field, can't afford a home so they end up moving to small rural communities where they can maintain an OK-paying job and work around all the inconveniences of living three hours from a major city.