Another post relating to my lack of empathy. I’ve been reading some “woe is me” stuff online and I don’t know if I can feel any less sympathetic about it.
Any time I hear people living in beautiful cities, in nice homes, with lots of friends and family, money for food, and access to social assistance, a good medical system, and even limitless entertainment complaining about how down they feel, all I want to do is drop them in the middle of a some country ripped apart by civil war where food and water are hard to come by, family and friends have been or could soon be killed, people live in shanties, the few jobs available are dangerous as all hell and pay virtually nothing, there is no medical system or social assistance to speak of, and the police force and government are either non-existent or rife with corruption. I wish I could immerse these whiny “I don’t feel good” people into truly dire circumstances so they can see how absurd it is to navel gaze and look for reasons to be unhappy when they are actually blessed in virtually every way imaginable.
I think that boredom and easy lives are terrible things for a lot of people. Without enough real stuff to do or think about, we go looking for imaginary problems, something to occupy our time. And for whatever reason — probably because so many people around us are equally bored and thus feel the same way — we validate this bullshit and convince each other that these bad feelings are real problems that genuinely need to be investigated.
I don’t buy it. Bad feelings are not a real problem. Drought, war, famine, crippling poverty, wildfires, widespread corruption, lack of access to clean water — these are real problems. It’s true that I lack empathy, but I think it’s also fair to say that whiny piss babies lack empathy too, because they should be able to put themselves in the positions of people who are legitimately suffering and realize they have absolutely nothing to complain about.
“Put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” shouted the unsympathetic, self-absorbed clod.
crimson highway 