Better Sets of Problems
This may seem odd, but I have sometimes found myself feeling a little sorry for Kanye West and his wife Bianca Censori, of all people. If you’ve ever seen the two of them out in public together, you’ve probably seen her or both of them wearing outlandish outfits:
Now, you might say, “Ok, the two of them dress weirdly, but they are impossibly rich and famous. Why would you feel sorry for them?”
Fair question.
It’s because it must be such an incredible pain in the @ss to do all of this. Imagine it. They have to pick out weird outfits to wear and then they probably spend an hour or two getting them prepped. Then, they have staffers alert the media. “Kanye and Bianca are going to the grocery store! Wait until you see what they’re wearing!” Worse yet, they may have to go to long, boring events, maybe even in a different city, to be seen. Next, they wear outlandish costumes and everywhere they go, people stare at them, and they need crews of bodyguards to keep people away from them. It must be incredibly isolating. For example, when I went to the grocery store tonight I had a lady walk up to me and go, “Oh, I see you at the gym all the time” and we had a short friendly conversation. It was nice. Can you do that with the two of them? Nope. They have to be standing around in weird costumes, surrounded by bodyguards to keep all the normies away from them.
The whole thing just seems like a huge pain, doesn’t it? That being said, they are living the life they want to live, and getting attention is part of it. They designed this life and despite the fact that this part may not be that appealing, it has a lot of great features. Fame, fortune, influence, luxury. Either of the two of them could probably pick up the phone and get just about anyone short of the president (and maybe the president) on the line because they’re such big stars.
Not everybody would be willing to make that trade-off, but an awful lot of people would.
This highlights a fundamental truth about life, which is that we all have problems, but we’re all working toward having BETTER SETS OF PROBLEMS.
Some of those problems may seem like good ones to have. For example, I’ve had a guy tell me how hard it was to maintain six-pack abs. A famous conservative once told me she found it “dehumanizing” to be swarmed by groups of people at conservative conventions because those people really didn’t know or care about her as a person. I’ve had women who’ve had multiple men sending them gifts for Valentine’s Day complaining because they didn’t like those guys and the men they did like weren’t interested.
In other words, no matter who you are, how successful you are, and how well you’re doing, you still have problems.
Combine this with the human propensity to devalue what we have and desire what we don’t, and it can lead to a lot of bad choices, especially if people haven’t taken the time to fully understand the problems they’re signing up for, which increasingly seems to be the rule, not the exception in our society.
Incidentally, this isn’t just something that individuals have to deal with. Governments and societies decide to trade one set of problems for another and end up regretting it all the time. For example, there were good reasons for the American government to get off the gold standard, go to war with Vietnam, and go into debt. Was it worth it to trade the set of problems they had for the set of problems they got?
Not at all.
This is the issue so many people, governments, and societies have today.
They have a problem. Then someone from their tribe or ideology suggests a way to fix that problem and that’s as far as it goes from them. There’s no thought about the long-term ramifications of what they’re doing, how this will impact anyone else, or what new problems they will create if they get their way.
What so many people don’t seem to realize anymore is that this is just the first stage of thought. If all you know is, “There’s a problem and someone says this is the way to fix it,” you know very little.
To know whether you should do something, you need to understand your current situation and the one that’s being proposed well enough to know if you’re going to be upgrading your problems. If you don’t understand the problems you’re going to have, you don’t understand what’s going on. If you don’t understand what benefits you will lose if you change course, you don’t understand what’s going on. If you can’t mentally understand the strengths and weaknesses of two competing ideas well enough to compare them, you don’t understand what’s going on.
The problem with that is so many people today make decisions based on memes, bumper stickers, and slogans because some celebrity or person said it was a good idea on social media or even just because, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea.”
Meanwhile, there are more depressed and mentally ill people than ever, our debt has never been bigger, there’s more division in America than at any time since the Civil War and nearly half of Americans think the country is going to break up. We live on a planet where people used to consider leeches and lobotomies to be effective medical tools, thought sacrificing children to the Gods would be good for their civilization, and believed you could fall off the edge of the world, yet there are probably more bad ideas floating around today than there ever have been before.
You can’t go through your day without hearing terrible ideas proposed by hucksters and idiots, being hit in the face with ridiculous propaganda, or having corporations trying to convince you that their product will make you rich, and happy and cause your children to love you more than ever before.
If you listen to them, you are going to end up with a different set of problems, but will they be a better set of problems? Highly doubtful.
If you go trans, yes your old problems as a man might go away, but those may be replaced with horrible medical issues, estrangement from your family and friends, and isolation from everyone except fellow weirdos.
Sick of being married to the same man? Got your eye on a flirty, exciting guy that gets you revving in a way your husband doesn’t anymore? Well, you may trade your current problems with your husband for the problems the new guy has until he dumps you two months later, leaving you with malfunctioning kids who aren’t handling the divorce well and financial problems after you didn’t get as much child support as you were hoping for.
On the other hand, maybe you’re liberal and like the idea of having a woke military because the fact it’s a naturally conservative institution makes you nervous. But when you get your way and make the military woker, you find that the performance level of the military drops off a cliff and you have trouble recruiting.
What it all comes down to is that Americans, our government, and our society need to do a much better job of understanding and debating the ramifications of changes we’re making so that we can make sure we’re going to have, “better problems” in the future than we do today. If you don’t know what those problems are going to be, unless it’s a sink or swim right this second situation, you’re better off taking your time, learning a little more about what’s happening, and making sure you’re going to create a better set of problems for yourself.
At first, I wanted to say "Well, bless their little hearts!" While reading further, I began to think I might feel sorry for those spectacle-creating people, too. But, finally, we begin to recognize the emptiness they must feel in their core beliefs, and they're trying to fill it with spotlight moments. Your on-the-nail closing paragraph can serve as a guidepost during those "what if I tried another way" problem-solving instances.