The Age of Self-Created Problems
The Age of Self-Created Problems
Look in the mirror to see who created that problem for you
One of my favorite moments from the Occupy protests of 2011 and 2012 happened in Chicago. Although the protests were generally incoherent, the main message of them seemed to be that some people were too successful while other people were failing. While the protesters milled around the Chicago Board of Trade building, protesting the fact that the people there made “too much” money, the people being protested responded by dumping McDonald’s applications on them as if to say, “You’d be better off going and getting a job than standing around complaining about the people doing work.”
If you believe any profession gets paid an “unfair” amount of money, then isn’t the obvious solution to join that profession, not to protest them? Why wouldn’t anyone do that? There’s a very simple answer to that you can see playing out all across American society.
It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
Incels are particularly interesting in this regard because they are widely vilified, but they’re also really no different than many feminists, transsexuals, ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, people touting Critical Race Theory, body positivity diehards, illegal aliens, and other liberal constituent groups in the primary way that matters.
In case you are unfamiliar with them, incel stands for “involuntarily celibate.” In other words, they’re men who would like to get laid, but can’t. This is not a new problem. It has been around for as long as human beings have. The new thing that makes incels stand out is that instead of going, “Wow, I really want women to like me, so maybe I better figure out how to be the sort of man women like,” incels have grouped together and decided that there is nothing they can do, women are bad, and the world is unfair. As someone who has perused their forums working on articles, I found the comments there to be overwhelmingly toxic, angry, and self-pitying. However, it was also intriguing to note that on the rare occasions when incels posted their pictures, about half of them were truly less attractive than average while the other half of them just looked like regular dudes you might see at a frat party.
In other words, we come back to that line from earlier.
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
Do people even realize how many places that applies in our society now?
Many liberal black Americans, living in cities run by people they voted for, believe they are being kept down by white Republicans and racists that control precisely nothing that’s going on near them.
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
We need to allow biological men in women’s bathrooms, allow them to play women’s sports, and pay for their surgical expenses because they’ve chosen to try to switch genders even though it’s impossible.
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
It’s really hard to lose weight, so why shouldn’t heavy women be considered beautiful and why can’t we claim being overweight is just as healthy as being fat? Body positivity baby!
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
The only people that should be allowed to speak on a college campus or have a voice at all have to agree with liberals because libs feel bad when they hear different opinions!
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
We need to raise the minimum wage, even if it is a starter job! It’s not fair that people work all day for years or even decades of their lives and only make that little amount of money!
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
People should be able to scream abuse at the police and attack them without risking being shot! The problem isn’t the people acting like lunatics, it’s the cops dealing with them! Black Lives Matter!
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
It’s a lot easier to pay some coyote to illegally take you over the border and just start working under the table in America than it is to stay in your home country for years and go by the rules!
* It's very easy to complain and demand that the whole world be changed to accommodate you, but it’s very difficult to improve yourself.
We live in a world full of narcissists who’ve been told all their lives what special, amazing little snowflakes they are and then they get out in the world and guess what? Nobody cares that you’ve been told you’re a wonderful person, they just want to know what you bring to the table. For a lot of us at 18, the answer is “not much,” but we see all those other people succeeding. Elon freaking Musk is worth 160 billion dollars! Kim Kardashian is famous for her butt for God’s sake! There are people on Instagram, reality television, and YouTube with millions of fans, living the life! Why can’t you be living like Dan Bilzerian?
Maybe that’s not even what you want. Maybe you just want girls to like you, you want your anxiety to go away, or you want a better, more fulfilling job. Why can’t you have those things?
The reality is that unless you are talking about things on the edges of human experience like being a billionaire, being the NFL MVP, or being a comedian that sells out Madison Square Garden, you probably can get what you want out of life or at least a close approximation of it. Depending on what it is, it may just require a lot of work, a lot of planning, and a lot of determination. Maybe you won’t get everything you want even if you put in the work, but what’s the alternative? Being a complainer? Being a hater? Demanding that the whole world be changed to make life easier for you? Not only is that unlikely to happen, chances are it’s not going to fix the problems 99% of people have because the problem is them, not the world. They have the wrong mentality. That’s a victim mentality, a someone-needs-to-fix-this mentality, a mentality that says they should envy and pull down successful people instead of learning from them. There’s nothing wrong with doing your part to change the world for the better, but the people trying to change the world to make life easier instead of focusing on making themselves better are not going to have happy lives.
Instead of treating every self-created issue people have as something politicians have to fix, have we considered the most basic and obvious alternatives? Are the police really a danger to black Americans or are they a danger to people that attack them or act crazy around them? Are college loans really a problem or is the problem that a lot of people are taking out huge loans to pay for expensive educations in majors that are unlikely to pay off financially? Is a boss at fault if they’re paying someone minimum wage for years or is the worker for not improving their skills enough to be worth more either to that boss or another one? Is it unfair to keep biological men out of women’s bathrooms and women’s sports or is the real problem that mentally ill biological men are mutilating and transforming themselves and then expecting everyone else to cater to their delusion? If you want to argue that a particular race in America is discriminated against not based on a specific policy, but on economic disparities, you should be obligated to compare different races on basic things that can dramatically exacerbate those disparities. What does the out-of-wedlock birth rate look like for that group? What about the number of people that have gone to jail in that group? How about drug use? High school graduation rate? College graduation rate? Literacy? If you are going to argue that women are paid less than men, it’s worth getting back to basics there, too. Are women working the same jobs as men or easier, less dangerous jobs? Are they putting in the same kind of hours or less on a weekly basis? Are they taking time off for pregnancy and raising their kids or continuing to go to work? If we’re talking about “body positivity,” is the problem that men don’t like overweight women and society overestimates how unhealthy it is to be overweight or that losing weight is really hard for a lot of people, and they’d rather make excuses?
The best thing we can do for a lot of Americans is to stop lying to them and stop catering to them. We should want everyone to be successful, but not in a crabs-in-a-bucket sort of way where everyone else has to be pulled down to raise them up. We should respect and appreciate people that raise others up, but we should also stop “helping” people who demand that we pull others down to help them succeed.
The infantile notion that "I'm okay, it's everybody else who needs to change!" is a cartoon out of a Calvin and Hobbs book, and it was funny because it was so absurd. Yet look where we are as a society; as a collective group we have a majority(?) of Americans who now assert this? This essay does a wonderful, concise summary with examples of what I hear and read everyday, and it's a huge and growing problem. Thank you for organizing "my" thoughts and writing them so clearly.