Last week we had a barrage of complaints on X about how crushing, debilitating and downright horrific it was to prepare a lunch for oneself. People experienced profound compassion for themselves. The drama of preparing lunch still hasn’t fully subsided with people complaining that rented apartments don’t have refrigerators and kitchens (which of course they do), thereby forcing them to rely on Doordash in order to stave off horrific and instant starvation.
This week another great hardship dropped:
Brutally difficult, you know? Brutally. The author of the “brutally difficult” post is a man.
The most basic psychological trick that you’d think everybody would know at this point is that if you tell yourself that everything is bad, you will experience everything as bad and will be very miserable. We process reality through words. We perceive things the way we describe them to ourselves. If we describe the most blissful, amazing situation as terrible, we will experience it as terrible. And vice versa, of course.
People get trapped into distorting their reality in negative directions without wanting to. There is a lot of peer pressure that convinces them that enacting misery is the trendy thing to do. They go on social media and see everybody compete in how deprived and persecuted they are. They go to work or to any peer group and, again, observe a misery competition. It’s very tempting to participate and many people do just that. They have no idea why they start feeling sad and depressed. Gratitude rituals are popular because they allow a person to escape into a private bubble from these collective rituals of self-pity.
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