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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With stuff like the lunch thing, I suspect third-world engagement farming. Those can’t be real people.
ethyl
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That’s funny. I just came home from my kid’s play date. We also regularly go to playgrounds where it’s easy to find other kids to play and interact with. I don’t do anything special to arrange things, but even with me being introverted it’s not that hard.
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Can you give a link to the lunch thing for us out of the loop people?
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There isn’t a single link. Kevin O’Leary said in an interview that people who make $70,000 a year should not be buying $28 lunches on a regular basis and the entirety of the internet felt it necessary to respond. The responses were either:
– I take a potato sandwich and two slices of gas station Wonder Bread every day and that’s how I can afford to buy a mansion.
– I’m too exhausted, deprived, and miserable to pack my own lunch.
Members of both groups probably wept tears of profound self-compassion as they wrote them, but there are way too many of them to link. One could literally not scroll through one’s feed on X without seeing hundreds of these posts.
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Thank you. You are right in that the discussion sounds insane. It’s kinda sad that people treat good advice as a personal attack. Also even if you don’t want to make your own lunch most supermarkets stock pre-made salads, sandwiches and yoghurt-cups so it’s quite easy to prepare a pre-assembled lunch for way less than $28.
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Back when I was working in fast food and we got an employee discount, I quickly figured out that I could pick up a yogurt and a kiwi (at the grocery store that shared our parking lot) for about 1/5th of a discounted sandwich at my deli. Which was not high-end.
Not rocket science. Some people are just too lazy to make that extra stop at the grocery store.
We still use this strategy when we have long car trips to make: if you have to stop for food, find a regular grocery store not a restaurant or gas station. The selection’s better and it costs a lot less.
ethyl
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” The responses were either”
I saw some kind of sane responses pointing out that basic cooking from raw ingredients is a skill that is not that hard to acquire and much cheaper (and healthier) than doordash heavily processed slop.
Responses mostly suggested that pan-frying a chicken filet, basic rice and steaming a vegetable or two was a more difficult feat than painting the sistine chapel and no person should have to suffer such indignity…
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People were feeling so sorry for themselves, it was hilarious. The word “starvation” was used frequently and without any reservation.
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Tragic, truly tragic ;-D
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