Clarissa's Blog

The real problem is that it’s socially acceptable and prestigious to pose as a victim. Victimhood and suffering, even if they are completely fake, are prized social achievements.

Our brain believes what we tell it. If you pretend to be overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable for social clout, soon enough your brain will believe it and you will feel overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable.

In academia, for instance, whining is everybody’s favorite hobby. Throughout my years at department chair, we had a self-pity group for female chairs. They’d go to restaurants and bars together to discuss how they are disadvantaged as women. I never went.

Even writing productivity groups are infected with the poison of self-pity. Once you tell yourself that you never have time to write and that everything around you is set up to prevent you from writing, you will most certainly end up not writing. Yet this is exactly what people do.

But it’s everywhere, not just in academia. And it’s getting worse. People talk themselves into believing that somebody’s out to get them or that their suffering is profound, and then they actually start to suffer. Yes, you get social acceptance and prestige from it, but is it worth it? Unless you’re a sociopath, you will end up integrating the fake persona into the real one.

People methodically drive themselves into depression out of social conformity. Yes, the woman in the image above is posing. It’s all fake. But she’ll get herself into feeling exactly what she’s enacting very soon.