That you had to set aside your feelings and use willpower. This is the way everyone had to live in history, this was a default of existence - and anything more than this was luxury. I felt hyper aware of how unusual our state of civilization was, how luxurious my life was already
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And this is why I feel a little confused when people get really angry at stuff like the minimum wage, or having to work two jobs and live in a shitty apartment. People are complaining at working conditions that I went through with actual gratitude.
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It seems very clear to me that the issue is not absolute working conditions and living standards, it is narrative and contrast. People have been much happier with much less, but these people are less happy with more. And I can’t help but think - have you tried being grateful?
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Nobody had to give you your job. Nobody owes you anything. You are incredibly fortunate to be living this far into an advanced civilization at all. This is a matter of perspective - and sure this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve your life, but the entitlement is bizarre.
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Maybe not bizarre. Just as I was grateful by paying a lot of attention to the state of past humans, I think a lot of the dissatisfaction with living conditions comes from paying attention to the more fortunate. We have some idea that inequality is *inherently* wrong.
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There’s a good chunk of people who would like to lower the wealth of the very rich even if this benefited nobody else, even if the wealth didn’t get redistributed at all!
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For far too many, the default assumption is that people had some sort of advantage to get them where they were. It’s what happens when you try to set the pivot point around things that people can’t control (race, sex, etc) as opposed to the things you can (work ethic, etc).
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Even so, that seems deeply fine to me. Life is unfair - I was told this constantly growing up. I never expectrd my advantages to be the same as others. Do other people get taught to expect this?
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I’m honestly not sure where this level of entitlement comes from, but it seems to have increased dramatically with the rise of social media. They’re learning it from somewhere.
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But by this same metric of “life is unfair” why is it immoral to take the money of the mega rich inheritance class?
Too bad! Life’s not fair!
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Life is unfair for me meant that sometimes things are outside your control, that sometimes people are born with more advantages.
It did not mean that we should be ok with stealing, which is an infringement on someone else’s property. Unfairness isn’t an infringement.