We are all dealt different cards in life
This is one of the things in life that are certain. Some people are rich, some are poor. Some attractive, some ugly. Some young, some old. Some intelligent, some stupid. Some educated, some uneducated. Some talented, some talentless. You get the idea.
From a very young age, we soon learn that people are different. We, or at least most of us experience what it means to be human, with our 5 senses, living in our 21st century life, with the good times and the bad, and the moods that come with that.
Not only that, we also have to consider the socioeconomic background of the person. The biggest factor for how successful a person will be in the future, is the success of their parents. And children raised without a father are more likely to go prison and be uneducated. Our family, friends, city we live in, the schools we go to, all shape our experience to influence who we are today.
The world is full of rules we are expected to follow
For a child, parents seem to tell them what not to do, more than they praise them for the good that they do. This teaches children somewhat that some things are considered bad to do. Parents have a responsibility to teach their kids what right and wrong is. Not only that, but schools do too. Getting an education broadens a child’s mind, and they will further learn the full realm of ethics by the time they finish their education.
Not only that, but that we live in a country, and that country has laws, and if you break the law you are arrested with a possibility of a punishment and a criminal record. It’s not enough to just follow laws, we also have to follow rules. Games have rules, forums have rules, chat rooms have rules. There’s also a thing called “unacceptable behaviour” which is behaviour that makes someone feel afraid, threatened or abused if done to a person, or something that damages someone’s reputation or property if it’s an organisation.
We work like a machine for hours to the best of our ability
There’s so much rules to follow, one wonders how we manage to follow them all. Don’t people get tired of doing so? In our western society, we are encouraged to study courses that align with our interests, rather than to go for a course that leads to a high paid job. We want to give ourselves something to enjoy, so why not make work fun? Nobody wants to be working a 9 to 5 they hate. There are people who prefer not to work, the workshy. That is socially unacceptable.
If someone is disabled, they are NOT given a pass for not following a rule or social norm.
Autistic people do not get lieniency or lighter treatment for being rude or not putting their shoes off when they enter a house. They are expected to follow the herd and do the right thing like everyone else does and know what everyone else knows. Yes there will be times when they made a genuine mistake, but in an allistic world, even a genuine mistake is one too many, no matter how small it is or how easily it can be overlooked. Should one say First World Problems?
If someone has a low IQ or has learning difficulties, they are prone to what the police call “mate crime”, when people pretend to be their friend in order to “use” them in a one-sided gain, whether that be money, free accomodation, free gifts, and exploit the person in the process. The thing with developmental disabilities, is that a person can be advantaged in one aspect, and disadvantaged in another aspect. They can understand right and wrong and what is legal and illegal, yet can often be exploited. If a person has retardation, the government can ban them from having sex as a court can find them incapable of sexual consent. Not all adults have capacity due to some disabilities.
Being an adult means having responsibility, and if we fail to meet what is expected of us, we have failed in life. Not only do our actions affect us, they also affect the people who depend on us, and not just in the present, in the far away future as well.
In this society it’s expected that everyone is nice. Not everyone is, so we have to create a society that clamps down on bad behaviour. My friend Jimmy Thio who writes about Game Theory said that people have to co-operate in order to get what they want out of life, so until you have sufficent evidence otherwise, you should assume that everyone is a sociopath.
It seems like everyone is competing, but not everyone is competitive.
Is everyone supposed to be nice all of the time, to everyone, who hasn’t treat them any ill way? The way society is going, that’s the way it has to be. The government, society and the pressure groups appear to be getting better at outlawing undesired behaviours, every coming decade.
What if you feel an injustice?
What if you feel an injustice about all the rules, social norms, laws
- File a complaint
- Write a review
- Write a blog article
- Start a petition
- Donate money to charity
- Start a pressure group (all charities are pressure groups)
- Make your own
- Create a business
Remember there may be repercussions for this.
People get worn down
What are the reasons to be happy?
It’s all relative.
When you’re a child, you have this whimical idea of the world that if you have money, or if you’re married, have a nice job, or a car, or a girlfriend, or some type of success due to something that you did, that for some strange reason you’ll be happy.
Then when you get older you realise that it’s not like that. I read this article that says that somewhere between 25-33% of people in the US are on some type of antidepressants. Some person living in some third world country wouldn’t be able to grasp that concept. But you have first to understand how the brain works. It’s all relative. The way the brain works, is that you have neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and norinephephrine (typo), and these chemicals are linked to mood. A common misception about the brain is that when you’re happy, you’re happy forever or for a long time.
What neuroscientists discovered is that the brain gets these chemicals, and they withdraw them, then deposit them, withdraw them, and deposit them, continuously. So you can NEVER be of a continuous mood, as the way your brain works, your brain ALWAYS fluctuates your mood. Now what you see with people who take hard drugs like cocaine and heroine, is that they boost the neurotransmitters so high, that they end up mashing up their brains.
It’s all relative. That’s what you learn when you get older. It’s all relative.
Once you get past a certain level of income, no more amount of money can make you happier. It’s all relative.
The cliche “someone else has it worse so be grateful for what you have” argument
Eat your dinner, there are children starving in africa.
Everyone
Stop moaning about it, others have it worse.
Everyone
It happened years ago so it shoudn’t affect you now. You should be over it by now.
Everyone
When sadness is down to psychosocial causes, the common argument against comments like those is that it is invalidation and that the person has EVERY right to feel how they feel and that “sadness isn’t a choice”. Someone is complaining because they got a “hate comment” on Instagram, their youtube video or their blog, and on the other side of the planet people are getting beaten up and inprisoned for taking part in the Hong Kong Protests. Some people would say that complaining about receiving a “hate comment” is a “first world problem”.
Sadness is an emotional response to a bad stimuli, so it doesn’t matter how sad the person feels, if another person is more sad than them, or if the stimuli is not the worst kind of stimuli, if a person has a negative emotional response to something, that negative feeling has to be addressed in order for the person to be a neutral flatline or happy being.
I did some research on Reddit as to what others say to the “others have it worse” argument, and this is what they said.
All pain is valid
All suffering is valid
Other people’s problems do not diminish your own
Depression is a legitimate illness
You don’t need to have it as bad as everyone else. Depression doesn’t discriminate between wealth, looks, tastes, social status, or race. It doesn’t care and it affects all of us the same way. Everyone is from a different walk of life, some vastly different from yours, some oddly similar but we all suffer from the same pain and that’s really all that matters.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/depression/comments/3e1800/dont_feel_like_i_have_it_as_bad_as_others_yet/
It’s interesting that people only say this to people with depression. You don’t hear them telling people with physical disabilities that other people have it worse. I think depression is still looked at as a form of attention seeking or something. depression isn’t based on “how easy one has it”. that’s ignorance on any level.
I know it’s supposed to give you a different perspective, to not look at the negative side of life, but isn’t that just denial? Your need to properly deal with what’s happening instead of turning your head away and look at the bright side.
Depression is chemical imbalances in the brain. While it usually does occur because of experiencing traumatic events, that isn’t always the case.
Telling someone that they shouldn’t be depressed because someone has it worse just makes the person feel more upset. It almost never makes them feel better, and just makes them upset over the fact that they can’t get over being depressed. It is especially bad when other depressed people do
Conclusion
It’s our duty to behave responsibly and ethically. Not everyone does, so we have to hold each other to account. However we all have different morals, so we all have to agree on a standard set of ethics that are fair for everyone involved. Also we have to not break rules, even if they are pointless. There’s so much pressure put on us all the time, people wonder what exactly is the point?
Further Reading
“Other People Have It Worse Than You Do.”
Other People Have It Worse, But That Doesn’t Invalidate Your Feelings
Stop Telling People That Others Have It Worse
Others Have It Worse Than Me: SELF INVALIDATION
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