Spent the past week backpacking with friends, which was awesome. Yay FIRE life! This meant I didn’t get much writing in. Figured I’d hit you with a blast from the past. I wrote the below almost 5 years ago, thought it was still decent.
I’m constantly trying to chill myself out when people complain to me about how much their lives suck. My life, I suppose, is pretty good by comparison to the rest of the world. Our family is healthy, I’ve got a good job I like most of the time. I sleep inside a climate controlled house in a nice neighborhood, I can eat whatever I want whenever I want. But when someone else starts bitching about their life, all of that gets flipped around and my ego starts screaming in the back of my head about how much easier they’ve got it.
For instance, my wife was telling me about how one of her coworkers was getting depressed because her coworker’s husband started an evening grad school program. This meant he was studying for an hour or so every night while sequestered in their office. My wife’s coworker was having a hard time handling this because she missed him so much during these times. She felt deprived because they normally spend every night together, and now his schoolwork was messing all that up. When I heard this, I started bouncing between laughing and mild anger. I thought about how I work late shift, and my wife works nine to five. On workdays, we’re lucky if we see each other for more than a total of 20 minutes. I’m on call, and we might go a few days every other week where I’m called in and we don’t see each other at all. Not to mention when I’m at work, people occasionally try to kill me. So we do sort of worry about not seeing each other ever again if shit goes sideways.
And the thing that really got me is I think I’ve got it good. I can’t help but think of my friends who are still in the Army. One guy is getting deployed for a year; his son is less than a year old. Another friend ‘s wife is pregnant, and he’s likely deploying before his first kid is born. I feel lucky that I get to spend a few days a week with my wife and son, while my friends will have to deal with their kids probably not knowing them when they get back. Not to mention I get to sleep in a comfy bed with no risk of getting hit with indirect. Almost as good is the Qdoba ten minutes from my house, which is a hell of a lot better than MREs. On top of that, I know all of us still have it good in comparison to the rest of the world. Having lived in third world countries, I fully understand it could be so much worse. And is for the majority of the world.
So when I hear people complain about the struggles of middle class American life, I kind of lose it a bit. But the thing is, I know I’m wrong. At the base of it, my incredulity at the lack of perspective in many of my peers is partially fuelled by my own unjustified righteousness and entitlement. That ego of mine wants to complain that my life is harder than the standard office worker. Well yeah. But whose fault is that? Mine. I actively sought out this life I live. I worked hard to put myself in a position where I would be exposed to more danger. And to be perfectly honest, it’s not like I’m doing all of this for altruistic reasons. I like this stuff. Working nine to five in front of a computer would be safer, yes. But good god Lemon, that seems like a slow death to me. So yeah, I know I shouldn’t be fooling myself. If I were in my wife’s coworkers shoes, hedonic adaptation would have taken full effect, and I’d probably be bitching too.
It truly is all relative. Respecting that everyone is facing their own challenges can be tough sometimes, especially considering the wide division between lifestyles. I remember one of my first patrols in Afghanistan, it had been dark for a bit and the heat was fading away into the night. We stopped at a checkpoint outside some shops, and this local came up to me. He was maybe 30, thin, and unarmed. So I figured it was cool to talk to him. He asked me if I was new to his country. Being twenty years old and full of machine gun enhanced testosterone, I took offense to this question. Kind of felt like getting called a rookie. Of course, I now know my basis of offense was pointless, but I was more immature than I currently am now. Anyways, I choked down my offense, and decided to be honest. I told him that I was indeed new. He went on to tell me how he thought I had a hard job to do, and he genuinely felt bad for me. He said he had seen how we lived in our country on TV, and he thought it must be rough having to be in the military after living in America our whole lives. He then wished me luck, and then headed home. I couldn’t believe it.
At that point in my life, I’d been in the Army for almost three years, I’d worked hard to get in my unit, and was ecstatic when given the chance to volunteer for a deployment. I considered it the culmination of the years of selection and training. I was finally doing exactly what I had wanted for so long. Now here was this guy, who lived in a mud hut with no running water, who felt bad for me. He had said that he thinks he’s got it good; he’s got a relaxing job farming, and gets to hang out with his family and friends all day. The hustle of American life seemed unreasonably stressful to him.
So I try to remember that, and be a little more like that farmer. Jennifer Gilbert does it way better than me. My favorite book I read last year was her I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag. I was amazed at her capacity for empathy when her clients would invariably lose their shit over some minor defect in a party she planned for them. What was incredibly amazing was how her clients’ issues paled in comparison to the violence she had been subjected to. Instead of brushing off her clients’ pain, she recognized that it was still pain, and saw that it was deserving of gentle attention. This floored me. I’ve tried to keep this in mind when I hear stuff like my wife’s coworker issues. I’m far from perfect, but I’m slowly getting quicker about skipping through my astonishment, anger, and getting to a place where I can empathize. Where I can remember that everyone is living on a spectrum of relativity; where the only true equality is in the suffering we experience when things don’t go our way, no matter the circumstances.
Well, what’d you think? Sound like me from 4 years ago I’m still not perfect about this, though I’m getting better at catching it.
