A Broken Image

It's a very easy trap to fall in to, and as far as I've noticed, everyone's done it at some point in their life.

"My situation is horrible, everyone should feel sorry for me, no one feels worse than me right now!"

I was at work one day, and a coworker and an assistant manager were talking, so naturally, being the creeper that I am (ssssss... sorry, Minecraft joke...), I started to eavesdrop.

"I hate the idea of minimum wage, I hate the idea of poverty, I hate that some people have to work their..."

At first, I was thinking, yeah, preach it Andy (that's the assistant manager's name), but after a little while of listening to them talk, I was disgusted...

I may not live the most flamboyant lifestyle, but I do live surprisingly well. I have a somewhat stable roof over my head, I eat plenty of meals a day (junk food, but it's still food), I have light, water, I even have a good car and good insurance on the car and the apartment, a decent phone, and I still can afford all of these things with a little money leftover! This is, of course, on that minimum wage they were discussing, working about 30 hours/week. I also am able to go to school, in a safe environment, and be educated in many different subjects.

To sum it up, I feel like I'm a pretty darn lucky guy, when you look at people who can't even manage to get food, let alone shelter for even a night or a nice bath! And that's not all! Even the poor people in our society are better off than people in other countries who get even less than our poor does!

But humans define their lives with suffering (that is a loose quotation of the Matrix), we feel like if we're not suffering we're not really living, so we rationalize that by finding things to complain about, just showing how spoiled we really are. I've never had my home broken before, my parents are currently still together. I'm better off than the narrator in "The Broken Home." It's just a hard concept to grasp whenever you're staring down the barrel of life's challenges, but once you grasp that, life actually seems very cheerful, even in the face of hopelessness and bleakness.