After talking with a friend the other day, I realized my big issue with people who can't get over small things is the amount of relativity in their lives.
When you grow up in a nice house, in a nice part of town, with parents who always work full time jobs, or better yet have a stay at home parent, that love and cherish you, chance's are you're a pretty sheltered person. I don't mean that in the negatively connotated way that many do. I mean, literally, you are sheltered to the adversity that many others suffer through in their lives.
Empathy can only get you so far. You need to live through eating grilled cheese and working two jobs to really get what I'm saying. As a parent, I've struggled, but more so, I've seen it as a child. I've lived through it. I've worked (maybe not as hard as I should have) to achieve a better life for myself and my family.
Which makes it hard for me to get how anyone could actually care about trivial, meaningless things like what someone posts on facebook. And again, I don't mean that all things posted on facebook are trivial. Bullying, in adults and teens a like, is rampant on social networking sites, blogs included. By trivial, I mean who cares if someone posts the same thing you post or doesn't agree with what you say. Those things are small fries in comparison to real world people who are fighting to keep the electricity on and feed their kids.
If you've never had that real world adversity in your life, then it might actually be world ending if your junior class chooses prom glasses that you don't like. But the loss of a grandparent, two grandparent-in-laws, and the birth of my child later, I honestly don't care.
If you follow my facebook, then you'll see just how much I don't care. I say it a lot. I don't care about immature, teenage crap. I don't care (nothing personal if the person who posted this is reading what I wrote on fb last night, just a great example) if my husband goes out and drinks with his friends. As long as he's not becoming an alcoholic and sleeping with other women, I don't see an issue with his being out whenever he chooses to, doing whatever he chooses to do. He's an adult, and I trust (No, I KNOW) that he wouldn't do anything to hurt himself, me or our son. I don't care. I don't care if he has facebook friends who are women, and posts on their walls. Why would I care? I have guy friends, and post on their walls. I posted on his best friends wall last night.
With all of that said, professionally, I know that their are people who care, and with reason. I know that there are mental disorders (anxiety being a big one) that cause some insecurities and other things that can lead to people caring. If you're one of those people, you've been excused from my semi (but not really) rant.
Of course, doesn't change the fact, that I really don't care. Maybe I'm too apathetic and dissociative, but that's a whole other blog post. : )
2 comments:
for me, whining about the trivial things is my way of coping with the bigger things. the more i complain about having stubbed a toe, the less i concentrate and worry about the impending bills that we can't pay. or the grocery money running out.
i don't completely avoid the big problems, but by making a big deal out of the little, fixable, things it somehow means i can deal with the bigger things too.
every time i talk to my mom, i don't talk to her about how long she thinks it will take her to become paralyzed, or what her realistic life expectancy is... we whine about how much weight we've gained, how we need to go to the salon, and how there just aren't enough hours at night to sleep. we aren't ignoring the big, glaring truth and we certainly aren't sheltered from it, but it's so much easier to cope when we concentrate on the smaller, normal things. :)
kwim?
Yeah, I totally get that. But the people who whine about the trivial crap, and honestly think it's the big stuff...that's where I'm coming from.
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