Why does most human life have to be crappy?

For far too many people on earth, life is pretty terrible. But assuming you’re not in a third-world country, starving for food or medicine or clean water or repressed under a tyrannical government that threatens to kill you for the slightest misstep, you’re probably doing okay.

I would not discount or minimize any burdens of suffering you endure, but I really think it’s a matter of perspective for most of us.

With outrageous ,exceptions most of what people gripe about is the standard stuff of life.
Unless you have seen the shitholes of the Earth like Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others, you might imagine it’s shitty.
But if you live on the North American continent, as I know you do, you might as well be in paradise compared to most other places.
I give myself a 98. Subtracting a point for a crappy marriage and expensive divorce, and another for occasional, mild and temporary bouts of PTSD. And I really shouldn’t even bother with that. Just being self indulgent.
I’m happy to be here period.

What he said, ^^^ exactly.

I’m not a big fan of the attitude that people who have privileges are not allowed to be sad.

I used to have big problems; nowadays the kinds of problems I have are what you would call “first world problems” but amazingly, I’m about equally as happy now (that is to say, not very) as I was back when Shit Was Real. People adjust and cope, and in the end I think everybody is approximately equally miserable inside their head, regardless of life circumstance.

I don’t know why vague unease seems to be the default state for so many of us. I wish it weren’t. I’ve been trying for years to figure out how to feel any better.

It’s what you make it, and what those around you make it for you. It isn’t pre-ordained. A wise man once said: “Life is a shit sandwich and every day is another bite.”

I’m fairly happy. No wife, no kids, no car. Just me fucking around and not needing to care about anything. I woke up this morning with a erection so I rubbed one off in the shower. Then I had a English muffin drenched in butter and some tea.

Drank a bunch of water while watching Masterchef AU (wft callum) and House Rules. Then hopped on the bike to go shoot hoops for a few hours.

Came home and helped someone with their wordpress theme and got some cash. Made manicotti and now rocking some PBR.

I adore the shit out of my sisters husband. But he is a fucking idiot. He has six kids spanning two wives. Dude needs to learn what a condom is. He makes 120K a year but is perpetually broke. STOP MAKING BABIES you idiot.

I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said,

“Most people are about as happy as they choose to be”.

My early life was pretty bumpy, but I found and married a woman who has always been adored by (just about) everyone she’s ever met (there will always be snotty, jealous bitches, I don’t care where you go).

Our two grown children are smart and honest, with great senses of humor, and both have dozens of loyal, lifetime friends…..so I’m grateful that they take after their mother.

Overall, I’d have to give my life a 97 (points off for the old man beating the hell out of my brother and me all the time, then a year of ugliness and sorrow in Vietnam.

And @johnpowell, if I may say so, instinctively to me it seems like you might make a great next-door neighbor…...

@PullMyFinger :: I rock a mean BBQ and if you can smell it I will feed you.

When I was a kid my life was crap. In fact I was doing the backstroke in it most of the time. I guess that’s about a number 2.

As a 66 year old adult my life is like a dream come true. I might step in a goose crap from time to time. That make my life now a 99. How sweet it is!

Assuming 1 is the worst and 100 is the best, my life is a good 10 right now. I am having an incredibly hard time finding any sort of motivation to do anything, and I just kind of want to check out.

(NOT saying I want to kill myself, just that I want to lay in bed and sleep and not do anything.)

That’s just taking into account my personal issues and such. Obviously, my life isn’t too bad, I have food, clothes, and a shelter. But I am not counting that in my above rating

I am only gonna measure this in a “first world country” kind of way…....I’d say currently about a
47.

The fact is, happiness is not necessarily contingent on privileges. Bhutan is apparently one of the happiest countries in the world, and it’s sort of in the middle as far as development levels goes. It’s not “first world” by any means, and yet people there seem to know how to live. What their secret is, I don’t know.

It does seem sometimes that “vague unease” is often the default for many people, I would agree with that. It’s always about how things were better in the past, how the world sucks now, how everything’s going downhill…I think historical perspective has done a lot to change my attitude toward that, since there really wasn’t a time in history where people didn’t think these things. And realizing that the core parts of the human experience aren’t really any different for me than they were for the millions of people who have lived and died in centuries past has allowed me to put to rest some of that “unease”.

I don’t know why people measure their life against perfection; maybe because we can imagine perfection it’s inevitable that we’ll always fall short of that and be unhappy in some way. That’s probably why belief in an afterlife of paradise is so important for so many people.

I’m always striving for better and I can’t imagine not doing so, and I have some regrets, but looking at my life as a whole I think I could put my 1–100 number somewhere in the 90s. “Life sucks” seems to be a motto for many, but it’s never been mine.

The important part is to live, not simply exist.
Baby, life’s what you make it…

I was taking a hot shower the other day, in my newly repaired bathroom. Nice new, giant shower head. It distributes the water so well, it covers my whole body. But, there was a drip from the ceiling, from condensation or something. The drip was quite colder than the shower water.

So. With thousands of drops of hot water hitting my body, all I could focus on was the one occasional drip of cold water.
99.99999% of the water was nice, comfortable even. But that one fucking cold drip every few seconds made it irritating…

Perspective indeed…

I look at my life and am sometimes frightened at my spooky good fortune compared to the bulk of humanity. Born and reared in the United States in the most prosperous era in the history of the world’s most prosperous nation. This single lucky fact has been augmented by so many other ” lucky” quirks that I’m nearly embarrassed at their consideration. At every juncture I consider, from my teachers and schooling, the women I’ve known, my decision on where to live, the friends I have accumulated, you name it. I have stumbled willy-nilly through an absolutely staggering total of right time right place situations, nearly all
them neither recognized nor appreciated at the time by the fool on whom they were bestowed. At this stage in my life, I find myself thinking about this more than is probably healthy. There’s this creepy feeling that I owe someone or something more than I can ever repay.

Good on you, Stanley B, for recognizing that some of us (including me) were just no-effort lucky to be born when and where we were, just as billions of people throughout history had to suffer terribly unfortunate lives, through no fault of their own.

In my younger days I never gave it any thought at all. But these days, as I sit at a red traffic light I daydream about the many people out there who would LOVE to change places with me…..even for a day….

Meh… six of one, a half dozen of the other. Could be better, could be worse, it’s all a crap shoot anyway.

@stanleybmanly :: That was actually lovely. I wish I could give you more great answers.

I feel pretty lucky. In 1995 we had a Powemac 6100/66 in my computer class that taught programming. That computer was 2K and had a 5K scanner hooked up to it. And a scan took nearly the entire class. We also had a server farm for rendering trueSpace. It was fucking bonkers for a high school computer lab.

But property taxes pay for schools here. My sister lied to get me in the rich district school. The school I should have gone to without fraud had a “chainsaw” class. I am not joking, my schools (rich one) had 3d Animation as a class. The schools are 5 miles away and the one with less property taxes had a “lumberjack” class.

I’m definitely miserable more often than I am happy. Usually when I try to open up about it though people aren’t too sympathetic.

I blame my awful fucking childhood.

I find all variations of the response “but if you live in the first world you shouldn’t complain” to be so fucking trite. Even children in the first world get subjected to abuse. Even first world people have to live with the death of the people they love. That shit ruins lives no matter where you are.

Just because life is comparatively shittier in other countries doesn’t mean life isn’t shit here.