(Heads up: this article goes quite in-depth on emotionally sensitive topics. Please consider skipping this if you’re predisposed to mental health concerns.)
I often use the phrase “ahead of the starting line” to describe the innate advantages that accelerate a person’s success in life — such as being born into a wealthy family, residing in a prosperous community, or having an attractive physique. It goes without saying that having these characteristics allow the person to do well in any society.
But there are just as many less obvious pieces of the big picture that can’t be easily observed. Take financial literacy, for instance: people who have poor financial habits will far more likely run into serious financial issues, no matter their level of income; being rich only speaks to how much more money will be wasted.
Think of individuals who often spend beyond their budget, or impulse-buy goods they cannot afford, whether it’s an expensive coat or a sports car. (This commonly happens to parents who also have poor financial knowledge and never managed to properly educate their children on the topic.)
All these different obvious and hidden pieces end up determining how much challenges we have to face in various aspects of life — and of course, some have much more impactful and long term effects than others. The tricky thing here is that the latter category almost always goes unnoticed while it continues to play a major role in influencing our perceptions and relationships with others.
So, that begs the question: Is it actually worthwhile to also become more aware of those hidden pieces, especially when it comes to fundamental disadvantages that we can’t make up for?
In my early days of realizing this, the ideas brought bitterness with their arrival. It made me become aware of the immense gaps between myself and people in much more fortunate positions. As much as I should already be thankful of my circumstances, it’s hard to not be constantly reminded of my shortcomings when challenges arise.
(A quick detour: as a matter of fact, much of our collective perception is skewed by the amazing narratives of “self-made” folks we come across in the media.
I’m of the opinion that most success stories don’t warrant our attention. It’s great for the individuals who achieved their goals, sure, but they aren’t helpful if they aren’t presented completely and impartially.
When the reporting very rarely paints the complete picture and leave out enough details to make the stories sound more dramatic, then they don’t benefit us nor do we learn anything useful from consuming them. We all love good stories, but it’s important to take away as much of the added glitters when we wish to be informed more than to be entertained.)
Why am I even talking about these, if not to just sound pessimistic?
Because it’s likely that there are many types forces that work against you in life and it can be useful to learn to see them, so you can form a better understanding of your world and make clearer decisions. But this decision come with costs that may weigh on yourself over time. The further back your “starting line” is, the more the negative thoughts will accumulate.
Having gone through this myself, I hesitate to say if everyone should seek that level of clarity. Thinking back to my memories in the past few years, there are things that I would be better off not knowing. But I’m not a believer of “ignorance is bliss.” (I also really dislike the trend of forced optimism I come across on social media these days.) I’d rather see the world clearly and deal with the pain, rather than live in a blur.
In other words: I would take the red pill if I were in that famous Matrix scene.
As social animals, we are incapable of not comparing ourselves with others even when it is not in our best interest to do so — far too often, we allow our emotions to be controlled by all those shallow observations. Instead of fighting against this behavior, I have chosen to let it be and work towards changing how I respond to it.
I do believe that, by embracing the bitter aspects of life and learning to live with them, it helps me to be pragmatic and more resilient towards unplanned misfortunes.
If any of these rings true to you, then take this mini red pill and read on. If not, it’s probably best that you stop here and don’t spoil your mood any further.
Here’s a story between me and a high school friend. (Out of respect of his privacy, I’m using a fake name here.)
Unlike my background as a first generation university student, Ray came from an opposite kind of a family. His parents were both highly educated and hold high ranking position at top universities; academic prestige is written all over his identity. If you’ve ever spent any time with him on campus, you would see how much the aforementioned has influenced his thinking and behavior: at any given day, his schedule was packed with one advanced placement (AP) class after another. When moving across classrooms, if he wasn’t bumping into people because he was deep in thought, he was chit-chatting with the stereotypical smart kids on some complex homework problems or plans for their Math Olympiad club.
Suffice to say, Ray was well-prepared to inherit and further along the academic track record of his parents.
One time, just right before the college entrance exam season, I somehow caught a lunch with him. As opposed to sitting at the “smart kids” table, he chose to sit with me — his fellow international buddy. I vividly remember he spent a good portion of the meal time blabbering about his elaborate course plans and aspirations in college (with food bits occasionally come flying out of his mouth). A question came to my mind when he was in the middle of talking about his exam strategies, so I had to cut him off:
“Wait, hold on, what are these Toe Fall and Essay Tea things you are talking about?"
Ah, if you could only imagine the shock on Ray’s face. After regaining his composure, he started firing the topics of TOEFL and SAT at me, including a lot of terms I hadn’t heard of... I couldn’t tell if it’s because of the overly seasoned chicken tenders, his incessant talking, or both, he paused to take a large sip of water, which perhaps caused him to finally notice my perplexed look:
“How could you not know all of this?"
Well, my friend, I just didn’t know. Nobody in my family knew any of this — including critical information like passing AP exams can contribute towards college credits or that one should purchase prep materials for entrance exams. While Ray had access to all those insights long before that day, I had close to no idea until then.
I doubt that he knew how much that conversation meant to me. It was only after that day that I switched gear into panic mode and voraciously sought help from everyone and everywhere. Teachers, host parents, classmates, websites, pamphlets... you name it. I might not even have gone to college without that surprised conversation — it was first of the many things that eventually contributed to me narrowly getting a scholarship, without which I couldn’t even begin to afford one-tenth of the tuition.
And sure enough, Ray would proceed to enroll into one of the top 10 college programs for his academic focus. Last I heard, he holds a prestigious position at a world renown firm. I’m happy that he found great success in his professional life — but frankly, I just wish I didn’t feel so envious of him.
It would be false to say that my envy towards Ray has all gone away, though it no longer weighs on me today as much as it did before. More precisely speaking, the feeling pops up in a while and it either quickly dissipates or it lingers around without much impact.
But Ray is a rare exception.
Over the decade of my journey as a foreign student, I have come across no less a dozen peers who are more privileged than Ray. But instead, most of them chose to waste away the opportunities and resources granted by their family; they barely got through school by cutting corners (or straight up short-circuiting the system by dumping millions of dollars to bribe the admission officials). What I hate to admit is that, as I found out not long ago, many are now in quite enviable situations.
That kind of inequality is simple to explain: with enough social and financial capital, most problems are no longer problems. And the opposite is equally true.
(There might plenty of these examples around you if you look closely — such as the coworkers who periodically visit premium tourist spots despite working at an entry-level position, or that college classmate who found a way into a highly competitive firm despite having done poorly in school and had no prior professional training, or that young person who still had to reach out to you for help despite already having amazing talent and skills. The surface evidences don’t even begin to explain who they actually are and where they come from.
Successful people underestimate how much external factors have benefited them, while unsuccessful people overestimate how much internal factors have failed them.)
Eighteen-year-old me still struggled to stomach that fact, despite I understood that reality well enough — it simply was challenging to witness that younger peers around me routinely dropped thousands of dollars on luxury goods, while I have to carefully budget every penny I earn from my part-time jobs.
For a long time, a mixed feeling of anxiety and confusion would kick in whenever I think of these experiences, but when I finally found the answer after some years of soul-searching, that feeling turned into a deep-seated sense of disappointment instead.
This part is the conscious awakening that I described earlier: having connected the dots, I only had a moment of relief before the thoughts started to weigh on me. I also began to dig up all of the other similar situations buried deep down in memory, and the more I recall, the more I understood and felt more uneasy over time. Even though the emotions didn’t always cling on for long, their back and forth brought upon a lot of frustrations.
I couldn’t quite recall when did this fixation start to loosen up. There were a series of seemingly unrelated events that eased my disturbances — whether it’s reuniting with my parents after a decade of being apart, or touring museums and seeing name plates of donors from a foregone time... I experienced a flash of serenity when they take place, for one random reason or another.
One of such event was stumbling upon Derek Sivers’ book notes of “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy." when I was having a rough day at work.
Here are a few lines from the notes:
Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted.
You are living in what to your ancestors would have been a dream world. You take for granted things that your ancestors had to live without.
Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.
At some point, I began to pay more attention to my consciousness throughout the day — to become more aware of how different occurrences are impacting my emotions, so that I can recognize the good parts and dwell less on the bad parts. After all, the mind has the ultimate say of whether I want to feel content or not; the least I can do for myself is to learn how to better handle it.
My biggest takeaway here was realizing that my time in this world is way too short to waste on even a sliver of self-imposed envy, anger, or grief.
From what I can tell, the process to achieve this state of mind is somewhat counterintuitive in practice, because the prior frame of reference plays a major role in this: people have to experience or be deeply aware of both ends of extreme hardship before they are ready to see their world differently. The fact remains that a vast majority of people either lie somewhere in the middle or the lower end, and only a small portion is likely to achieve life-changing social mobility; their frame of reference is just very limited.
When we think of hardships in the modern society, we rarely picture ourselves in the far end; we think of failing out of school, losing employment, or divorce. But it takes a truly traumatic event for a person to shift his or her frame of reference — and only then that the impression will be carved into the mind — so to see the world through a new lens.
(Relatively speaking, my struggle above is rather trivial compared to actual destitution. If personal hardship can really be objectively measured, I am already very fortunate, all things considered.
That said, my frame of reference originate from my parents: most of my father’s childhood was a uphill battle against poverty and malnutrition; he frequently had to dig around his hometown shoreline just to scavenge for enough food to get by. As for my mother, she was born and raised in one of the most impoverished countrysides of her home state... we still were in a modest economic status when I arrived, so I caught a glimpse of their past. But they did everything they could to change that and things did get better over time. I can’t begin to imagine where I would’ve ended up if I were born into a less dependable family.)
Let’s use hunger an example: It’s one thing to skip a meal and be hungry because of having a busy work schedule. It’s entirely another thing to not have enough to eat due to financial hardship, all the while knowing that many others frequently throw away perfectly edible leftovers.
Nonetheless, becoming more conscious of your thoughts is a start (especially pay attention to whenever you form opinions by comparing yourself to anyone else), regardless of whether or not you need that awareness right at this moment. Given that life is never a smooth ride from beginning til the end, I’m sure it will benefit you to be prepared sooner rather than later.
Here are my approaches for dealing with any emotional recoil:
Reframing my point of view has served me well in most occasions — I envision that the trouble I’m going through is merely a speck in grand scheme of everything, or that the burden I’m bearing will seem trivial a month or a year from now. Whenever I use these significant scales for comparison, I’m reminded that there are not many things more important other than life and death.
More recently, I have come to notice that some of my aspirations are really built on top of an alternative reality — a perfect version of my world that doesn’t exist in the first place. While others may say that having dreams is one way to stay motivated, I prefer to be a realist and play with the hand I’m dealt; at least I will have a better estimate of my expectations this way.
I’m sure we don’t share a common frame of reference and we have different mental needs, so you will have to explore more suitable options for yourself when the time comes. (As a callback to above — may I suggest Stoicism?)
This is a rather dreary topic. To end it on a brighter note — here’s one of my favorite poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon:
“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.”
If for any reason, things have not been going well for you lately... I hope that, like I did with myself, you can find the courage within you as well.