You're spoiled too

14 May, 2024

Today, I make a small confession. I am 40 years old, work, and support (almost 80% of everything in my current home is paid for and maintained by me) my immediate family (mother and brother). They are great people who never complain.

But it’s not about them that I’m going to talk about. Nor about myself. It’s about the “surroundings” of society. As I mentioned in the reality check text, I always live on a tightrope where I balance life in the periphery, daily and routine, with the usual setbacks of a life of privations. Nothing that is not normal and every day for those who go through the same process. On the other hand, I have contact with people from a different social spectrum- the middle class- via the internet and because of having studied at a federal college.

Within this distinct reality, far from the majority of Brazilians, people tend to think that the fact of “not getting by” (meaning doing what everyone does in the periphery) is a reason to raise red flags. Getting by is typical of this class, mainly because their concept comes from a twisted idea of doing the basic things of daily life in a household. Cooking, cleaning, shopping. These things, which in the world of most of these people who complain about “getting by,” are just one more daily task in the world of the issues that everyone faces in the peripheries (in addition to money problems, justice, theft, housing, education, health, and many others).

So, most people who complain about others being spoiled are also. That girl who thinks every man is like her ex-boyfriend, spoiled and raised without responsibility, is also spoiled compared to a peripheral woman who worked from an early age at home, took care of siblings, and got a minimum wage job. It’s not the exchange program in Ireland that teaches you to get by; on the contrary, it only reinforces that you are spoiled.

What do I mean by all of this? Setting aside the rant, it’s that the people in the internet’s court of micro-causes (aka X/Twitter) are spoiled, foolish, and almost always incapable of understanding the material reality that surrounds them.

In other words, you are also spoiled, privileged, petty, and arrogant.