Oh Poor Me!

Welcome to another episode of “Sounds Reasonable To Me”.  This podcast is created and produced by iamreasonable.com, and I’m your host, C. J. Sand. 

In this week’s episode we’re going to take a look at a malady running rampant in our society.  No, I’m not talking about the Corona Virus, the affliction I’m talking about is something much more common.  It’s something I call the  “Oh poor me” syndrome.

Transcript

Title:  Oh Poor Me!

Podcast:  Sounds Reasonable To Me

Script: 43

First Published:  6 June 2021

Welcome to another episode of “Sounds Reasonable To Me”.  This podcast is created and produced by iamreasonable.com, and I’m your host, C. J. Sand.

In this week’s episode we’re going to take a look at a malady running rampant in our society.  No, I’m not talking about the Corona Virus, the affliction I’m talking about is something much more common.  It’s something I call the  “Oh poor me” syndrome.

As human beings we all feel sorry for ourselves now and again . . . OK, sometimes a lot more often than just every now and again.  I call it the “Oh Poor Me” syndrome.  I sit around and feel sorry for myself, wondering how I ever got myself into this mess, and also wondering why things like this only happen to me.  But I know in my heart that we all have disappointing, frustrating and annoying things in our lives.  Things that other people don’t really know about.  Things that other people don’t really care about.  Whether it’s our family, or friends, our work, or circumstances that beyond our control, we all have struggles that no one else really knows or cares about.  Most of us suffer these little frustrations in silence, leading to what Thoreau called “living lives of quiet desperation”.  Then again, some of us aren’t so silent about it.  It’s easy to point out the ones who can’t suffer in silence, since they are so busy telling everyone they know about every little problem.  You know who those people are, and it’s usually someone you might try to avoid.

  But usually it’s just us, all by ourselves.  We think, “Oh poor me!  How am I supposed to put up with this?  How am I ever going to become the amazing person I’m supposed to be when it seems as if all the fates are working against me?  How am I supposed to fly with the eagles when I am surrounded by turkeys?

But you know what?  I think almost everyone on earth feels the same way.  Now, I haven’t actually spoken with everyone on earth, but those that I have spoken to seem to back up my point.  Kings or peasants; rich or poor; famous or common.  We all have bad stuff in our lives and have the tendency to sit around thinking, “Oh poor me”.  

So how does this happen?  For us to think that we’re the only ones with problems, and everyone else is just fine.  It seems to me that we might just have ourselves to blame for this one.  Most of this comes down to how we present ourselves to other people when we interact with them in the world.  They ask us how we’re doing and we quickly reply “just fine” or “great”, even if things with us are far from “fine’ or “great”.  Now I know that we don’t want to be gloomy around other people, but this knee-jerk response is part of the problem.  It gives people the impression that they are the only ones who have rotten things going on in their lives right now.  When we ask other people how they are doing and all we ever get is “just fine” and “great” then we’re the ones who start feeling like the big losers, because we’re not “just fine” or even close to “great”, but evidently everyone else is.  I think most of us do the same thing on social media.  If you look at most people’s homepage, it tells a story of happiness, amazing trips, delicious food, and loving, caring friends and family.  For all we know, their whole lives could be coming apart at the seams, but we’d never know by looking at their social media page.

This whole subject reminds me of a story I heard when I was a kid.  The story went something like this.  There was a man who was told he could put all of his problems in a wheelbarrow and he could take them to the center of town and dump them out for everyone else to see.  Every person in the town would be asked to do the same thing, so that all of their problems would end up in one big pile all together.  The catch was that they could leave their problems behind, they would have to pick up the problems of someone else and take them back home as their own. Well, when the man got to the center of town and got ready to dump out his problems, he took a good, long look at the problems that were being dumped alongside his own.  What he saw dismayed him.  Up until this point, he had supposed that his neighbors didn’t have a problem in the world.  But now, all of the unhappy families, the horrible sicknesses, the pain and the suffering that was being laid out in front of him, well it shocked him to his core.  After contemplating what he saw, the man turned his wheelbarrow around and went back home with his own problems, happy that they were all he had to deal with.

So, what am I trying to say here?  I have to be honest, I don’t know what the answer is to this one.  For myself, I know I don’t want to turn into some miserable whiner, wearing my heart on my sleeve and boring everyone I know out of their minds with my problems.  Then again, I don’t want to keep all of my feelings and problems to myself, bottling them up inside thinking “Oh poor me”, because I know that isn’t good for either my physical or mental health, on top of making other people think that they’re the only ones who ever have problems.   I guess the best we can do is to try and find a balance between how much we share and how much we keep to ourselves.  And living a life that works toward that kind of balance . . . well, that “Sounds Reasonable To Me”!

Thank you for listening. “Sounds Reasonable To Me” is an iamreasonable.com production.

Iamreasonable.com.  Working for a more Reasonable tomorrow.