There I was, feeling cheated, frustrated, unappreciated, old and irrelevant. Have you ever felt like that? Feeling like the score at halftime is Scammers, Drama-Pushers, and Criminals 28, Honest Hard Workers 3?
If you’ve been following along in the first two “Bad Baby” posts, you’ll know I’ve been suffering 5 frustrating thoughts due to the ever-widening wealth gap in the world today, coupled with an insane cultural shift away from what was once considered normal. Here are those thoughts in review:
Life isn’t fair and it sucks.
It’s extremely difficult to struggle and work all your life, seeing very little results for your efforts, when other folks are simply handed a high-paying career on a silver platter.
The rules have changed in our Brave New World. Hard work is now for suckers and the poor, while the real money lies in criminality, creating drama, and rubbing elbows with the well connected.
I feel disconnected from the new world and all alone in this line of thinking.
Knowing that there is a large percentage of people who feel the same isolation (ironically) I feel a revolution brewing.
There. You’re all caught up. I hope you’re not suffering from these thoughts like me, but if you are, this final post of the series is for you.
The important thing to realize about these thoughts is that they’re all half true which makes them extremely dangerous. It’s so easy to focus solely on the half that’s true and miss the half that’s false.
Let’s break down these thoughts one at a time and measure them against reality.
Life isn’t fair. Yup. Correct. If someone, somewhere in your life ever told you life was fair, they were stupid, a liar, or both. Life is not fair. Undeserving people sometimes get promoted. Innocent people sometimes die young and senselessly. This is the nature of the game you find yourself in. However, sometimes life isn’t fair in your favor. If you were born and raised a healthy person in the U.S. or someplace similar, you hit the lottery. Life has been unfair in your favor. You could have been born in Congo and forced to mine for cobalt as a 7-year-old so that rich people like you and I can have access to cheap cell phones. You could have been born with multiple handicaps, or some debilitating life condition. I could go on, but you get the gist. Travel the world and see how the average person lives in the Middle East, in Africa, Central America, in Southeast Asia. If you are an average western citizen who has been bestowed average health, you are disqualified from EVER complaining about life’s unfairness.
It’s difficult to struggle all your life just to barely get by while watching others easily succeed and grow rich. This is tricky. We are intimately acquainted with our own daily challenges and only see the headlines in other people’s lives. We see what others want us to see. It all appears easy from the outside looking in. In Bhad Bhaby’s case, she most likely has suffered sexual or physical abuse at some point in her young life. She shows all the signs: imagining you’re someone else, anger, manipulation of others, criminality, an over-sexualized personality… Her father left the family when she was a child and has remained distant, her mother’s a “piece of work” in her own right, Danielle claims to have been abused at the ranch Dr. Phil sent her to, she was used by Dr. Phil to garner ratings, used by the music industry, and now is suffering abuse from her spouse if media reports are to be believed. Do we really want her life? I would take a guess that Danielle is
mostly unhappy amid her pile of golden riches, and would trade all of it for some peace of mind and a shot at real happiness. I think the trick is to enjoy the good parts of your own life, keep your head down, keep battling your own battles, and stop comparing yourself to others, especially those who are living unreal lives in an unreal social media world.
The rules have seemingly changed for making money. True. You can either continue on in your old-world ways, manufacturing wagon wheels and harpoons for a market that no longer exists, or you can change with the times and learn to prosper. Bhad Bhabie learned to use platforms that large groups of other people worked their ass off to develop and grow. It’s called leverage. That particular money-making technique is as old as the world is. She used Dr. Phil’s show to garner interest in her life, leveraging the power of TV. She used her Facebook and Instagram accounts to keep the interest going and grow it further, leveraging the power of social media. She used movers and shakers in the music industry to further her career (and she actually has a little bit of talent for it). Now she’s using the hugely popular platform of Only Fans to leverage her bank account to new heights. This is the way to make money in the New World; use platforms that others have built to launch yourself to heights you could never dream of alone. Come to think of it, that’s the way it’s always been done. The poor work with their hands. The rich use their heads. The massively wealthy use their head to leverage the results of poor people using their hands. You can either curse the way the world has been for thousands of years, or you can learn the system and ride the wave. Bregoli’s bank account attests to the fact that she’s a great social surfer.
The world IS changing rapidly. It gets frustrating trying to keep up. You have two choices. Isolate yourself amid the graveyard of the way things used to be or learn the best you can to make changes with the technology while holding on to timeless principles such as honesty, friendship, hard work, love, and networking with others to leverage whatever skill you currently possess. Those who choose to remain in yesteryear will grow smaller and more isolated as their losses mount. The only way to prosper is to add new people and ideas to your life to maintain your happiness. Like a healthy tree, make the effort to add new branches to your life as you lose the old ones to time and catastrophic storms. Woah, that’s deep.
Is there a revolution brewing? I hope so. I’d like to see a world where money isn’t the be-all-end-all of existence. I’d like to see a world where everyone is valued for their contributions in a more equal fashion. Today, those 1% who have a specific and special set of skills seemingly gain the world (financially). The 99% who have different, but just as valuable, skills are left out of the picture. Not everyone can fit atop wealth’s mountain. It would be great to see the steep curve at the top flattened a bit, however, to include more of us people down here at the bottom. Strangely enough, it’s the majority of us at the bottom who hold the power to change this unfair aspect of our world. Less energy spent on TV watching, social media, pop music, and OnlyFans, and more engagement in our political, business, and cultural society would be a great first step toward achieving the vision of a better world for you and me. Until then, it’s Bhad Bhabie’s world. The rest of us are just watching it.
See you next time,
Doc Dan
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