Have you ever been talking with someone who is many years older than you, and they said something along the lines of “you youngins’ have everything easy. Back in my day, we used to walk into the 4th dimension to get to school”?
Well, it’s an exaggeration. But something we take for granted today is how easy we have it compared to our elders and ancestors. And I don’t just mean living without a phone, because some of us could accomplish that. I want you to think back to medieval times, before the 1300s, when they didn’t even have personal toilets. Actually, they still didn’t have those in the 1800s and had to use cesspools and outhouses.
This is not to gross you out, but to remind you that even the basic luxury of having a house was something people didn’t have back then. In the 2nd Industrial Revolution, which was only about 100 years ago in the late 19th and early 20th century, workers lived in tenements. These small apartments often housed multiple people and were about as big as a modern-day bathroom. Actually, some modern-day bathrooms are bigger than those tenements. Even the most basic needs for life that we own today used to be in scarce supply. Food used to be an everyday struggle as you spend your entire salary. You worked 7 days a week before Henry Ford popularized the weekend. Most likely you also had to run a family, and if your salary wasn’t enough, you had to make your family work as well.
All this is to say that life was never easy, even 100 years ago. Humanity has existed for far longer than that–around 300,000 years. This means that wherever you came from, the large majority of your bloodline has had it much harder than you.
The issue with this is instant gratification. For most of humanity, people have had to wait for a long time to get a sense of happiness. However, this may cause problems in today’s society because instant gratification is the norm. Many years ago, instant gratification was not as prevalent, and while it was still certainly there, it wasn’t an integral part of society. When you were bored, you could not pull out your phone and access entertainment at any moment. If you wanted to watch a movie, you needed to use DVD’s or you needed to go to the theater to watch a new one.
Instant gratification is not inherently a good thing. Our brains are designed to look for it, but this was useful at a time when you had issues getting basic human needs. At that time, it’s optimal for your brain to seek instant reward because the longer you delay that reward, you will die. But today, in a world where most of us can access basic human needs, the need for immediate satisfaction can be detrimental. It manifests itself in the form of addiction. Gambling, substances, even video games. It can lead us to forget about long term goals and suffer in the future. It also leads to a lot of complaining.
Everyone knows what a spoiled person is. Everyone has their own view of a spoiled person, but a spoiled person is essentially someone who has a much better life relative to you but still complains and isn’t happy. Do these people really deserve bad treatment?
Well, this is due to instant gratification. Because their life has been so easy, when something unexpected happens, they dislike it, even though normal people would see it as a minor inconvenience. And in that regard, we are all spoiled people. We tend to complain about things that others wouldn’t even care about. There are some people in the world right now who struggle for food and water, and yet some of us complain about not being able to get the latest phone.
But my point is, this does not make our complaints pointless. Problems are not all the same, and some are worse than others. But just because one problem is worse than another does not mean that we should ignore it. This means that while some of us are better off than others, we shouldn’t neglect our own problems because they are not as bad.
On the contrary, we also must not blow our own problems out of proportion because they are valid. At the end of the day, while it’s still a valid problem, we shouldn’t treat it the same as other worse problems.
And so, when you have an especially spoiled person, you shouldn’t just tell them to grow up, but instead you should show them the positives of their life and how they should really view the problem. Rather than showing negativity towards every problem, we need to develop a mindset of neutrality. This way, we can properly understand which problems are worse than others. If we have a negative mindset, we will notice every problem. If we have a positive mindset, we might ignore certain issues that can affect us in the future. Instead, if we keep a neutral mindset, we can always figure out which problems we should prioritize over others.
This is what people don’t do. We often tend to assess our priorities wrong and make decisions emotionally, when in reality we should be thinking logically. This is the problem with instant gratification. It’s reliance on the limbic system ignores the part of us that thinks properly, and in turn makes us act in a way we shouldn’t. This is why it is always important to look past your emotions and expectations in order to solve your problems.