Since the dawn of time, people have come up with new ways to make the world a worse place to live in socially. It gets so bad sometimes that it seems like the best way to avoid all of it is to live in a cave far away from any other living person. The reasons for this are many: people are stupid, people are animals, people won’t learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others. It’s not a single group or sect that’s to blame; the finger is pointing at everybody. People suck and here’s why.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “hurt people hurt people”. It means those who have been hurt by others tend to hurt others in return. It’s the chain reaction of “misery loves company”. It’s far easier to drag people down with us than to find a way out of our mess.
Spite plays a big part here. Spite is not just an ugly thing, it’s a poison, an infected memory that stings again and again. “That’s what you get, (insert your favorite insult here)!” Often these same people will play the victim card and blame others for their problems. “I’m a good person,” they say. “I’ve been wronged and that makes it ok when I do it back to them.” There is a difference between the need for justice and the need to forgive and forget.
A far too common trait among people is apathy. I know plenty of people who are willing to admit that they suffer from their lack of drive and still they do nothing about it. The cycle of self-defeat is a vile one. It is worse when people have easily solvable problems, but don’t do anything about them. They fail to acknowledge their destructive habits and so hurt themselves and others.
Then there are those who intentionally make people miserable. The bullies, the meanies, those in power who abuse it for kicks, the critics who destroy others’ self-esteem, they all lack one thing in common: courtesy. Common frickin’ courtesy. Courtesy is the oil that keeps the gears from grinding together. Conversely, courtesy is taken for granted, even though it shouldn’t be. It’s too essential a thing to ignore.
Education makes room for problem-solving. Lack of education means lack of problem-solving power, which makes that person a burden on everyone else. Those who are unresponsive to feedback, who don’t or refuse to learn from their past are screwed, plain and simple. Those who rely on assumptions and make their decisions based upon them are also likely to fall into trouble. It should be common wisdom that facts are always better than assumptions, but it sadly isn’t.
But the big one, the huge blunder that a person lacking mental facility falls into is being easily influenced or unfocused because of outside influences. AKA: people who don’t pay attention to obvious things or are distracted because of others on a constant basis, people who “go with the flow” and do incredibly stupid stuff, people who won’t think for themselves and play “follow the leader” with the wrong crowd. This is by far the greatest idiocy: to hide inside the crowd and say “everyone else was doing it.”
The last section of sucking that I’ll point out is the illusion of uniqueness. To most people I know, it is obvious that riches, possession and connections do not automatically make a person better. Mistaking “wants” as “needs” is a mistake often made here. There is another side to uniqueness: the sin of super-optimism, the subtle idea that “I’m invincible and therefore I can’t get hurt.” Perhaps you’ve heard it or said it before. “I won’t get pregnant. It won’t happen.” “I can drink and drive just fine. It’s no big deal.” “Let’s play with homemade bombs! It’ll be fun!” Unfortunately, there are a few laws that people cannot break: the laws of physics and Murphy’s Law. For those of you who haven’t heard of Murphy’s Law, read this out loud, so that somebody about to do something horrendously dumb might hear you: “anything that can go wrong, WILL go wrong”.
Chances are you fell into one of the categories of suck I listed. Some of the dumb things I do fall under a few of them. It stands to wonder the stubbornness of mankind and the ingenuity of fools. People may suck, but they also have free will, which they may or may not use to better themselves. To quote Gandhi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” If people seek to make themselves better, the world will ultimately be better.
