"It's so easy for them!"
Sep. 24th, 2025 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jim_pComing back to the dreamwidth thang. I keep doing this every so often when I get disgusted with the Big Social Media... then I drift away because the Book of Face is really good about feeding content to keep one hooked and just enough of my friends are over there that I like to stay in touch. Then something happens to my feed and suddenly it's all ads and invitations to follow people and communities I've never heard of before and scams and ads and scam ads and...
Anyhow, this is a half-baked musing about perceptions of how easy/hard people have it. This thought started in my head when someone in another post mentioned one of those folks who are constantly complaining about "those people". Specifically, how all those people on welfare and assistance "have it so easy" while he has to work hard for everything he has. A lot of these people have a really distorted perspective on what it's like to deal with public assistance; somewhere in their cavernous skulls they have an image of a brown-skinned immigrant (is there any other kind?) just casually waltzing into the welfare office and walking out with armloads of goodies, like a cross between an Oprah show and Christmas morning.
It's easy to just dismiss these people as being angry and ignorant, but I think this is another version of the social media phenomenon where we extrapolate from glimpses into other people's lives. As someone said, all you see of your social media peeps is their highlight reels, whereas you have experienced every flub, misstep, and outtake in your own life. No wonder it feels like a struggle for you and they have it so easy.
It doesn't help that media of various types encourages this. I turn on the TV and see a show about Kathy's Cookies who started on their kitchen table and before you know it Kathy has six bakeries, a hundred employees, and her cookies are being sold in twelve states. Easy, right? Anybody could do it. Then I looked at my own struggling business that did well to break even every month and wondered how I could make it to easy street the way "everyone else" obviously had.
I poked fun at this on Reddit recently as well: I mentioned the type of Linkedin influencer who says "I vibe-coded my SaaS on the flight from London to Dubai and now I'm up to $50K a month in revenue!" I asked them how I could get in on this because they made it look so easy...
Not necessarily going anywhere with this other than musing. But if someone knows how I can become one of these "overnight success stories" I'm all ears.
Anyhow, this is a half-baked musing about perceptions of how easy/hard people have it. This thought started in my head when someone in another post mentioned one of those folks who are constantly complaining about "those people". Specifically, how all those people on welfare and assistance "have it so easy" while he has to work hard for everything he has. A lot of these people have a really distorted perspective on what it's like to deal with public assistance; somewhere in their cavernous skulls they have an image of a brown-skinned immigrant (is there any other kind?) just casually waltzing into the welfare office and walking out with armloads of goodies, like a cross between an Oprah show and Christmas morning.
It's easy to just dismiss these people as being angry and ignorant, but I think this is another version of the social media phenomenon where we extrapolate from glimpses into other people's lives. As someone said, all you see of your social media peeps is their highlight reels, whereas you have experienced every flub, misstep, and outtake in your own life. No wonder it feels like a struggle for you and they have it so easy.
It doesn't help that media of various types encourages this. I turn on the TV and see a show about Kathy's Cookies who started on their kitchen table and before you know it Kathy has six bakeries, a hundred employees, and her cookies are being sold in twelve states. Easy, right? Anybody could do it. Then I looked at my own struggling business that did well to break even every month and wondered how I could make it to easy street the way "everyone else" obviously had.
I poked fun at this on Reddit recently as well: I mentioned the type of Linkedin influencer who says "I vibe-coded my SaaS on the flight from London to Dubai and now I'm up to $50K a month in revenue!" I asked them how I could get in on this because they made it look so easy...
Not necessarily going anywhere with this other than musing. But if someone knows how I can become one of these "overnight success stories" I'm all ears.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 02:28 pm (UTC)