We tend to think of first world problems as minor inconveniences. If you complain about anything these days you send up hearing a litany from someone about all the people in the world who have it so much worse than you.
Have a sense of perspective (as if Douglas Addams didn’t warn us about that), be grateful. The man with no shoes cried until he met a man with no feet. And so on.
All very true valid points.
And that’s the problem.
Because we do recognize the truth in these platitudes, we know we can’t really argue with them. Which unfortunately makes them very easy to weaponize.
Like all toxic positivity, what once started out as a well intentioned way of helping people stay grounded has now become a cudgel used to shame people into silence if they speak up about issues that others would rather ignore.
But that doesn’t make those issues go away.
Invalidating someone’s pain doesn’t make it stop hurting. All it does is add layers of guilt and confusion that just make an already difficult situation even harder.
No one gains anything from that.
You can pretend that you don’t hear the ice cracking all you want, but it won’t stop you from falling into the lake with the rest of us.
First world problems aren’t always as frivolous as getting the wrong sauce in the drive through. (Although for someone with allergies if that wrong sauce contaminated the entire meal they just paid $20 for and now they can’t eat it, I don’t think we should be telling them to shrug it off and stop whining. And I don’t think we should make them feel bad for asking for it to be made right, either.)
I’m not saying people don’t sometimes go out of their way to make issues where there shouldn’t be one- Karens are a thing- but many things that are brushed aside as “first world problems” are actually systematic failures that expose weaknesses in the infrastructure that’s holding up our first world. And it’s the most vulnerable members of our population that fall in the gap.
There’s no place this is more clearly demonstrated than when someone posts online about a problem with a grocery or food delivery. The comments roll in, one after the other “just go get it yourself then. Be glad someone was even willing to bring it to you.”
It never once occurs to a single one of them that if the person could have gone to get the item themselves they probably would have.
The first world problem is not the screwed up grocery order. The first world problem is that our city planning relies way too much on cars even though not everyone drives, and we don’t fund or support adequate public transportation or walkable cities.
But it’s easier to call someone lazy than it is to untangle the mess we’ve made of our civil engineering so we leave a nasty comment and scroll on to the next piece of ragebait.
Not your problem. Bootstraps, snowflake, “pErSoNaL rEsPoNsIbIltY”, blue hair, nose ring, and so on and so on.
Well, what about the personal responsibility of the person who agreed to do a job, took the money, and then either didn’t follow through or did the job so badly it has to be done again? You wouldn’t accept that kind of work from a plumber or a mechanic, so why should any other service be different?
Someone paid for that delivery and the delivery driver didn’t hold up their end of the bargain, so now the person who paid them is out both time and money… But somehow it’s wrong to hold the driver accountable for that?
Does that really make sense to you?
And what about the service itself that’s exploiting both customers and drivers while the executives play both sides against the middle?
Awhile back I got an order delivered by a guy who did not speak a single word of English and he was so confused. He had multiple orders to deliver and had somehow got them all jumbled and was now standing on my porch with 2 packs of disposable plastic storage containers and mop head instead of my bag of dog food.
Well you should have gone to the store yourself. You shouldn’t be buying stuff from that place anyway, he shouldn’t be doing that job if he doesn’t know the language. This is why we need immigration reform…
All of which once again miss the point. The problem isn’t the language barrier. The problem is that the store chain in question does billions in sales every year and could easily afford to make their delivery driver app available in other languages, they just choose not to because having it only in English puts more money in their pockets at the expense of everyone else.
And that right there sums up the basic gist of it all. The first world problems aren’t the oversights and inconveniences. The first world problems are the greed, the selfishness, the lack of empathy or compassion and other basic decencies that weave society together. Without these threads to bind us, society unravels around us. And it's doing so at an alarming speed.
We've got to do better while we still can.
Image Credit: My own original digital photograph that I took myself