What People Who Live Down in a Hole Get Wrong About the Misery of Life

The billionaires will try to shut me down. Your support helps!Hello Friends,Everybody makes the wrong assumption about people living in squalor and misery. This is because so many people, particularly the people in the United States of America, have always had a great deal of privilege.If you come across somebody who is clearly struggling and offer to help, you assume they will gratefully agree.That's not what happens.Quite often, if you come across somebody living in misery and say, “Can I help you?” They respond with, “No, I'm fine.”I'm not talking about homeless people living on the street holding up cardboard signs asking for change. There is a whole spectrum of suffering in the world. Some people suffer because they live on land that's been in their family for three generations, and they know that today it's owned by the bank.They lost it, on their watch. They're suffering, but they have too much pride to ever ask for help.What people don't know about individuals living a life of misery, is that you find a way to survive. Your perspective on the world changes. You start to develop an unreasonable fixation and even a sense of affection for bizarre things.To give yourself a concept of what I'm talking about, you could go camping. Camping strips you of all the material comforts that you enjoy without even thinking about them. In your regular life, when you're hungry you go to the fridge. If you want to open a can, you get the can opener from a drawer. You can sleepwalk through life.But if you're camping and you don't have a can opener, it requires your full attention to solve the problem. Maybe you remember that the little knife that hangs on your key chain has a small can opener tool. All of a sudden, that item that you casually threw on the table without a second thought day after day, becomes a critical part of your existence. You start to appreciate it. You start to even love it.It's impossible to comprehend this unless you've been in a situation where you've become dependent on that can opener.This unhealthy form of attachment manifests in a number of different ways. If you live a life of misery, you start to develop all sorts of strange affections for any item that might bring you even the slightest reprieve. Your life becomes a bizarre concoction of love and resentment. Your emotions are unhealthy because you've been denied the basic comforts others enjoy without even thinking about them.I think the divide that's currently apparent in the United States of America fits this model. There are groups of people who have taken advantage of education. They've studied. They've achieved things. They've built prosperous careers.Then there's another group that's left to wallow in the dirt.The educated group approaches those in the dirt and says, “Come with us, we can help you.”The people in the dirt, who have known nothing else their entire lives and who have developed many unhealthy attachments, sneer and say, “What? You think you're better than me? You can go straight to Hell!”Hurt, the educated people retreat.Meanwhile, the folk down in the dirt go back to pounding cans open with rocks because they broke their can opener years ago.That's the United States.Most people are either in the educated group, or the group down in the dirt. You'd assume there'd be a section of our population consisting of people that have gone from one group to the other. However, that almost doesn't exist. After all, why should somebody in the educated group drop down to wallow in the dirt?They might go and experience it for a weekend, but soon they'll be back because once you've known enlightenment you can't give it up.The greater chance is that there would be people in the dirt who would climb out and join the educated group on their own.There are almost no people who do that.Why?Because it's nearly impossible to make that climb. There is no pathway. There is no ladder. Once you're down in the dirt, that's where you're going to stay.I grew up on a farm in a rural area in Northern Wisconsin. I made it off that farm, but I haven't completed the journey from shadow to enlightenment. Even now, I'll pause and pick up a rock with a sharp edge because I think it might be useful for opening up a can. I fully recognize I'm part savage. I have a teaching certificate, but I don't integrate well with a teaching community.My wife, on the other hand, merges with that community effortlessly. But I have all these indoctrinated bad habits that come to the surface when I'm pressed. You can't spend twenty years down in a hole and expect to erase all the things that allowed you to survive during that time.This is the problem that confronts the United States. How do we convince people that it's time to leave the hole behind? You'd think it would be easy. It's dark down there. It's miserable. It's cold. You suffer. There's no color. There's no joy. Why do people insist on staying down there?When enlightened people come along and say, “Come on up to the surface. There's joy and laughter and color and song! Come join us! It's better up here.” The people down in the hole think they're lying. They don't have the context to understand that any of that is possible.“How could that be?” they think. “The only color is gray. The only song is the sound of shifting stone. The only comfort that exists comes from returning to the dirt.”They don't even dream of good things, because those aren't things they've ever seen.Today, the dirt dwellers are chortling because they've selected the individuals who hold all the seats of power in our society. The enlightened people look at what's happening and recoil in terror.“Why would they do this? Why would they destroy everything that's good and beautiful in the world?”The answer is simple, the dirt dwellers don't have a context to fully comprehend the misery they're inflicting on humanity.I'm not saying this as a justification. I've cut out all the dirt dwellers from my life. I don't want them near me. I don't want their awful, toxic ideas contaminating my children. I don't want them to pull my kids down into a hole.I've crawled out of that hole. I'm still crawling. Other people are born on the surface, and I'll spend my whole life making that journey. That's fine. That's better than wallowing in misery forever.But I don't think the people who are on the surface can ever really understand the mentality of a dirt dweller. Dirt dwellers are awful, cruel, spiteful and malicious people. It's easy to take them at their word and turn away when they say “We're fine! We don't need your help. Get out of here.”Well, clearly they're not fine because they support sex offenders and criminals for positions of power. There's something wrong in their minds. They're broken. We can't take them at their word when they say they're fine.If social services finds a child living in squalor, the child is likely to resist leaving. “I don't want to go, this is all I've ever known.”We don't listen to them and say, “Okay, if you're good, see you later.”We have a responsibility to help people who are suffering even if they don't want to recognize that they are suffering. I'm not justifying the evil acts that people who are suffering do. All I'm trying to provide is a framework for how to fix this problem.How do we create a society where we don't have dirt dwellers that vote monsters into positions of power?It starts with the understanding that these individuals do not have a valid viewpoint. They have only had access to a limit fragment of what's possible in life. They're trying to change the curriculum of public education to teach kids how to open cans with rocks. They're doing this because they sincerely think it's important. But the reality is that we live in a world where there are can openers. We have access to all sorts of comforts the dirt dwellers can't comprehend.Our job isn't to listen to them.Our job is to educate them. If we cannot reach the adults, we have a responsibility to at least save the children from that mindset of misery.When people living down in a hole say they're fine, don't listen to them. You have to help them. You know more than they do. But you can't lord that knowledge over them. After all, it's only a quirk of fate that put you at the top and left them down there. Until we're all saved, none of us are.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe