I was never able to bond with my classmates or teachers from my school, and the primary reason involving economic hierarchy. I was that forgettable weirdo, who would be the butt of laughter, and that was how I used to cope with classmates I could not relate to, and hated dearly - by creating a joker persona, and lying to them with a mask hiding my true feelings for them. Well, I don’t follow anyone on any social media for my own sanity - well, I don’t have any social media account, to begin with. No Facebook, no WhatsApp, no Insta, no Snapchat, no Discord, no Twitter - basically, none of those. Just Lemmy and a Gmail account, that’s it.
Today, out of sheer curiosity, I was reminded of a person from my senior grade, and I tried looking about them. And since I don’t have an account, I tried to stalk them on Google - which is almost useless, because unless you’re famous, or have a blog written for you, you’ll not show up. Except that there was a blog written in one of those Ivy university pages, with their picture, and how they’ve got VCs sucking their toes.
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried this stupid experiment, because this hit me hard like a truck, and I don’t think I’ll be able to recover from this. For context, they are an American citizen, who were also my classmate in one of the senior schools in Mumbai. They got into a really good university. They have completed multiple cool internships a few years ago, in big MNCs. They have co-founded a cool AI company associated with the service industry (the same that will steal low-skill-requirement, crappy-wage jobs), and partnered with other rich tech-nepo-babies from Ivy leagues, and life seems to be just great for them in the expensive part of California - which, coincidentally, their Indian-origin dad and mom bought multiple houses and other properties for them way back around the 90s, again, in Bay Area. So in a way, they’re doing insanely well than the average American.
But me? I’ve graduated a crappy, no-name uni. I’ve quit my crappy exploitative “intern-shit” last January after barely working for three months, and remained unemployed to this day. I’ve yet to find an “internship”, because sure as hell they’ll not be hiring someone like me in a congested IT market like India, without any proof of experience. Don’t have any ancestral property, or that dead, rich uncle from Switzerland. I’ve tried my best for an entire year, only for the dominoes to crumble down all over me. In a few days, I’ll be 24, and I’m pretty sure this feeling of dread, failure and shame will worsen exponentially.
FML, FR.
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comrade, your hate is not pure. do not envy the finance ghoul, pity their vacuous and transactional inner lives. it’s not your personal failure that you weren’t born as privileged, there is no shame or failure on your part, the shame and failure belongs to the economic/social systems. much more shameful to have the comfort of choice, and still choose to exploit and commodify for personal gain. your continued survival is revenge against a broken world.
Kill the bourgeois striver inside your head. If you have a good life then that is enough. Always needing more and more and more and more is a mental disorder powering our planet’s destruction, not something to be valorized.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” was a definitive Boomer obsession that contributed significantly to the planet-burning life-poisoning suburban hellscapes all across the United States today.
Fuck keeping up with the Joneses. Finding happiness and satisfaction as best one can is better anyway, and far more possible than whatever rat race attempt to catch up you’d get into while giving into the envy that those same affluent assholes want you to feel.
Their success is false. they were handed everything and are only serving themselves. You were handed nothing yet you still persevere. you are already better than they could ever be
This is the truth and Im so glad somebody said it
On top of the voices of sanity here reminding you this is a matter of privilege, and you shouldn’t envy these ghouls, you’re not even 24! You have a world of life changing directions ahead of you, and fortunes can swap in a matter of days.
I think yours is a natural reaction, but I question its usefulness or correctness in the face of a whimsical reality.
I did this recently, saw a classmate graduating with her… 5th? degree, and I didn’t even finish one. I don’t envy her though, jetting around the country with no morals and no roots. friends that can only afford to visit your bougie locale once every few years. She wasn’t the nicest person in school, and unless she’s changed drastically I don’t think she’s going to have a lot of close friendships… ever? It does help that I’m getting by just fine in my field of choice and could probably go back to school if I wanted, but that was all just luck.
Maybe she feels fulfilled. Maybe she’ll take a turn and do something positive for the world and not ghoul-adjacent, but it would be a pretty big trajectory shift. Being successful doesn’t make them happy. You will find a way to get by, hopefully thrive, and you can take pride in not being a bloodsucking ghoul like your rich classmate. You didn’t fail, the system is just set up to elevate the children of the rich to unspeakable places.
There’s no such thing as a “cool” AI company
“Cool” in the relative sense that Indian boomers have this FUD for their children getting into FAANGM. Personally, I despise the AI-hype, and how it is being used to cut-costs to satiate the greed of vulture capitalists.
You’re comparing yourself to a person who sounds like they were born to significantly more wealth and privilege than you were. More than most humans on earth, frankly. A regular human comparing their life to a rich person’s is like a difference of species.
I think it’s important to emphasize this otherness between the rich and the rest of us. They’re a tiny minority of comfortable people living with far more than they or several generations of their family could ever need, all to live this alien lifestyle at the expense of the rest of us, and the planet itself.
You shouldn’t envy these people, both because it does nothing but make you feel shitty and give them a sort of spiritual victory over you, but also because envy implies a part of you that wants that life for yourself, when you shouldn’t want it to exist at all because of the harm it causes to everyone and everything else.
yeah multiple properties in the bay area? holy shit this person would be top 0.1% in the us, let alone india. born too rich to fail.
I made fairly good grades in school and everybody thought I would do well in college and life.
I’m a college dropout who lives in a house that is falling apart, doesn’t have working showers or hot water, and make juuuussstt about 1000 bucks a month.
Impossible advice to heed and I wish I could myself but comparing yourself to others is the road to misery. We all make tradeoffs and your classmate could very well be miserable.
ESPECIALLY when it comes to work shit, I probably need therapy to address this to be honest, but it just doesn’t matter at all. At the end of your life nobody will remember you for the money you made but for the lives that you touched.
I’m high and I thought I was on blind for a second lol
In a few days, I’ll be 24
Crazy twist in this ride of a post.
