"Maybe there's nothing wrong with you- maybe it's just the system"

A brief commentary on a shallow, terrible, corrosive way of looking at life

He says: “A word for those who (like me) might need it.”

Actually, nobody needs messages like this.

Not a single person in the entire world.

The only purpose of messages like these is to serve as moral warnings: warnings about what not to do or think.

To be sure, it’s good to recognize where and how the current system is flawed.

But only because first and foremost such recognition enables a person to grasp where and how they can adapt—and where and how they will maintain their integrity.

To recognize that a system is flawed and does not accommodate us shouldn’t be comforting.

Not at all.

It should spur us to think about how we can change.

We can change. We are not stuck being the same person we were last year or the year before.

Anyone who has grown as an adult knows that.

And while personal change can provide us with some optimism…

It’s also downright hard.

Change is the opposite of comforting.

It consists in recognizing that we fall short of what we want to be.

And then, it consists in pushing ourselves forward, inhabiting that uncomfortable awareness, toward something better.

Really, to call change “uncomfortable” is a euphemism. If we’re honest, big changes are often downright painful.

So to find comfort in a message that says we are completely at odds with our environment…

That it is undermining our thriving, and we should find comfort in that?!

This is a psychological—even moral—illness.

It is a refusal to acknowledge the need for change even when it slaps us in the face.

And then to celebrate that refusal—to be comforted by it!

To be encouraged to be comforted by committing ourselves to passivity!

What could be worse for human wellbeing?

While it might make people feel better in the short run to “blame the system” and end there…

We have personal control only over our own selves. No other person. No system.

Just ourselves.

If we frame everything as “the system’s fault”, we surrender our capacity to overcome, grow, adapt, and thrive.

What we gain in short-term comfort, we relinquish in our agency.

What we gain in a moment’s reprieve, we relinquish in losing a part of our humanity and our soul.

When we see messages like these, we should say to our children:

“Children, these messages are like drugs: what they provide in short term comfort, they will rob you of in your long-term well-being. The people who have created them are unwell people. And by being unwell, they have also chosen to be bad, for, as they blame others for their own unwillingness to do the hard work of personal growth, they will inflict their pain upon others through thinking and behavior that reflects that lack of growth.”

We should teach our children that both short-term comfort—and the foundation of a great deal of evil behavior—is found in messages like these.

We should teach our children to feel sorry for those who find comfort in them.

This is not to say that we should never try to change flawed systems. We should.

But change always starts in ourselves first.

The world changes when we change—and when the changes we make in ourselves are then externalized, out into the world.

Lose sight of that, and we lose sight of not just only great power as a human being in a flawed world…

But also of our greatest power in making the world a better place too.