Welcome back to the Art and Practice of Victimhood. This week we pick up with the second step. #2: BE PREPARED TO SACRIFICE EVERYTHING.
This step is where we begin to separate the serious and truly committed victims from the wishy-washy types.
For those truly committed to a life of victimhood know it can yours, and will become yours, but not without first paying some costs. The life of a victim demands you give up any of your older, and/or more commonly long held foolish beliefs – the ones that have kept you from truly advancing.
We sometimes carry around what we might best call societal illusions. It’s not your fault for thinking these things as they are taught to many of us throughout our earliest years. Eventually they become ingrained in us and we internalize them. There are, for instance, romantic novels, as well as films, and TV shows, that give us the “happy ever after” notions. What gets conveyed is that all our problems can easily be resolved within a 110 minute movie. These include such misgivings about things like: happiness, success, or peace of mind.
People love to promote these lovely but skewed notions these things are yours for the taking. “Happiness is available for you.” Or “You can have a powerful say in the matter of your life.” There are countless gurus out there selling this kind of magical thinking. Bookstores are filled with self-help books and recipes for success as though is to be done in a cookbook fashion. We victims know better. It’s all a bunch of malarkey.
The simple truth is such things as happiness, or success are elusive and unstable at best. One minute you’re happy, the next minute you’re miserable, or upset, or depressed. Happiness is a very unsteady enterprise. The point is, why would you want to take such a risk? And why do so when you can be unhappy all the time? It just doesn’t make any sense.
The same goes for so-called success. To be successful you have to have a pretty clear idea as to what you deem as successful. Most people don’t know what it would take to feel successful. So what they do is use exterior comparisons. They try to be more successful than somebody else that they see as being successful. Talk about a royal pain!
The other problem with this is even if you do manage to obtain your initial goal you had set out for yourself as what you first deemed as constituting success, once you’ve achieve this goal you are going to soon feel this is not enough.
You can only rest on your laurels for just so long. Discontent will kick in. You’ll start to second guess yourself. You’ll likely over-think things. Then you’re going off to set some newer goals, and will get repeated over and over. The net result is this way of living becomes quite exhausting.
While I’m at it, the very real issue with this illogical approach is that most people really would prefer to seek out certainty in their life. Certainty comes with knowing what to expect and becoming familiar with it. Success around any of these other things that got sold to us as worthwhile are chuck full of uncertainty. They are things we are unfamiliar with. We are, therefore, not used to them. And so the risks involved in trying to become happy or successful – or with any other of those ideas society foolishly promotes – is that there is huge and vast amounts of uncertainty that must come along with them whenever we attempt to achieve them.
There will be unfamiliarity with these states of being so-called happy or successful or whatever. If you are someone who has never or rarely felt happy or successful, to start now will guarantee you to feel incredibly strange – weird even. It will feel as if you do not even deserve to feel this way. You’ll feel conflicted. You may like what is happening white at the same time it will not be comfortable one iota. This isn’t what you bargained for. This sucks.
So why not make things so much simpler? Just go for those things that hold lots certainty. And this is exactly what unhappiness and failure have this going for them. You’re used to these; they’re familiar. The same thing with misery or feeling powerless. You can, instead, rely on being a victim of a system that you can justifiably judge as totally rigged and is designed to make you miserable and feel very shaky.
There are smarter ways to go about living your life. One of the best ways is to drop any of those loftier – misguided – ideas and problematic notions about what you can do with comparison thinking. Instead of using it to try to be more or be better, you can use comparison thinking to your advantage.
If you start to feel happy – which is an unstable and unfamiliar state of being – just start thinking about all those people that have more than you have – more money, or more status, and dwell especially on those people who have way more opportunities than you ever did. Maybe they have a bigger home than you. Use this so you can now mope about in your own home picking out everything – big and small – that are wrong with it. This will do wonders for regaining your negative thinking and negative state of mind.
Maybe they drive a newer or nicer car than you do. Dwell on how poor your car is and before you know it you’ll be in that familiar and very stable state of misery. With a little practice you can jettison out of your mind all of those so-called positive feelings you were maybe starting to have. You’ll readily replace these with things like resentment, jealousy, and some good old fashion poor-me thinking. Nothing can make you feel more miserable faster than by doing this.
Also once you let go of those positive feelings and you see them as nothing more than evasive notions – you’ll be able to focus on the security and certainty that comes from being a victim.
With practice you’ll become much better at committing to a life of safe regret and stable resignation. Consistent despair will be available to you anytime by simply recalling all those things you once foolishly pursued, or had for brief moments and lost soon afterwards. Tell yourself “I’ve tried EVERYTHING” even though you have not. Instead resign yourself to being a victim and feeling helpless. These are the things you can count on to get really good at becoming a victim.
Next week: #3: BLAME YOUR PARENTS