Giants with muddy feet

When it comes to inner conflicts, one of the most salient is the apparent contradiction between our repeated need to feel human empathy and the social expectation to always show our best selves. As I pointed out some weeks ago, hardship are an intrinsic part of life because all living systems tend to expand their scope (habitat, diet, sexual mates) as long as they do not find resistance, and it is this hardship, the competition among actors, what sets the final location of the equilibrium boundary. This metaphor reflects pretty well the concept of "comfort zone", these parts of our life where we are indisputably competent, feel safe and have a clear outlook for the future, but as soon as we venture outside, or even near the edge, of our domains the risk increases greatly and the comfort plummets.

Unfortunately, there a lot of people who do not have any reasonable comfort zone because the circumstances in their life happen to be harrowing, so their life is a constant toil, trying to rise above the water level to get some air. This can be due to a number of causes, from unemployment, loneliness, poverty, addictions, family situation, many of which are extremely difficult to overcome by sheer strength. However, each one of us has a different standard for how to deal with such grievances: some people do not have any problem asking for help whenever they reasonably believe that it can improve the situation; others are ready to seek the comfort of their family or their closest friends, but would be reluctant to let their suffering be known beyond those circles; and the most determined will insist on pulling themselves up by their own strength, potentially not admitting their weakness even to friends, parents, siblings or spouses.

Photo: PickPik

In some parts of the Western world, particular those linked to the Calvinist tradition, hardship has often been interpreted as an indication that the affected person is not among those predestined to salvation by God, with the inevitable consequence that many people end up hiding their hardships to avoid social defacement. But, as I mentioned above, this makes a recovery even less likely, so it is easy to see these well intended believers spiral down, trying to keep a smiley face while going through a very dire situation in a hopeless hope that it will turn up at some point. This is precisely the phenomenon that we all witness in social networks like Facebook and Instagram, which depict the glory of everybody's life without giving a single hint that anything could be less than rosy behind the scenes.

In that sense, tabloid magazines, such as People or Star, have found a fairly well-tuned balance: while a big majority of their content deals with the fortune and luxury of the rich and famous, which we can only admire by craning our neck all the way up, they also publish pieces about tragedy, disease and unhappiness, which points out that they are also human beings and are still plagued by (some of) the same ailments that we all suffer. The news this week about the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates is just another example that, even if they seem to be giants, their feet are still in the mud like everybody else's. The grief is much easier when you have billions in the bank, but still breaking up a marriage is always hard.

In the end, we only have one shot at life and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Asking for help does not have to be a permanent blemish and failure is not a sentence to eternal damnation, because even the best of the best, those who seem to have reached the peak of the humanly attainable, can stumble and demonstrate that they are giants with muddy feet. Have a nice evening.