Driven by Discontent
Sean Moore
Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
This isn’t the way things should work.
Do you ever have that feeling? That sense that, however large or small, this one part of the puzzle that snaps together to build the world somehow doesn’t fit quite right?
I see it everywhere, these deformed pieces within the world. The inequalities that we’re told to accept, the rungs we’re told to climb, the hoops we’re told to jump through. The difference we’re told not to bother to make. I – and I hope you do too – refuse to accept them. I’m driven by these things that are wrong in our world; they are the fuel to the fire, the reason to continue. And they are a constant reminder to not accept the world around us as a given.
Those that have come before my generation have heard some of these sentiments and labeled them entitlement. They call it bratty that we refuse to accept this notion that you need to wait your turn before you can change the world. That there’s a process, that you need to pay your dues. That’s what they did after all.
It’s dismissive – once my generation had this “entitlement” label, every request we make against the status quo suddenly begins to sound like the demands of a spoiled millionaire teen “you’ve got yours, now where’s mine?” When in reality, it’s a product of my generation refusing to pay their dues to a system intent on ensuring the world we inherit is in worse condition than before.
Those people, the ones that scream “entitlement”, look at the world, and the things in it that don’t line up with expectations and say, “well, that’s just the way things are.”
Fuck that.
The world isn’t this mysterious actor that consigns us to a fate we have no control over. The world is made out of the actions of men and women, ordinary people no different than anyone else. They saw some part of the world as they wanted it to be and then made it so.
The world isn’t the way it is because it’s “just the way things are.” The wrong things in this world exist because the people who experience those wrong things have for some reason chosen to believe that their reality is immutable. That they’re meant to suffer through the parts of the world they don’t necessarily agree with, that the unpleasant is somehow in service of enjoying life more fully.
Somewhere along the way, we get the idea that we can change the world beaten the hell out of us, to be replaced by some sort of so-called “adult pragmatism” that tells us to manage our expectations. We lose our curiosity, we lose confidence in ourselves, and suddenly we lose that ability to dream. Our aspirations become diminished. We trade in the idea that we can go to space, or build a rocket car, or put the world on our shoulders for job stability, weekends mowing the lawn, and gossip amongst the neighbors.
If there’s something broken in your part of the world, fix it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can, either. Tell them that yourselves, by showing them that you already did it.