struggling with struggle, by el gato malo

Kids need to encounter the vicissitudes of life, the downs as well as the ups, if they’re ever going to grow up. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

return the wolves to childhood

here’s a cheery little piece of dystopian hypothesizing from francis fukuyama in “the end of history.”

it’s been sort of niggling at something in my brain and i find a sort of uncomfortable truth embedded here that seems to link a number of ideas.

it really does appear to be one of those unfortunate calibration issues where humans seem to need to feel a certain amount of struggle/deprivation/injustice and it’s all subjective such that a brearley girl in her posh high school in NYC experiences a lack of kale at the salad bar in about the same way that an african kid in a warzone experiences “no food this week” in terms of the sense of struggle it constitutes.

this has a wide range of implications, among them the particularly ironic one that

in a world of outlandish plenty, the children of privilege seem to contract an societal auto-immune disease that attacks them and everything around them.

it’s some sort of civilizational hygiene hypothesis.

you have an immune system and it’s going to fight something. deprive it of pathogens and it attacks you instead.

past a certain point, the very fact of having nothing real to struggle against becomes oppressive and you go mad against the system that provided such bounty even and especially if it’s all handed to you on a silver platter.

the easier it gets, the more you freak out.

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