blog @ xanatos.ca

Perspective

Nothing irritates me quite like listening to people complain about their lives.

If the whining came from someone who'd lived a truly hard life, I could tolerate it. But I don't know anyone who fits that description. Instead, I know a lot of people who think they've got it tough, even though they've all won what Warren Buffet calls "The Ovarian Lottery". That is, they were all born in a rich country, and raised by rich parents. If you're reading this, you're almost certainly a member of this privileged elite, at least by global standards. Like me, you can probably expect a lot more out of life than almost everyone else in the world.

Don't believe me?

Go here to find out how wealthy you are relative to everyone else. I'm in the top 100 million globally, which makes me part of the richest 5 percent of humanity. Trust me, you're in the top 5 or 10 percent, too.

Of course, random misfortune can strike anywhere and sometimes bad things do happen, even to rich folk like us. So that's fine if you want to complain about a real tragedy. But remember: getting a traffic ticket because you were speeding is not a tragedy, and neither is failing an exam, missing a sale, or getting bad service in a restaurant. If you can afford to own a car, go to school, shop for anything other than food, or eat in a restaurant, then you've already got it better than most.

Once you've won the Ovarian Lottery, you've lost the right to complain about life's petty annoyances. And the fact that the average Canadian doesn't recognize that is just proof of how detached from reality we really are. (That's my nice way of saying that Canadians are, for the most part, very spoiled.)

You know how sometimes you hear about someone who just won the lottery, and you kinda hate them for it? And deep down, you just wish that you could catch a break like that? I don't blame you. Life just seems like it would be so much sweeter if you were really rich. But don't forget that there are a lot of very poor people in this world who are just as smart, hardworking, and deserving as you are. They all wish that they could catch a break, too. They see the gap between how YOU live and how THEY live, and they also think that their lives would be so much sweeter if they were really rich.

The only difference is, when you think about being rich, you imagine being like Bill Gates. When they think about being rich, they imagine being like you.

Human happiness is not tied to wealth so much as it is tied to a sense of perspective. Happy people are the ones who can remember their place in the world. They're the ones that are good at imagining how much worse things could have been--because that's what lets them appreciate how good things actually are.

Anyhow, my intention in writing this blog entry was to do more than just growl self righteously for a few paragraphs and then sign off. There's actually something very worthwhile that you can do to help reduce the wealth gap between you and all the truly poor people in the world. It's an organization called Kiva, which lets you loan money directly to the world's poor (an activity known as microcredit.)

I'm a huge fan of Kiva. I've been making $25 loans here and there since sometime last year. I've found that it doesn't really hurt much to give up such a small amount of money, so when the people I loan to pay me back, I just reloan the money to someone else.

If you find the idea of doing something like this appealing at all, I strongly encourage you to check Kiva out. Consider it chance to do a favour for someone who really needs it.