I’ve always wondered if it takes me longer to get past clichéd thinking than others, or less time. I was thinking about this because I read someone’s response to a Facebook post that went something like “I’m wearing shorts today. I don’t think I could handle the weather in [place x] anymore.”
Seriously? Do you honestly believe that? Moreover, do you think any of us believe it? You lived in a colder place your entire life and now, after a tiny percentage of time in this new ‘better place’ you suddenly have no ability to stand the cold temperatures the rest of your friends so stupidly suffer through, year after year (you know, those people with which you associate yourself despite obviously being of superior intellect because you think the only true measure of a person is to identify a warmer climate)?
When I read stuff like that I find myself getting irritated a little; it really seems like a blatant attempt at thumbing one’s nose at someone because they live somewhere colder, as if the writer has really done some amazing thing by simply moving to a warmer place. Let’s face it: it’s far easier to drive your car and your crap to Florida, for example, than it is to toil away in a lab and win a Nobel Prize for physics. So why the open allusion to some amazing accomplishment for which one feels some massive need to take credit?
Why doesn’t anyone ever call out that person and say, “Well whoop-de-do for you! You moved to a warmer place that quite possibly sucks in every other way, yet you think we’re all sitting here simultaneously jealous of you and wondering how we could just hope to be more like you.”
Isn’t it funny how we’re all just too nice to (or perhaps too passive) to respond to this person?