My one regret as of yet is that my life has been utterly tolerable

This (admitted) rant is in response to those people whose rallying cry is “stop complaining about your problems and enjoy life.”

First of all, my problems are trivial. In all likelihood, yours are too. Duh. Barring disease and car crashes, there are no serious threats to health or happiness endemic to the North American middle class.

This is, of course, a Good Thing. Or so they say. We live our lives largely without pain. This is aGood Thing. Or so they say. For almost one hundred thousand years, we’ve worked pretty much the same, biologically speaking. For almost all that time, we’ve felt pain and hardship. Now, for the first time, that which we've always sought to avoid has been, indeed, avoided. The bullet has been dodged, some might say. But really, all we've done is made ourselves unaware of its impact.

Pain provokes reaction to negative stimuli. Without pain, we do not react. But we've been trained to take things apathetically. The methods have been developed, with the best of intentions, to remove the effects of our problems, without removing their causes.

All that we have done is that ensure that the vast majority of people will never be in enough pain to try and better their situation. Change is hard, and we have removed most of the motivation.

So I regret that I haven’t been fucked over harder then I have been. And it’s not like I can ask for pain. But I see myself, subconsciously, trying to screw myself up in little ways. One day maybe I’ll choke, and then things can only get better. And if they don’t, well, hey, that’s fine too.