Yesterday I read this interview with a famous popstar and after I finished, I said to myself, “She is just not very smart.”
This is ridiculous if you think about it. What the fuck do I care if she is not very “smart?” Being smart is not her job. And to judge someone who is, in other areas, incredibly skilled and talented, as being somehow deficient because they lack some other additional thing? Selfish and entitled are the only words.
Bill Simmons wrote a good article Tracy McGrady a few months ago. He talked about car washes and how they usually have a couple packages, the most expensive one having basically a complete list of amenities (even though the cheaper middle packages have pretty much everything you could reasonably want). People don’t like T-Mac because he may or may not have been gifted with it all–and didn’t make the most of it.
But that’s kind of the problem huh? We go around expecting everyone to be the “Everything Package” and then we write them off as being failures if that turns out not to be true. We do this for professional athletes. For musicians. For politicians. For potential boyfriends or girlfriends. For the people in our own lives. When the reality is that the full package is extraordinarily rare. Only children don’t understand this.
Yet, we sit around expecting more and more from people, instead of accepting them as they are. We somehow tell ourselves that they’re letting us down instead of the other way around.
We’re the asshole. We’re the one with a glaring hole that needs to be fixed: Whether Tracy McGrady is making the most of his talents is not our concern–at least not one we’re allowed to get genuinely upset about. What other people do and how they are is up to them. Going around expecting more, more, more out of people is a recipe for a very unhappy existence.
It’s called setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s called distracting yourself from the task at hand (your own life). It’s called wasting your energy on things you can’t fix.
