How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story

The traditional society would have you live among your relatives. Which can be great if your relatives are great, and can be horrible if your relatives are horrible.

The modern society allows you to choose the place where you live freely... at least in theory. In practice, I think if you would ask most people how far they live from their best friends, and how far they would prefer to live from their best friends, those would be two very different numbers. So somehow the relative freedom is big enough to break extended families apart, but not big enough to bring best friends together. So instead of trading relatives for friends, we are trading relatives mostly for loneliness.

There are reasons why this happens. Buying a new house is expensive, and moving to the new house is a lot of work, so you only do it once or twice in your life. The moment when you decide to buy a house, and when you have enough money to do it, is not the same moment when your friend decides to buy a house and has enough money to do it. Despite enjoying the idea of living closer to each other, each of you probably has a strong opinion about the best place to live, and very likely it is not the same place. Etc. Every step in this chain is so logical... and yet, at the end, the outcome is unsatisfactory. Maybe we also suck as predicting what will make us happy in life.

Once I lived in a 10-minute walking distance from my best friend. It was amazing; I never felt so connected socially. Any day, any hour, I could just pick up my phone, ask "hey, would you like to meet now", and if yes, then in 10 minutes I could be with my friend. We talked a lot and played a lot of computer games, heh. It makes a large difference when it is 8PM, and you have to go to work the next day, and still you can insert an hour or two of human interaction if you need it.

These days my best friends live between 30 minutes and 2 hours away from me. It absolutely does not have the same dynamic. Visiting them is something that needs to be planned; for the more distant ones it is something that takes the whole day (2 hours there, 2 hours back, and we better spend a few hours together otherwise it was more traveling than socializing). I can no longer just do it spontaneously at the end of the working day. I need a large time interval, they need a large time intervals, and we have to coordinate these time intervals. So at the end, we meet more rarely than we would prefer to.

Now imagine the opposite situation, if somehow magically we could just live downstairs from each other, or across the street. We could meet anytime. Even anytime we go with kids to the playground, we could meet and talk there.

In theory, there is nothing preventing me and my best friends to coordinate and buy houses in the same city, on the same street. But in practice, almost no one does this. It would take money and time, you would have to sacrifice some of your preferences, you are not sure that the same people will be your best friends 10 years later, you do not want to move every 10 years to follow your new friendships, your best friends are not the same people as your partner's best friends, etc.

So we keep dreaming about something that feels like the right thing, but most likely we will never have it.

I wonder how much the society would be different if houses were like Lego bricks, and you could anytime relatively cheaply move your house from place A to place B (and if you change your mind later, move it back). Whenever you feel alone, if there is at least one person you would prefer to be with, move closer to them.

It's rational and correct to tackle underlying causes of inequality. You're correct that the only thing that can be done is to deal with the situation you find yourself it; you're wrong that you "can’t control how unfair the world is". The world will remain unfair unless we all try to fix that situation – and drawing attention to is one of the steps required.

Everybody has responsibility for themselves. But that's not an excuse to shut people down for complaining about inequality.

Like I said, it is down to each individual to make the best with what they have. I don't advocate anybody "wallowing in despair", but I do fully support objecting to structural inequality that denies people the opportunity to compete fairly.

The only equality we can strive to achieve is equality of opportunity.

Obviously.

Although we could improve on this point, we actually already do it pretty well.

We do it shockingly badly by almost every metric.

At no time in my life have I ever been denied an opportunity because I grew up poor

I have no reason to think you don't believe that, but it's almost certainly not true. It's completely obvious that this is the case. If you grow up poor, it is harder to access better education, better nutrition, better medical care. These subsequently have an effect on which opportunities one can take advantage of.

I have found many opportunities to improve my life, and I have taken advantage of many of them.

That's awesome! It's the only way to improve one's own outcome. It doesn't invalidate the fact that those opportunities are harder to come by for people of some backgrounds.

redistribute all resources perfectly equally between all members of society, but people would still be born with their own set of natural talents and abilities.

We don't require complete redistribution nor absolute equality of circumstances in order to improve the situation. We can make sure that there are well-funded public schools, so that children from poor backgrounds can receive high-quality education. We can provide welfare systems and education programs so that kids have access to quality nutrition. We can provide universal medical care. We can try to eliminate structural racism or homophobia. There are all good things that are worth arguing for.

The message that "it's not your fault, it's inequality's fault" is so incredibly destructive and dangerous. The only person responsible for getting your life to where you want it to be is you.

Far more dangerous, in my opinion, is the view that unequal circumstances are unavoidable and the best thing to do is to "put up or shut up", as it were. I do not claim that anybody other than yourself is responsible for your own life, but I totally disagree that we should pretend inequality doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't bother fighting it. It's not an excuse for failure, but it's also something that very obviously makes it more likely.

There's a comic I quite like that illustrates this: http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate