Hubris masking as hard work
Do you know who “the rich” are? Go to the nearest bathroom and look in the mirror.
I once heard if you own a fridge you are in the top richest 1/3 of the world.
Something that unites humanity is the belief in the virtue of our own hard work. We love to tell people that we “worked hard” for our living which is why they don’t get any of our charity or a leg up. Go get your own. Yet we always look upwards at “the rich” and see them as undeserving? Why? Because they aren’t. Yet we all want to be them. The undeserving rich with our “haters” on speed dial in case we need a little drama in our lives.
All this does is attract hatred, jealousy and resentful of our fellow man. So classic scarcity mindset, there isn’t enough good stuff in the world so therefore we need to underline how much we deserve our stuff in case someone tries to take it from us. Whilst pointing the finger at “rich people”
Remember the old adage. “When you point the finger, remember 4 of them are pointing back at you.”
How I see it manifesting is when I see people talk about how hard they work to get where they are without acknowledging the privilege they owned to get there. We all have privilege. If you live and work in the UK you are privileged, You will undergo relative poverty, but hopefully not absolute poverty. I myself have lived in relative poverty, but I ate daily. That simply isn’t the case for someone who lives in Ukraine, or India or Sierra Leone. So you need to acknowledge your privilege.
You also need to come off your hard work. My dad used to say “there is dignity in hard work”
Yes there is, there is virtue too if you are working hard for a earnest cause. Making Jeff Bezos richer still isn’t a virtuous cause, however people work horrendously hard for that. Making Anglo American rich isn’t virtuous but people still work ungodly hours so that they can work out which 3rd world countries water system they are going to poison next.
So let me be abundantly clear. Hard work does not equal virtue, it doesn’t make you deserving of a good life, if so then people who work the fields at 4am so you can have fresh strawberries would be the ones living a good life, not those of the “laptop classes” such as myself.
No one owes you a good life, if you have one, praise be to Jesus because you are blessed. It is not, due to your own virtue, and just as easily as it has been given to you, it can be taken away. We have a war in Ukraine, we’re just coming out of a pandemic and we are on the brink of recession. So don’t act like one or more of those things can’t take your dreams of a golden retirement away. In short. Behave yourself, your arrogance is attracting trouble.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith.