The cognitive dissonance between what works for a healthy mental state and what works within the dominant narrative is stark. For good mental health, one needs to be regulated, self-fulfilled, and be able to socially engage and disengage as necessary. Within the dominant narrative, there is a constant struggle to put everyone else’s needs ahead, spend our entire lives bowing and scraping for people who never care enough, and we are forced to compete to exist. To add insult to injury, there is so much bad advice on doing our best to appeal to people who are determined to reject us. One way to offer helpful advice to people is to stop telling them that they can reach success if they work hard, offer integrity, or others play games in which the rules were set by someone other than themselves.
It is now borderline abuse to tell people that if we just put in the right amount of effort, someone will take notice and reward us. The people who have control and resources are not looking to share, and manically trying to please them has not worked. No matter how hard one works, it takes approval to get a raise, get promoted, sustain a business, and make profits. No one lives in a vacuum, and people have to be willing to part with some of their resources for someone else to gain them. All of our livelihoods depend on the grace of someone else, even if we have the best self esteem and are flawlessly financially responsible.
For a long time, extremely toxic people were able to get away with anything up to and including murder. When confronted, not only would these kinds of people say, “That’s just the way I am,” but everyone around them would say, “That’s just the way they are.” People continued to drain their resources for these entitled brats, and others refused to hold them accountable. Now, people are finally recognizing that if anyone is consistently taking without offering anything, the giving should stop. No matter how kind one is, it takes approval to sustain resources, including mental health. If someone is constantly preying on the good will of others, there comes a time when the enabling should stop and social efforts should be removed.
No matter what trait one has, we all live in a world with other people. The problem is that some people are willfully oblivious to the harm they cause others and the unreasonableness of their expectations. It actually is possible to sustain a healthy socioecosystem, but not when people demand to control it or hoard large portions of it. Moreover, perpetuating imperial systems means that others feel entitled to take, and no, that is not human nature. The only element of human nature that is universal is one of survival; only imperial systems make greed and destruction part of “human nature.”
Chasing A Dying Empire 