The World Doesn't Owe You a Thing

Mass-Killings. Gun Rights. Mental Illness. These issues will be thoroughly argued over, forgotten, and rehashed when the next 20-year-old opens fire on innocents. What hit me about this most recent tragedy is the raw narcissism at its root. Here is a man who believed that his failure to attract the opposite sex is due to some systemic failure in the nature of all of humanity. It wasn’t he who was untalented, unattractive, or just plain unlucky. Despite his obvious superiority to anyone who ever had any actual success in getting laid, his failures all came down to unerringly shallow women who were universally attracted to brutish men. The cosmic order of things was simply skewed against men like him. The only solution was for them all to die. How can anyone think that way?

Despite the headlines, most troubled young men don’t end up as mass murders. Some become criminals or recluses. Some just kill themselves. Some get over it. The solutions are manifold. Experts have toiled over identifying some algorithm that predicts who is who among this most dangerous group, and how to stop them. Take all the guns away and surely there will be fewer deaths. Public vigilance might head something terrible off. Improve mental health care and surely someone will get the help they need. But none of those decisions alters the fact that any one mass shooter represents thousands of others who don’t quite have all the pieces in place to commit such a reprehensible act. Certain policy changes may alter the odds of one particular tragedy, but they will do little for the related but subtler forms of suffering present in all quarters of our society. What is it about these men? What does it mean for the rest of us?

Maybe someone who harbors these feelings of self-hate, or hatred of others will read this. If so, the one thing I want you to hear is that the world doesn’t owe you a thing. No amount of rage or retribution will bring you peace. Get all the help you can, but in the end, it’s up to you to heal.

The tragedies that bring about suffering are irrelevant. Suffering is suffering, whether it’s because the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed your whole family, or because some girl rejected you in the eighth grade. In both instances, people are left with the simple choice of how they react. Do we blame others or is it somehow our own fault? Ultimately, are we capable of overcoming suffering or will it destroy us? Will we find it just to take others with us?

In my limited experience, despite some chemical imbalance or series of genuine tragedies, the most resilient people are the ones who believe that the world doesn’t owe them anything; that injustice happens and that the only question is what we do with what we have. Given the same variables, different cultures lead people to different choices. We can and should help those in need, but for real healing there must be some sense that in the end, it’s up to us to improve our own lot. Maybe it’s with the help of family or friends. Maybe it’s religion or some other social order. Maybe our cultural shortcomings are due to the erosion of traditional institutions, or the growing mountain of self-referential role models present in our torrent of media, but it’s not just about the next 20-year-old mass shooter. Something is lacking in many, many of us.