Children.

Kids, right? Selfish, greedy, dirty brats who think only of themselves with nary a sniff of empathy. It’s all about them, all day long. All they want to do is mess around, have fun and never be responsible. So selfish: if someone’s got something they haven’t got, or if there’s something they can’t have it’s just the world being unfair. They should get whatever they want, and screw everyone else. It’s tiresome.

Oh, wait. THEY’RE CHILDREN. THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THAT. *gives everybody else a long, long, look* WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR EXCUSE?

Yeah, I have a job. And yeah, there are other people that don’t. And yeah, out of all those people out of work, there are some who would rather not get a job, and would rather be supported by the state. Seriously, who the frick cares? Who decided that our society should be geared so intensely towards working for the majority of your life? If it really bothers you that other people don’t have a job while you do, perhaps you need to find another job. Perhaps you need to find another way to live your life. Perhaps you need to walk a mile in their shoes to disabuse yourself of the notion that they are living an unpressured charmed life at your expense. Besides, even if they are, the expense is such a vanishingly small fraction of your total tax payments that it would make no appreciable difference to the life you live if that money appeared in your pocket. It’s all about your perception that they have something that you don’t, and your instinctive feeling that they shouldn’t. Like a kid in nursery who has noticed another kid playing with your favourite toy.

I heard once on a BBC documentary that you don’t lose that knee-jerk selfishness until you are in your 30s. It seems to me in a good deal of us that it’s never truly lost. Not that I’m not childish. The hours wasted on Xbox exploring Cyrodiil, shooting Locust or shaving precious seconds off those lap times testify to that fact. I just don’t see the fun in getting all annoyed at a misguided sense of privilege derived from a feeling that everybody should live their lives the same way you do. I don’t mean that everybody should be able to do whatever they like with impunity, or have no sense of civic or moral responsibility, I mean that the Jam lyric “Work, work, work ‘til you die, ‘cause there’s plenty more fish in the sea to fry” are not necessarily words to live by.