Modern misery goes mainstream

People get blasted with rage because they dare to tell the world they made a decision

Hard-luck stories have become a rich industry, once niche but now mainstream. The phenomenon is spreading like a puddle in a big rain.

Barring measurable economic problems, it’s not necessarily true that people’s luck is harder than it was before, it’s that modern misery requires a public stamp of attention before it registers. People want affirmation.

In these times, they get harsh judgment instead and it hurts worse. This worries me. People get blasted with rage because they tell the world they made a decision, and all decisions are wrong.

Long ago, newspapers used to run a photo feature called Wednesday’s Child, weekly listing the good points of a child up for adoption. (This is true.) They would end with “Sure, Lacey can be a bit of a handful but she’ll settle in.”

The modern hard-luck story is just a variation on Wednesday’s Child, full of woe. Go Fund Me. Validate me. But what if there are no takers?

Memoirs based on trauma — an extensive and largely self-defined phenomenon — crowd the market; some traumas tiny, some lacerating, but invariably end with immigrants’ anxiety-ridden children finding happiness by rediscovering their ethnicity. This is improbable.

All American memoirs end with the claim that everyone can heal, which is simply not true. I think it’s more true that people can get used to anything, which makes memoirs kind of pointless.

Reddit’s AITA (“Am I the a--hole?”) posts draw tens of thousands of judgments, mostly “yes” but also astonishment about the things people have not yet learned, like laundry, courtesy, living on one’s own dime, and “My boyfriend likes to be called ‘daddy’ in bed but when I told him to call me ‘grandma’ he got mad.”

All immigration court stories are the same, a wearying exercise in implausible claims by people in impossible situations. Someone broke the rules and wants a break from the rule-enforcers, which is far beyond the remit of even that rare commodity, sympathetic readers.

I would make a terrible immigration judge. I would tear a dodgy claimant’s farcical case to pieces in court and then say, “Are those your kids? Well, they’re adorable. So stipulated! Yes, based not on the humanitarian grounds so frequently trotted out, but on photogeneity alone, you are one lucky landed immigrant.” I’d let everyone in.

Readers’ hearts are hard because there are so many hard-luck stories. Take rentals. Having been a tenant long ago, I find landlords wrong by definition.

But then there are landlord stories. Tenants had farm animals inside the house, neither goat nor lamb. A smell of acetone prevailed throughout. Hissing and boiling noises.

I can’t decide who’s right and since Doug Ford’s Ontario doesn’t have a functioning landlord and tenant tribunal, no one can. Readers weigh in. Renting sucks. You should buy.

Oh no. Home-ownership heartbreak manufactures the bulk of hard-luck stories. Readers point out the obvious, that your problem wasn’t the bank or interest rates, it was that you couldn’t afford that house/ neighbourhood in the first place. You had no wiggle room.

So many problems ranging from tiny to minuscule, so many agony aunts. The Washington Post has Miss Manners (“a simple no will suffice”), Ask Amy (“Mom worried about daughter’s alcoholism”), Ask Sahaj (“My immigrant parents annoy me”), Carolyn Hax (“Mom mortifies teens by asking server to replace dirty glass”) and Work Advice (“My co-worker smells”), plus Readers’ Questions to which reporters respond irritably that they’ve been answering that for seven years on the beat, look it up.

Since I won’t read its Reaganite opinion page and my immersion in agony aunt-ics has made me think humans are a failed concept, there’s little left to read post-Bezos layoffs. I shall cancel.

Certain horror stories obliterate all others. Gaza is one. Climate change is another. Are Wednesday’s Child tales popular because we cannot countenance the worst stories of all? Very possibly. What a lucky country we are.

Barring measurable economic problems, it’s not necessarily true that people’s luck is harder than it was before, it’s that modern misery requires a public stamp of attention before it registers