Why Getting All Worked Up Over Nothing Is A Waste of Energy

It's five a.m., and I've been up for a few hours, looking for some mindless Internet entertainment. I'm just getting over several days of intense pain with a knee injury, so I've just kind of been enjoying "crashing" and finally having a few pain-free hours. It's amazing how we take for granted all the times when we live without pain; but how, after we've been living with something painful, we feel so thankful once it finally eases up.

I turned down the volume on the news hours ago, because there's only so much Earthquake coverage one can keep watching in the middle of the night. The overwhelming devastation that has occurred in Haiti is more than, I'm guessing, most of us can get our minds around.

So, after doing a few incidental and not-too-mind-draining tasks on some writing sites I decided to take a look a YouTube's "Suggested for You" page. Some of that "suggested-for-you" stuff is stuff I can kind of see as being suggested for me, based on some of my You Tube activity. Some of it, however, really makes me wonder why on Earth it is being "suggested for me". Most of my YouTube searches have to do with music or clips from films. Often, too, I'll search for something educational and something that might be a good link for a piece of writing. In any case, when I went to "Suggested for You" I was met with the giant, giant, moon-face of a young man and a title about fat people in grocery stores. Keep in mind that I'm not of the generation of young people who seem to be unable to speak without throwing "the F word" in-between every two words; and while I certainly won't melt if I hear or see a bad word, I'm generally of the school-of-thought that our skill with proper and dignified use of the English language is a sign of intelligence and refinement (which, in itself, has apparently become obsolete in the minds of a lot of today's younger generation). A high-school English teacher used to say, "Profanity is the weapon of the weak." Somehow that just kind of stayed with me.

In any case, curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked on the moon-faced young man's video. Maybe I assumed he was going to rant about facing unfairness or mistreatment when he, as a very overweight individual, shopped for groceries. I'm always interested in hearing people's take on "social issues".

It turned out this kid was ranting about a couple of women in the grocery store when he was in line. It's probably safe to say he added an F word after every regular word, and his full face looked like it was going to explode as he, all worked up, went on and on about these women. It was so absurd, and he was so worked up and ridiculous, I found myself laughing at his rant and think he's headed for a heart attack if he keeps letting stupid little things that bug him get to him to that extent. I scanned through the comments on his video, and they were generally either telling him he's "f'ing fat" or else finding some other creative use to follow up with the F word theme of his video. I was awfully tempted to post a comment, "Life is f'ing short, and a heart attack is going to make yours even shorter", but I decided this individual didn't want or need motherly advice, even if it made good medical sense.

Of course, anyone who posts his rants on YouTube doesn't care what other people think of him (otherwise he wouldn't post undignified, out-of-control, rants in the first place); but whether he'd care or not, my reaction (once I stopped laughing at his ridiculous display of inability to control his emotions) was, "What a little jerk." (with "little" applying to his smallness as a person, not his obviously very immense physical size) Honestly, I really think a lot of parents of today's twenty-somethings and under didn't know how to help their two-year-old grow past the self-centeredness and general immaturity of being two.

One thing was that I saw the video in these first, peaceful, hours after several days of living in what may have been the worst pain I've had in my life (including a couple of childbirths and any number of fractures). Not one to allow myself to become too self-centered even in times of pain, for the last several days all I've been thinking about are those people who live in pain and don't know it will end when an injury heals. In the last several days just about all my worries in life went away and were replaced by thinking of little else but how to reduce the pain, how to get in and out of a chair, and fear of going to sleep because waking up would mean starting a new day with that "first few hours" of particularly bad pain until it went from feeling like horrible torture to only feeling like mild torture. In my better moments I've wondered how people who live with chronic pain do it, and when they get to where they just want to die (because I know I wouldn't have minded dying up until yesterday).

What's worse - a young person who has a whole, painful, life ahead of him; or an elderly person who knows a pain-free life for him is a thing of the past?

And then there's the Earthquake in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Earthquake aside, I was thinking about how poor Haiti is and wondering what, on Earth, could ever be done to improve the conditions in a country like that. Haiti may be the poorest, but the world has plenty of poor countries and places where life is full of poverty. I think an awful lot of us think often about the World's starving people, wherever they live. People are starving to death, and mothers watch their malnourished children die. Of course, the Earthquake in Haiti (or any other natural disasters that ever occur anywhere in the world) aren't the only awful things people often have to deal with, regardless of whether or not the nation where these things occur are wealthy or not. All around the world people deal with awful stuff all the time - the loss of loved ones, serious illness, financial problems, worries about children, to name a few. Yes, the World is full of problems and troubles well beyond even the excruciating pain of a temporarily injured knee and certainly well beyond the stupid little irritations that can happen at the grocery store.

The overweight young man's gripe was that a couple of "f'ing fat" women in line were riding the little "scooters" for disabled people. His assertion was that they should lose weight, and he, personally, didn't care about any knee problems their weight caused. (I suspect this young man would have approved of my recent attempt to shop for groceries with my injury, which was not, by the way, caused by weight. With a leg that wouldn't tolerate my putting any weight on it, and a knee that "screamed" with every fraction of an inch I moved it, I loaded my foot and lower leg onto the bottom of the shopping cart and let it "ride", as I hopped around the huge store and through the parking lot.) (Of course, for all I know, my hop-shopping could be the subject of someone's angry YouTube video.) The trouble is that not everyone has the stamina and ability to be able to hop their way through grocery shopping, so I do think this YouTube fellow was being pretty unreasonable about his fellow-overweight shoppers, the two women who inspired his rant.) There is, of course, the chance that he's like a lot of men in that he thinks it's fine to be overweight when you're a man but has contempt for overweight women. Mine is not to psychoanalyze this "little boy".

I've already moved beyond the laughter, but also disdain, this YouTube video brought about; but I'll give the young man that he inspired me to write this Hub - not aimed at him, by any means, but at anyone who gets similarly upset over the stupid little aggravations in life that, if they are our only problems, should be reason to feel grateful. After all, why have a heart attack or stroke over someone holding up the grocery-store line by using coupons? And, for anyone who gets this worked up even if he does have bigger problems in life; then it's time to have the good sense to put this kind of crap into perspective, because it's the serious things in life that require as much of our mental and physical energies as we can muster. Besides, the person who has real problems in life (even just the "usual" kind) and who gets this upset over people at the grocery store just comes across like a giant moron - plain and simple.

This Hub isn't aimed at the young guy on YouTube who apparently has neither a clue nor much self-control, and who appears to need one of those "Increase-Your-Vocabulary" books. It's directed at anyone who, like he, thinks the small stuff in life is worth posting a YouTube video or at least worth more discussion than a simple mention to someone in our inner circle. It's directed at the overgrown babies on the roads who have been the reason the term, "road rage" was created. It's directed at people who seem oblivious to the fact that with self-control comes respect, dignity, maturity, and even a happier outlook on life. In fact, it's just plain a whole lot cooler to be above the small aggravations in life. The irony is that people who rant and get upset about the small stuff don't seem to care what anyone else thinks of them; and yet they also seem oblivious to the fact that nobody cares about what aggravated them on any given day.

So, my unsolicited and sure-to-be-ignored advice to the out-of-control ranters of the world is to grow up, get some perspective, figure out how to have a little self-control, and vent your frustrations in a personal diary (which you may read one day in amazement, once life has hit you with enough serious problems to make you realize how stupid it is to get worked up over the grocery store). There are people dying in the World, people with serious illnesses, people sleeping on the streets, and people living where thousand upon thousands of people have been killed by one natural disaster or another. Nobody cares about how you got aggravated at a couple of women who, when it came down to it, were minding their own business at the grocery store (but nobody would care if they weren't either). Grow up (and by the way realize that bad words are so over-used these days they've become nothing more than a boring sign of how boring a person you are).

And that is MY rant (complete with nothing but socially acceptable words and the knowledge that nobody cares about what irks me any more than anyone cares about what irks anybody else). Having completed my own rant, it's now time to return to my life, in which I usually have the luxury of pain-free days, and always have the luxury of abundantly stocked grocery stores in a part of the world where so many people get to shop for food it can get a little crowded and aggravating at times.

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