There’s probably some blogosphere law out there that says that if I don’t post every X number of days or weeks, you can just stop reading altogether. Maybe so. It’s been an interesting and hectic couple of months. April in particular. You know as a graduate student, you start out the month thinking, “ah, nice paycheck. I’m going to set aside this much and have that much for spending money and pay bills with the rest.” Sometimes it happens that way but often it doesn’t. Sometimes your income taxes come due, your research expenses loom etc. and you end the month thinking, “Well thank God I had the money to do all of that.” Well it’s not the end of the pay period, but I can certainly relate. I know, I don’t normally write blog entries about my personal life, but this is going to be a bit of an exception. … Maybe I should be more personal in my blog. That’s something to think about.
To catch you up, my research is going well. I collect the last of my data and pay the last of my subjects today. Paying for my dissertation is not over, however. Next comes data analysis. That also has to be paid for and could get pricy. On the credit side, I’ve been appointed my German department’s Max Kade fellow for the coming academic year. A scholarship, more or less, for those of you who don’t know about such things. I certainly won’t complain about that. Next year is unquestionably my last year here. There’s no doubt the dissertation will be completed. What is more, the academic job search will get underway. Last Fall it was suspended because I needed to collect more data. Now it really gets underway. One could say last Fall was practice for this Fall. That’s fine with me. This summer, though. Now that’s the interesting part.
Right now I don’t like summer much. When I was a kid I loved it. Who doesn’t love summer. As a grad student, it’s hard to love summer. Your paychecks are guaranteed you only September to May. Between June and September … you’re screwed unless you can secure summer funding. As a professor making $50,000 a year, this is generally not a problem. As a grad student making less than $15,000 a year, however, this becomes cause to loathe summer passionately until the end of your schooling. At my level of study summer funding usually means teaching or some sort of research support. Those decisions are still being made. At the moment I might have $900 in summer funding. The class has the required number of students enrolled in it, so I don’t see it being canceled. The concern, when you’re me, then becomes how to stretch your last paycheck into three months of summer cash flow. You can’t. And when you’re blind and living in a college town, half the summer jobs are outside your abilities. Driving a cab or waiting tables? Now that could be comical, even life threatening, but it’s not practical. So, you keep looking. And, when you’re me, you write to your department hoping to secure additional funding and you scour the campus looking for extra cash. And finally, if you’re like me, you pray. Most diligently do you pray and not just because there are no atheists in a foxhole as the old saying goes. You pray because you know that there is an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God who knows your needs and provides for them. You just don’t know how he’ll do it. Meanwhile, it is of little value to me for people to say, “at least next year’s covered.” While I know what they mean when they say this, it doesn’t help. Next year is next year. This summer is this summer. I’ll even grant you that a lack of funding for next year would have been a much bigger problem than this summer’s woes, but it didn’t happen that way. Yet, this summer must still be dealt with. But that’s the situation today, May 3. That situation actually brings me to the main topic I wanted to consider.
Let me ask a brutally pointed question. Have you ever noticed that your problems are huge to you and small as crap to those you often look to for aid in solving them or to those on whom your future depends? I’ll call this the relativity of problems and troubles. This plays out especially when there’s a hierarchy of power involved. When you’re a high school student, that final in algebra looms large. You didn’t get the hang of factoring polynomials or of dividing matrices, so how are you going to pass that big exam? Your algebra teacher, on the other hand, has a couple hundred tests to grade and is writing a paper for the master’s class she takes at night and is worried about completing her M.ED. this year or her contract won’t be renewed. Your problem to you is massive. To her, your failure to grasp the concepts is unfortunate, but she has other and bigger fish to fry. In college, that term paper you got back with blood red ink all over it and that you have to revise for your Holocaust studies course looks daunting. You have to revise it, study for that classes final and take five other finals. Yet your instructor himself is a student, balancing teaching and grading with a whole slew of courses that he’s taking and studying for his M.A. exams or his Ph.D. qualifiers. Maybe in his heart of hearts he doesn’t give a damn about your particular term paper on the radar of his own issues. SO to you, your term paper represents hours of work, sweat and tears. To him, it represents one more thing he has to grade before picking up his Adorno and studying some more or finishing his own paper on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. In grad school especially at my level of study, it’s your doctoral thesis that matters. For many, it consumes them. It worries them. They have to write a 200-page paper and if it doesn’t happen they’re out of luck. By the way, this isn’t what I struggle with. My dissertation is going well and it doesn’t bother me, but for most people like me, what I just said is very true. To the professor overseeing the project, though, this is one more student whose work she’s overseeing. She has six other advisees, not to mention classes to teach, committees to sit on, projects to oversee and budgets to juggle. And for giggles, she’s coming up on promotion and is worried about her own employment if she fails to advance in rank. One more example? Ok then. When you work for the company and you know layoffs are coming, you pray like hell you won’t be one of them. You’ve put in a lot of work for this company, right? You’ve been valuable to them. Besides, you have two kids to support even if your wife is working. Yet your boss, the one who will or won’t fire you, is watching the bottom drop out of the company’s profits and shares and is facing a layoff himself if your company is bought out. TO you, it’s your life. TO him, you’re one more cog in a wheel that’s coming close to dropping off the axle, taking him, his job, and incidentally you too along with it.
Is that not so? Isn’t it often just that way? I submit that it is. But why? Well firstly, I agree that no matter how bad your situation is, someone out there always has it worse. Some people, I’ve noticed, take a certain miserable pride in wallowing in their circumstance. This attitude, if they put it into words, would come out as, “ain’t nobody got it worse than me. I’m at the bottom! So shut up with your problems!” I’ve known people like that. Haven’t you? The ones who are almost perversely proud of being able to boast that their lives suck the most?
On the other hand—and here we come to the heart of my question—is it fair to tell a person in trouble that they shouldn’t worry because someone else has it worse than they do? “Well, Brad, that’s tough. But it could always be worse.” How helpful is that. Does it solve my problem, whatever that is? No. Does it show me a solution that I can find myself? Not even close. Does it comfort me in my situation, whatever that is? Well, let’s think about it. It’s certainly meant to. It’s meant to give me perspective on my own problem and by that, to settle and comfort me, to get me to accept my circumstances. if it did offer comfort, though, what kind of human being would I be? Think of it this way. If all the comfort I could take in my situation was that some poor wretch out there had it worse than me, what would that say about how I thought of myself or about other people? I ask you to really think about statements like, “Well, it could always be worse,” “there are worse things that could happen,” or, “people in other countries don’t have it as good as we do, so stop complaining.”
Rather than this way of thinking, I want to suggest something else. It is true, I grant you, that for any given problem, there is someone out there somewhere who has a worse one. On the other hand, there are many out there who don’t have it as bad as you do. These are often the same ones who want to tell you not to worry or that you shouldn’t complain because you’re not as bad off as you could be. These are also the people you want to smack really hard for saying such things too, but that’s beside the point. The main problem, as I see it, is that we compare and relativize each other’s problems. We like to make those comparisons. I don’t have it as bad as X, that wretched man. Or, calm down, Mac, at least you’re not Mr. Y, and you know what hard times he’s fallen upon.
It’s this whole line of thinking that just needs to be ripped up by the roots. How would it be if we were able to take each friend’s problems and think about them totally from their perspective without even the slightest trace of comparison or belittlement, intended or not? If we could hear X’s problems and then Y’s unquestionably worse problems, without giving one moment’s thought to how good X has it compared to Y … or even compared to you. Well, we’d probably make for better friends or employers and so on. What do you think?
It occurs to me that this ability to think about each person’s problems without reference to others’ issues or to oneself may be an ability that only God has. God, being beyond space and outside of time, has the capacity for listening to the prayers of countless millions and acting on each of them with the same degree of attention that you or I would give if we were devoting ourselves wholly to one person’s issues or to a single problem. That’s not to say either that we should strive to be godlike or that we should simply give up since we can’t function as God does. Either is dangerous and neither is what I mean. I think that if we tried to stop diminishing others’ problems by comparing them to ourselves or to yet other people’s troubles, we would find a few things happening.
First, we would find our ability to sympathize to be on the increase. You can include empathy in that too. I don’t draw a fine line between sympathy and empathy. I leave that for my social work and psychology friends. But we would find our sympathies on the increase and untainted by cynicism or skepticism. We would also, I think, find ourselves being more creative and sincere in our efforts to help find solutions. After all, when you truly care about a problem, you work at it until a solution presents itself or until you’ve hunted down a solution and dragged it kicking and screaming into the daylight.
Finally, this non-relative way of thinking about problems would give us a healthy perspective on our own issues. I think we would stop using our issues as a club over the head of someone else. The, “look at me,” attitude some people adopt. I think we would also be a bit more honest about what’s troubling us. In this culture, we put on a front to hide our problems. It’s the, “Nobody’s gonna care about that, come on,” or the, “why should I lay this on him? He doesn’t need this?” Or the, “lots of people have it worse than me, so I’m going to just keep silent,” mentality we were raised with and that pervades our culture. I don’t think that we’d be perfect even if we could think about our own and others’ problems as I suggest. Sadly, I also don’t think what I have wished for here is even possible. I just think it’d be nice. Don’t you?
Well, at least I'll have more time to work on my blog. Now there's something.
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