Spending one of many frustrated, disgruntled Saturdays stuck in a coffee shop working with my partner during a beautiful afternoon on a advertising brief we had questionable chance in selling, gave rise to considerable amount of complaining on my end. Finally my partner offered this tidbit of consolation.
“You know, once I watched this clip on Youtube. Horrible. This lion catches a guy and eats him alive.”
Figuring this was prelude to an idea, I begged her to go on.
“So when it gets bad, I always think, at least I’m not getting eaten by a lion.”
That's the alternative? Work weekends or spend the last moments of your life hearing the skin you so diligently SPFed every summer get shredded like a stack of junk mail? I think it could be better.
I blame lazy mothers. If a four year old refuses to eat dinner, mom shouts that there are starving children in China. Or in my case, my dad actually took regular trips to third world countries as a photographer and had pictorial proof that I had it better. But in my experience, Ethiopians eating tsetse flies in loincloths didn’t change the fact that mom’s cooking sucked.
And so from that malleable age we’re taught to settle for shitty because at least you’re still breathing. Yeah, it’s with the help of life support, but count your blessings. Maybe mom needs to go back to the drawing board and learn how to cook my fucking chicken. Maybe hearing another misfortune on top of my lament only makes me more depressed. You’re damn right it could be worse. You just turned a shitty meal into the hopelessness of mankind. I need a drink. And I'm only four.
Of course, I could get behind this ideology if I could use it for my benefit . For example, I get an assignment, only to turn in a couple crappy headlines and call it a day at 4pm. When my Creative Director shoots me a threatening, “WTF?” email, I could reply, “Well, at least it’s not a letter from your future self detailing your imminent death by carnivorous jaws.” I could lower his expectations *and* get home in time for 5pm high balls. What could be better?
