The real struggle

Recently, an article in  The New Yorker  had me thinking — how the things we worry about these days are embarrassingly trivial; they aren’t actual problems and can probably be solved by a good night’s sleep or an overindulgence in carbs.

Forget climate change, the curbing of freedom of speech and expression, freedom to follow any religion (or not) and even terrorism — those aren’t the real issues. Instead, you should be wringing your hands when the power supply gets cut leaving you sitting alone in the dark, with your face illuminated only by the light from your phone that makes you wonder why the mobile data has no coverage when you badly want to tweet about all this. Or when Instagram is down? What is one supposed to do with the food? Actually  eat  it? What about late-nighters one has pulled to write a pitiful 300-word story when that could’ve easily been written at the start of the week? Also, tangled earphones, hair sticking on lipstick and football matches at 2 a.m.

How about that time when you’re in the middle of watching a movie in the theatre and you just have to relieve yourself but doing so will cause you to miss a small part of the movie? Watching it again is 

not  an option. And we’ve all faced a situation where we’ve run out of conditioner on top of running late to work by, of course, oversleeping. These are just unfortunate, real problems, aren’t they?

Well, the beloved Internet lovingly puts all these into a category called “First World Problems”: whines by people of privilege (also referred to as “First World Problems in a Third World Country”). Nevertheless, writing more than 300 words is a problem for some of us; we don’t want to bore people with our tirades, do we? Wait, how many words is this?