Outside the Room

There is a particular kind of mistake that is very easy to make, and results in you not only thinking that the world is terrible, but also – crucially – thinking that you cannot make it better. I would like to help you correct that mistake, because chances are good that you’re making some version of it right now.

Imagine that you are in a dark room. It’s very dark, such that it’s almost impossible to see. This is very inconvenient and makes life pretty difficult in that room. There are a few other people in the room, and life is equally difficult for them. They complain loudly, so you’re aware of their discomfort and the fact that it matches your own. Now imagine you take all this in and conclude: “Life is an inescapable hellscape of darkness, and we’re all brutally oppressed by the lack of light!”

See the mistake? It seems obvious from, you know, outside the room.

But some people inside the room don’t find it obvious at all. They truly believe that their particular set of negative circumstances represent something that (A) is universal and (B) cannot be changed, except by something capable of changing universal circumstances. It does not occur to them at all that they are merely witnessing the circumstances of a very small group of people who could change those circumstances quite easily.

If you never talk to anyone outside of that room, it’s pretty understandable! If you talk to some people and 100% of them all claim the same circumstances, it’s quite easy to extrapolate. But birds of a feather and all that. The people around you are also like you. You have to put in a lot of effort to make it otherwise.

People make all sorts of broad statements as if they were universally true. When you hear one, just add the following to the end “…according to the very small group of people just like me that I exclusively exchange information with.”

If you hear someone say “Nobody wants to work anymore,” add the caveat. Same with “We live in a capitalist dystopia,” or “Women always date jerks but never nice guys,” or “The American dream is dead,” or whatever point of view you hear. Remember that this person isn’t describing reality, they’re describing a very small and specific room that they could easily leave.

They don’t, because they haven’t yet realized they can.

Two people with opposing viewpoints have a beef on Twitter, and both are convinced that they’re representatives of the only two viewpoints in the entire human population and that their struggle is a battle in the Great War Between Good and Evil, instead of being an online argument that only 0.0001% of people could even understand, let alone care about. It’s the same tiny group of people in the dark room, except now they’ve chosen to fight over whose fault it is that it’s dark in there.

Most of the problems that you perceive to be “the world’s problems” are actually just your problems. They belong to you and a small group of similar people. They’re quite easy to solve, in most cases – just leave the room.

I notice that there’s a small group of people, for example, who are convinced that economically things are worse now in the United States than they were in the 1950s. (They aren’t. They are, in fact, so much better that it’s almost mind-boggling.) Here’s what I notice about this group of people though: they almost all live in very high-cost-of-living cities and are themselves low-income or low-wealth compared to their contemporary peers. So their personal economic circumstances are rough, and of course birds of a feather – so their peers are in similar straights. Then they look at comparisons to average income earners in average cost-of-living cities from the 1950s and think “See! Things are worse for everyone now!”

They’ve taken their own dark room and assumed everyone is in it. Sure, if you have a low-wage job and you live in Manhattan, things are tough. But the person who makes an average wage and lives in Cleveland is doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s.

(And the low-wage person from Manhattan is also doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s, by the way. In fact, they’re doing better than the 1950s average person too, but it’s easy to see what you want to see.)

Of course, this type of person can’t see that they can just open the door and walk out of the dark room. It’s dark, so it might be a little tricky to find the door at first. But they can do it – and they can even shout the directions back into the room to help the others still stuck in there when they do.

Some people do that! They leave the room and try to help others do it too. But our personal failings are often sticky, and complaining about the room – useless as it is – is easier than leaving it. Some part of us thinks that our complaints should carry weight; surely since everyone is in these same circumstances, the revolution is right around the corner! The reason it never comes is because the pain is actually so localized and so minor, but you don’t see that yet.

So the next time you think that there’s some great and terrible flaw with the way of the entire world, pause. Consider that you’re just in a very dark but very small room, and that the door isn’t far away.