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Pretty Privilege, Social Currency & The Empathy Scale
If you want to determine where you fit on anyone’s personal standard of social success, pay attention to how they react when you have something to celebrate or cry over.
People do not have to have such an impact on me that I am mentally and emotionally enslaved to their critiques. I can keep the benefits of doing my best and being at my best to myself, first by deciding what my personal best is and what this means to me and me alone. Not to earn a man or to earn friends or professional connections, but to earn something greater than this: freedom. The ability to not care. To check out of society and its silly rules.
One of these silly rules is that we must treat others based on how inferior or superior we believe them to be. Feeling above or beneath others impedes on the ultimate goal of why we are here: to understand unconditional love, and to express it as well.
People are naturally meddlesome, and they will haggle you into answering the most invasive questions about your personal life, career, income, family life and other topics because they are actually using your looks and lifestyle to secretly compare themselves to you, plus measure how much empathy they are willing to give you.
Basically, anyone who sees you as beneath them will always have a lot of sympathy for you…
