They seem to think everything just comes easy, everything is obtainable. I was just reading a thread on reddit about a woman who screams non stop at her son and takes all her frustrations out on him and all of reddit are like “She needs to get therapy, for a long time, maybe years, maybe permanently.” Like, what the hell? Who on earth could even afford that? Do they all just have endless money? Even if you live in a country with socialised healthcare you normally have to spend ages on a waiting list for a short course of therapy. Who are all these millionaires who think everyone can just be in therapy permanently? Whenever anyone has a problem the reddit answer is always “Therapy, now!” With no thought at all about whether the person can access or pay for that.
I’ve noticed this with other things on reddit too. There was once a reddit thread where people were asking why poor people buy takeaway food and how they can’t be poor if they buy it. I spoke on there about how I’d been in a situation where I was living in a bedsit, had run out of money, only had a few pounds left. There was no money left on my gas or electric meter. I could either put my last few pounds on the meter, or I could buy food, but then with no gas or electric I wouldn’t be able to cook any food. So my only option was to buy some cheap ready cooked food like chips from the fish and chip shop. Some really rude redditors refused to believe this, saying no-one is ever in that situation. They are so dissociated from reality they really don’t even believe people can be so poor they have to choose between utilities or food.
I’ve see other threads where someone posts photos of a medical condition they have, asking what it could be. When told to go to the doctor they say they have no medical insurance, no money to pay, etc and the others are like “Just go, this could be serious.” Like OK, just materialise money out of thin air then. It’s like they think everyone actually has an emergency fund but just doesn’t want to dip into it. It makes me think there’s no hope for humanity, when so many people are like this, not even wanting to believe how poor other people are, there will never be enough appetite for change to actually change things.
Lucky for us, Reddit is not the general population, even if it is distressingly over-represented therein. Also a portion of the most ignorant ones are literally teenagers.
I find people in general are like that though. Very judgmental of anyone who’s struggling, always assuming if you aren’t doing well it’s your own fault for not trying hard enough. Many of the people on reddit who say things like this are middle aged too.
Like I said, it’s distressingly over-represented in the general population, but it still is not the same as the general population, where there are lots of things to have grievances with in terms of people’s social attitudes but a noticeably smaller number of people are openly advocating for banishing a woman to the shadow realm for having an argument in a grocery store.
I wouldn’t equate my experience with yours (I’ve read a number of your posts), but I’m also frequently someone who visibly “isn’t doing well” as you put it, and lots of people react with at least implicit contempt, but I would not remotely compare how most of them or the much kinder individuals behave to how redditors are just a few steps shy of open eugenicism. You’ve probably seen a lot more people be vile than I have and it’s horrible that society is like that right now, I just think a lot of people aren’t like that. This is something with a lot of variance by location too, of course.