Put Your Back Into the Fucking Plow

I overheard part of a conversation today that reminded me very much of a former friend.

This friend always claimed to have come from money, and he would dominate conversations by bragging about how he used to have money, how much he knew about money, and how he knew what real money was.

The problem was, he didn't make any of the fucking money himself.

He inherited it.

And somehow, despite knowing everything there apparently was to know about money, he was always fucking broke. He would whine about how he'd helped so many people throughout his life and how, now that he needed help, nobody was willing to help him.

Join the fucking club, I'd secretly whisper under my breath.

Not because I come from money. I don't. I grew up poor. I meant join the fucking club made up of people who learned a long fucking time ago that nobody was coming to save them.

But there was a fundamental difference between him and me.

I work every fucking day. I've worked my entire life. I get up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and start working through whatever needs to be done that day. I'm not operating from some brilliant fucking master plan. I'm just trying to build a life that's a little bit better than it was yesterday.

That's fucking it.

And that's what America is supposed to be about.

We have liberty, or at least we're supposed to, in a country supposedly committed to preserving it. But liberty comes with responsibility. If you want the freedom to build your own life, then you also have to accept responsibility for fucking building it.

That means responsibility for yourself and responsibility to the people around you. It means risk. It means you might fail. Hell, you probably fucking will fail. Repeatedly.

But that's also what makes success so goddamned rewarding when it finally comes. You know what it cost because you walked through every fucking failure on the way there. You remember being broke. You remember being scared. You remember wondering whether you were ever going to get your shit together. You remember every time you fell flat on your fucking face.

Then you got back up.

My former friend would rather whine about his circumstances than do something about them. He seemed perpetually convinced that somebody else should help him because, at some point in the past, he believed he'd helped everybody else.

And I fucking fell for it once.

I gave this entitled prick six thousand fucking dollars.

Actually, I should put that in quotes.

I "lent" him six thousand dollars.

He eventually decided to send me a payment, as though I'm a fucking bank and we'd entered into some sort of installment loan. In retrospect, I wish we had. At least then I'd have firsthand knowledge of when the remaining payments were coming, and I'd have some fucking recourse when they didn't.

But I gave him the money.

That one's on me.

I know I'll never see the rest of it, and I learned a lesson that was probably worth considerably less than six thousand fucking dollars.

Flash forward to this morning.

I'm having my coffee when I overhear what appeared to be two siblings talking. I wasn't trying to listen, but one of them said something that immediately grabbed my attention.

"I don't get it. You didn't help me, but now you're out spending money on a car."

The other person became visibly fucking annoyed.

Understandably.

Because fucking really?

The argument wasn't that this person had borrowed money and refused to repay it. It wasn't that they'd broken some agreement or abandoned some obligation. The argument was simply: You have money. I needed money. Therefore, you should have given your money to me.

That's some entitled fucking bullshit.

Someone having enough money to buy something does not establish your claim to that money. Their bank account doesn't become communal property simply because your life is difficult. They don't owe you an accounting of their finances because you've decided your needs are more important than whatever the fuck they planned to do with the money they earned.

Maybe they saved for that car.

Maybe they worked overtime for it.

Maybe they've been putting fifty fucking dollars away every paycheck for three years.

Maybe they inherited every fucking penny yesterday.

It doesn't matter.

It's their fucking money.

News flash, honey: everybody who has genuinely tried to build something in this life has had it fucking hard at some point. In fact, that's frequently why they try so fucking hard now.

They remember hungry.

They remember broke.

They remember scared.

They remember nobody fucking coming.

And those experiences become fuel.

That's certainly true for me. I didn't build the life I have because somebody handed me a fucking blueprint and a pile of lumber. I've fucked up. I've lost. I've been broke. I've been knocked down. I've made terrible decisions. I've trusted people I shouldn't have trusted. Apparently I've even given six thousand fucking dollars to people who had no intention of giving it back.

But I kept fucking moving.

So I'd like to say I'm sorry that this person apparently had a tough life. I really would like to be able to say that.

But I fucking can't summon much sympathy for the idea that suffering creates entitlement.

Want to compare tough lives?

Want to trade fucking notes?

Want to trade notes with my dad? My uncles? Want to trade notes with some of my Navy buddies? Want to sit around a table with a bunch of people who have been kicked squarely in the fucking teeth by life and explain why your particular hardship means somebody else owes you what they've earned?

Good luck with that.

Having a difficult life doesn't make you special.

What you fucking do about it might.

So get off the fucking couch. Stop staring at somebody else's field and bitching because their crops are taller than yours. Stop demanding part of their harvest because you don't like what's growing in your own fucking dirt.

Get up.

Find your field.

Put your back into the fucking plow.

And start tilling the fucking land.

Because that's how you build a fucking home.