by Jamesbeam | 2026-02-15 12:50:57+00:00
I think you make the mistake of tying character traits to causality for his circumstances. It’s a common thing for people with trauma to think of themselves as the heroes of their stories. It’s a mechanism to stay sane in dire circumstances and part of the human survival instinct.

An example.

You will often hear people talk about themselves as cancer survivors or that they fought cancer and won.

Now if we take a step back to look at that, thinking you beat an illness because you ate more green leaves and less sugar is pretty narcissistic, because in reality it’s often more of a dozen people spending hundreds of hours of time during your treatment and the scientists developing your therapy meds that spend years of their life having the major share in your recovery, if you recover.

You could eat double-stacked cheeseburgers for a year having cancer and it will have zero outcome on the cancer survival chance itself. Therapy works or you die. Reality is that simple.

Still you will never see a comment under a cancer survivor’s post that says I get an incredible “narcissism ick" from this writing.

Why do you think that is?

Almost everyone of us over 40 knows someone who died miserably of cancer or got healthy again but you can see the toll therapy and illness took on the person, their life, their careers, financially etc. So we give them some rope and empathy and let them be their own heroes if it makes their life easier.

Homelessness on the other hand is something that is always tied to personal failure by society. When often just like cancer, it’s just an unfortunate accumulation of external factors.

But you set yourself up to dislike this man from the start. First you established for yourself he must be a narcissist from his writing, then you try to find reasons why you’re right, but not a single one why you could be wrong.

That’s pretty dumb.

First, you say he seems to think he’s better than the "normal" homeless person, which feeds right into your narcissistic prejudice, and then you continue from there, building yourself a nice causality chain based on your personal belief model that doesn’t seem to have room for thinking about the big picture.

You say he is not a victim of external factors and instead directly responsible for his misery, but you don’t know the full story.

You could have sent him a message and asked about it; instead, you went to a conclusion on a flawed set of data you possess about this man and then published your conclusion, probably because you usually get away with that or people simply don’t care enough about you to take time out of their day questioning you about your belief system.

You link his upbringing to him not even having a couch to crash on, which has zero correlation. If rich/privileged people never felt lonely, Elon Musk wouldn’t have paid a fortune because he seems to offer flight attendants horse money for someone to voluntarily touch his dingdong.

I don’t know how you come to the conclusion that he thinks his grandma’s death is exceptional, which it is tbh, as with everyone who loses close family, but that angered you more than his own mother sending him an email that his grandmother died instead of calling him.

Did that not raise any questions with you? If your dad dies, do you expect to get a text from your mum? In what world is that normal?

But as I said, you set yourself up from the start to not like this man and therefore miss stuff like that from the narrow point of view. There are subtle hints everywhere that this man is a victim of his circumstances, and he tries to make the best of it.

From thinking to being qualified to do the work of a lawyer, to never backing down, because he is convinced he can prove everyone wrong.

About the stealing. We both agree that stealing is not an option, but we also don’t have to survive on the street in winter.

He only steals stuff that he needs to survive; he doesn't sell what he steals.

I think the store managers would have helped him out if he asked nicely, maybe do some clean-up work or anything to pay for the stuff in return; there would be no need to steal.

But this man fell through all security nets and is now met with losing trust in society enough so he rather steals than asks or offers something of value to the people who could make his life better.

And he is right to be sceptical about the society he now lives in.

You do not care how we could get this man back into society; you put him into a drawer and decided this man’s life is not worth a word of positivity or half an hour of your time to think about how you could help him, and then you put your disapproval out on the internet so people can chime in and make you feel better.

I really hope you’re not a Christian, because you will go to hell for stuff like this.