I don't mean any offense when I say this, but I kind of resent this type of perspective.

I can't say for sure but I suspect if we knew each other, I would fall into the "non-addict friend with problems" type category.

You do correctly point out that a lot of people worry whether they will be judged for revealing a problem. This has happened to me and my family quite severely. Long-term, deeply close friends have abandoned me; extended family scatters like roaches when the lights turn on; goodly people of the working class like pastors or coworkers just brush you off with annoying platitudes.

Human beings seem pretty hard-wired to pass judgement on other people due to their associates and circumstances. We absolutely are a "blame the victim" species through and through. If we can't even stop ourselves from blaming the victim in matters of rape or child abuse, how can we expect people to see others' problems clearly?

So, yeah, for people who aspire to some of the fruits of their working class labor, and who feel great pressure from "blame the victim" thinking, they sure as shit are paranoid about not coming off as though they "have problems" -- and it's pretty disingenuous for you or me or anyone else to judge them for this and roll our eyes while we say they should be more zen and stop "wanting things" or "clinging to their pride" or whatever.

The other big thing though is that people really, truly can be victims of circumstance. People can have depression, for example, not because they are genetically predisposed to have depressive reactions to mostly-normal circumstances, but because they have normal, sane, healthy reactions to insane circumstances. Reacting to something by being depressed about it can be, and often is, totally healthy because it represents your body's correctly calibrated response to a circumstance that cannot be "lived with" and must be purged out of your life for survival.

I bring this up because I feel like a lot of people give extremely little thought to the problems other people have. We rationalize and look for one or two ways that it might "be their fault" (i.e. blame the victim) and if we can't find those, then we revert to Plan B which is to rationalize one or two ways that they could "get better but they won't" (e.g. they aren't currently seeing a counselor; they aren't currently on anti-depressants; they aren't currently in a support group; they refuse to have a less materialistic outlook on life; etc. etc.).

Our brains are wired to find or invent short-circuits out of actually empathizing with suffering people. Just like we want our shit to be flushed down the toilet bowl and to Just Stop Being Our Problem, we think along similar lines about the problems that others tell us, even close friends and loved ones.

What I can say for sure is that letting go of ego and pride has almost nothing to do with it; having humility has almost nothing to do with it; "reject desire and attachment" sounds nice on a poster, but that's just so thoroughly not human that I don't even know where to begin, let alone that it too has almost nothing to do with anyone's extrinsic circumstances.

I guess what I am saying is that a lot of people who have problems already are well aware that there is no "thing" that's going to make them happy. They aren't searching for that. And yet, being embedded in the life circumstances they are in causes real, visceral pain, and they have no choice but to try to find a way to not be in pain. There is no amount of perspective shifting that's going to just poof make a painful circumstance into a pain-free one.

And, to be quite blunt, for a lot of people, money absolutely would solve a huge number of their circumstantial problems. I don't want to make this comment any longer than it already is, so I'll just provide a link to a past comment that I made. It was on a thread discussing the semi-recent self-aggrandizing post from DHH about his magical foresight to know that wealth was never going to "truly" make him happy.

< https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628129 >

Money is just one dimension of all this, sure. But I bring it up because one of the first things we all rush to bash is someone's "materialism" in the face of their problems. I have to believe this is some kind of Hansonian signalling dealie that's secretly about taking stuff from others, because it really is the case that money can solve a lot of problems in life. And instead of indoctrinating people with feel-good mantras about being less materialistic, we ought to be teaching them when and how to strategically employ their materialism when it is for their own benefit and when to avoid letting it become excessive. Heuristics that are too sweepingly general, like "never be materialistic" frankly do more harm than good and probably lead people to worse living circumstances that feedback into the pressure to look like you're not having a problem and just magnify the whole thing.

We can probably make similar claims about love and relationships, health and beauty, intelligence, credential, and status within organizational or social hierarchies. All of these things, like money, have a slippery slope aspect to them: you can really fuck yourself over by caring about them too much, but you can also fuck yourself over by believing some zen bullshit mantra about how you can "transcend" them and they don't matter at all. Like most things, the answer is somewhere in the middle, and it's exceedingly hard to get it right, and it's different for every person, and no one has any magic answer for how it's going to work out for you or me or any other given person.