I am losing my sense of humanity. I think that happens when you get so caught up in yourself and your problems you forget there are people who suffer worse than you do. You get to a point of being so absorbed in yourself over such a long period that when you see evidence of how other people are suffering, you’re hardly able to care, which I suppose is hardly a crisis if you believe that selfishness is a virtue. Personally I don’t like that I am losing my ability to put my own stuff in perspective relative to what is going in the world.

I complain about being poor but I am able to eat every day. There are people who don’t have the freedom to decide to eat this or that on Monday, that or this on Tuesday. I might not be able eat like a billionaire, but I do still have choices within my means. I don’t have to partake of rice every day because that’s all that’s available, or worse, go days without food.

I complain that I just barely managed to raise the money to pay the rent; but I did raise the money. I have a roof over my head. There are people sleeping in cardboard boxes, under bridges, on park benches, and they are not all drug addicts and alcoholics and worthless people who made their beds and now must deal with the brutal consequences of the unwise choices they made.

Certainly, the people living in the Kroo Bay slum area of Sierra Leone aren’t living in squalor because they’re worthless druggies and alcoholics who have no ambition to succeed in life. They are people who got dealt an abysmally bad hand in life, trapped in a mucky black pit they have very little if any control over escaping. It shouldn’t be hard for me to empathize. I spent the first 12 years of my life living in a country where poverty, while not to the extent of severity as in the slums of Sierra Leone, was nonetheless the rule. But I’ve become almost desensitized to the plights of others, wrapped up in my own cares, so angry that my life isn’t what I want it to be that it hardly matters that by comparison to what many others are going through, I am very fortunate. I suppose in a way I simply don’t want to allow myself to put things in perspective because it might inspire me to want to accept my life for what it is, and if I accept my life for what it is, then I become more willing to settle for mediocrity; it becomes easier to pacify myself by telling myself that "as bad as it is, it could always be worse". But the truth is, it could be worse. I could be in a situation of not even having the choice to get up every day and take some small action towards a goal of changing my life. I could be living in the slums of Sierra Leone.