Necessities of Life or Entitlements of a Selfish Lifestyle?

The coffee is weak. The Wi-Fi drops out. The barista doesn’t smile warmly enough. Within minutes, thumbs are flying across screens, documenting injustices as if history itself needs correcting with the swipe of a finger.

We call these things bad. Not mildly inconvenient. Not slightly annoying. Bad. As if the entire universe has let us down.

But “bad,” like most words, only makes sense when it’s kept in context.

We complain about bad coffee while sipping it from a clean cup, in a dry room, with electricity humming quietly behind the walls. Meanwhile, elsewhere, people bend down and drink from puddles. Not artisan puddles. Not filtered puddles. Just water where water happens to gather—muddy, shared, risky.

We complain about slow service in restaurants, forgetting that eating out is not a human right but a social luxury. In other parts of the world, there is no service. There isn’t even a plate. There is simply food, if you’re lucky. Yet we sit tapping cutlery, irritated that our meal took an extra ten minutes, as if patience were social currency.

Life, for many of us, is astonishingly good—so good that we barely notice it until one tiny cog slips.

Water arrives in our homes with obedient regularity. Electricity flows invisibly, lighting rooms and powering devices with no effort required on our part. Waste disappears. Just… disappears. We don’t dig holes. We don’t burn refuse. We don’t haul anything down the street. Someone else takes it away, and we give it almost no thought.

In some places, there are no homes at all. No walls, no roofs, no infrastructure quietly working in the background. Survival isn’t something you complain about online; it’s something you actively manage, hour by hour.

None of this is meant to shame anyone out of having feelings. Discomfort is real. Frustration is human. But there’s a difference between acknowledging irritation and mistaking it for hardship.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve blurred necessity and entitlement. The line between “I need this to live” and “I expect perfection for me” has become fuzzy. We’ve grown used to convenience arriving on schedule, polished and personalised, and when it falters—even briefly—it feels like a horrific violation.

Perhaps that’s why everything feels so dramatic. When your baseline is comfort, even a small drop feels like free fall.

My grandfather would have had little patience for that nonsense.

He was a man who reused nails. Bent ones, too. He’d straighten them against concrete, sort bolts by size, and store screws in old jars that once held something else entirely. Nothing was wasted. Complaints, if they existed, were kept private and proportionate. You didn’t announce them. You dealt with things.

If he could see what we complain about now—and more importantly, what we broadcast—he’d likely turn in his grave. Not because life is perfect, but because it is comparatively abundant. Gratitude, at the very least, should be exercised first, second and last.

We live in a time when problems are too often shared. They not to be solved, but to be witnessed and enjoyed. Social media has turned minor discomforts into performances. The coffee isn’t just bad—it’s a story for a social stage. The service isn’t just slow—it’s content. Our grievances have become lifestyle accessories.

And yet, when you step back, take stock, and look honestly at the wider world, the picture changes.

Life is good. Not flawless, not fair, not equal—but good in ways that earlier generations would recognise immediately. Warmth. Light. Clean water. Safety. Choice. These are not small things. They are enormous, even if they arrive quietly.

So maybe it’s time we recalibrated. Not silencing complaints, but weighing them. Asking whether something is truly bad—or simply less than ideal. Whether it belongs in the category of necessity or the luxury of expectation.

Because perspective doesn’t eliminate discomfort—but it does restore balance. And balance, like gratitude, is something worth holding onto, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a post.

-Michael Forman