Embracing victimhood is wrong, even for victims

Life can treat you badly, and rest assured there would be ample times in it that you would feel short changed.

This could’ve happened with you at a very young age when you wouldn’t ever get a chance to bat while playing cricket at your local playground. This could’ve happened to you in your school if you were not good at studies (remember your teacher’s condescending look as you crouched and felt like melting away in oblivion), it could’ve happened to you in college, it could’ve happened to you in your office when your reporting manager made you feel as if you were the worst employee that could ever have been. It happens all the while and with everybody. Some go through it publicly while some would even consider themselves lucky to have only faced this humiliation in person.

Even the best of the best have gone through it. Remember the story of a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi being thrown out of his first-class compartment at Pietermaritzburg in 1893. Imagine the humiliation he would’ve felt at that moment - a man who owned a legit ticket and still thrown out of the train. Or the humiliation that Karna from story of Mahabharata would’ve felt all his life because of his supposedly humble origins. Some would feel it because of their birth, their roots (read the wonderful Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley to really understand what slavery was all about) and some due to the travesty that life throws at them. At close quarters, corporate world is a perfect breeding ground for it. A system that runs on zero sum game would naturally lead to situations abound of such kind. If you’ve felt humiliation in your office, the good news is that you are not alone. Remember, Cyrus Mistry getting knocked off from being the Chairperson of Tata Group. Or the famous story of Steve Jobs getting fired from the company he founded himself. Your reporting manager who humiliates you on a daily basis could also be on the receiving end from somebody. What goes around comes around. Life has in it the capacity to make the best jokes out of us.

Such scars remain for long and I can’t think of a person who wouldn’t have been shamed in his life.

So, under the circumstances, there would be ample chances that you would start considering yourself a victim. Possibly you would not feel so at the first hint of a bad treatment, but such insults and tribulations can happen sequentially over a lifetime, and even the best can wither under life’s mistreatments. Is there a quick fix to it? Well, there are none, but the simple thing to realize is that when you are not the only one to go through it, why feel bad about it. It’s one of the negative bumps that life gives us all on this ride of ours. And it would be foolish to say that - Well my bumps are harder than my neighbour’s. Each to his own, every person has different battles to fight. Even a Mukesh Ambani would’ve his own shares of troubles to deal with.

Also, if life throws a spanner at you, fight back. If your reporting manager is an asshole, fight back. Let him know that his tactics are not helping the case, talk to the HR, work on yourself, or do something to wriggle out of the situation, and least of all - don’t become like your reporting manager. Be empathetic to people who report in to you. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi didn’t wait for time to forget his humiliation. Rather he did something about the raw deal that was handed over to him – he worked to bring down a colonial power just as Chanakya had done with Nanda dynasty centuries ago. Cyrus Mistry filed legal suit against the Tata Group and Steve Jobs went on to found a new company (life even did poetic justice by bringing him back to Apple).

Feeling of victimhood can kick start a negative loop of negative emotions pulling yourself away from working hard, and not complaining about it.

My sense is that those who can avoid considering themselves victims along with life long philosophy of working hard without complaining would always stay afloat in life, and might even emerge winners out of it (basis one's definition of what-a-winner-is), because life in itself is not a zero-sum game. Everyone can win here.

So, don’t consider yourself a victim, even if you are one and never stop working hard.