Reduced Individuality Through Suffering Is Rarely What It Seems

One of the troubling paradoxes of modern life
is that to illustrate modern suffering well enough
it has to be rendered as a brief and well told story
about an individual as presented by mass media.

By the time the story appears it is aided
by a Greek chorus of mildly stricken relatives.
then an over competitive media reduces the original story
to 'grieving relative hits out' and otherwise makes out
that the experience is atypical from the norm.

To varying degrees, suffering is the common experience.
And when the stories we tell so easily misrepresent us
the more honest path will be a silent misanthropy.....