A photo of mostly dark gray cloudy sky, with a turbulent sea at the bottom. White sans serif text reads, “I asked God, ‘Why are you taking me through troubled water?’ He replied, ‘Because your enemies can’t swim.’” The sharing source is “Purpose of Life.”
…but this macro is like encountering the twisted subterranean soul twin of “Footsteps in the Sand,” and then realizing that it was mainstream American Christianity all along.
A black and white photo of a shipwreck on a beach at high tide. The ship is in the bottom third of the image, and the rest is mostly cloudy sky. In the sky space, there is black serif text that says, “Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.” The source is “Power of Positivity.”
Ships sink because they let themselves sink.
The Edmund Fitzgerald just wasn’t trying hard enough.
And don’t even get me started on the Titanic.
“Boo-hoo, poor me, my hulls are all breached!”
But did it really think about the signals it was sending when that iceberg starting hitting on it? I think maybe somebody wanted to become synonymous with catastrophic hubris.
Square image from quotecatalog.com with a cartoon piece of strawberry shortcake on a black background. The pink sans serif text reads, “True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.” -Brianna Wiest
People who are well-off enough to periodically reject some of the many comforts available to them at any given moment are good about weirdly moralizing other people’s inconsistent access to comfort, at least partly due to a complex combination of projection and rationalization.
I am leaving that rat-maze of a sentence there, and barreling on to the cheese at the end.
For some reason, I haven’t seen a macro that says, “Don’t weirdly moralize other people’s access to and use of comforts you assume are equally available for everyone to reject in the name of self-righteousness!”
The rest of the article that this quote was pulled from does account for the fact that hygiene and food are not necessarily bad forms of self-care, but someone’s choice to pull the quote from that context speaks for itself, too.
The other squiffy implication of the framing “…the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from” is that you, cake-eaters and bath-takers, are wholly responsible for the stressful conditions that exist elsewhere in the world.
Probably your own shortcomings created the context in which you are mired in an exasperating, unsupportive, and/or dehumanizing workplace and/or life situation.
The infrastructures behind those exploitative systems supported by your employer / government / family / etc. are irrelevant here.
“…the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from” is just code for “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
The implication that small indulgences are “lesser” forms of self-care is grounded in the warped mentality that suffering and denial are inherently noble.
You built your own hedonistic little prison out of minor indulgences! For shame.
ME: Fix my problems, cake!
CAKE: Nope, sorry – you did your life too wrong to get to want things that are nice!
ME: (SOB)
(NOMNOM)
(SOB)
Decadent bath cakes will only shield you from the harshness of reality for a little while, without addressing the real roots of your own inadequacies.
Animated gif of drag queen Latrice Royale fanning herself and saying, “Shade.”
I can’t stand the kind of petty assholes who judge the adequacy of another person’s argument based on adherence to arbitrary grammatical conventions. That is some classist nonsense.
But you know what?
I bet that the Venn diagram of “people who have shared this macro” and “people who pride themselves on correcting internet grammar” is barely two circles.
And so, I’ll go ahead. I’ll be petty right back. I can get pedantic about a rule that doesn’t really matter to me.
Show a semicolon some love, you independent clauses.
From a design perspective, who decided to use strawberry shortcake instead of chocolate, like in the quote?
“The background is black, so chocolate wouldn’t contrast,” you say?…
THE SAME PERSON WHO CHOSE THE GRAPHIC CHOSE THE BACKGROUND.
The creation of this image did not require a design team. Stick that in your back pocket.
Lastly, I feel like the point of the quote is to reject the value of the cake, because finding comfort in cake means that you hate your life so much that cake is an escape from it.
So if you loved your life more, you wouldn’t need to seek solace in, like, physical comfort.
Shouldn’t the picture be… I don’t know… not cake?
Being truly happy because of how right your choices always are is like eating cake in the tub all the time, but without the guilt of knowing that you shouldn’t be eating cake, because you actually aren’t.
Pith Rant 
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