Brilliant piece. Should be in every daily in Australia.
Hi, my name's John and I've got first world problems
October 4, 2012
Opinion
Blunt Instrument John Birmingham tells stories. Most of them true. RSS feed
I live in the first world, the world with the bestest and mostest of pretty much everything you'd ever want. But that doesn't mean I don't have problems, and you don't have problems. And it sure as hell doesn't mean we can't bitch about them.
Sure, I don't have to crawl five miles through a minefield to draw bad water from a poisoned well controlled by a warlord psychopath. And I totes have sympathy for anyone who does. But I don't have to do that very often, so I'm unlikely to complain about it, am I? In fact, if I did, you'd have just cause for ragging on me.
My problems run to the sketchy wifi here in my holiday house by the beach. And the perfidy of network TV programmers. And the inexplicable popularity of sauvignon blanc. (I mean, seriously, people. It's the Britney Spears of the wine world.)
I grow annoyed with my inability to hold onto a decent pair of sunglasses. (Honest. I once bought myself three pairs of Raybans, when they were still a thing, and had lost all three within a couple of months). So now I buy these cheap-arse Chinese pieces of crap for ten bucks whenever I'm in need of some anti-glare protection and the local servo is running a sale on sunglasses and stale chocolate bars.
But I'd really like to have some nice sunnies and the tension thus created might well be a first world problem – OK, it totally is – but here's the thing I LIVE IN THE GODDAMNED FIRST WORLD AND IT'S MY GODDAMNED PROBLEM.
So when I throw myself a little pity party and get onto Twitter or Facebook to share the misery around, the last thing I want is some preachy wanker rolling his eyes and pushing back with a tired #firstworldproblems hashtag.
