wow, that's truly sad to hear. Thank you for sharing your personal experience. I wonder how much mental health stress is caused by outside influence on people and them feeling they have to "live up to" something or "do more"?
There is room in the world for people with all education levels and none are more important than another. Value and worth should not come from position or title or accomplishments alone. Yes, they are important sometimes as it seems the MIT professor was incredibly smart and working on things that could change the world, and the world needs people like that. The world also needs EMTs who rush to your house and perform CPR and save your life and bus drivers to bring our children to school and barbers to cut hair, etc. It doesn't work without ALL of us.
If this man truly did all this because of some perceived lack of accomplishment on his part or feeling resentment due to someone else doing better (or maybe not even better, just successful in a different way) than him. SAD
As an immigrant: a lot of mental health stress is due to high parental opinion of their child. And many of us who move here to achieve and sometimes, achieve fast, may get stalled by the reasons unrelated to us. But ironically, many have that childhood, when parents were telling us, “you are the best”. It starts as the plus. But some may break when bad things happen and achievement doesn’t immediately follow.
But this is when a totally different quality is necessary, and it is resilience. I remember coming here and thinking, I have generations of achievers behind my back. And then one year, things were not great physically, but I reminded myself that some of my relatives survived GULAG, so surely I’d survive driving 64 miles to my job, one way, every day! And back, too!
Interestingly, when I visited my relatives one year before COVID, and I haven’t seen them for years, I found out that they were doing the same, mentally asking the same long-gone relatives, “What would you do in my shoes?” when things were not good. “Mobilizing resilience” is important.
So I think you expect the US being the place where one can achieve, but all immigrants who come to achieve need to have the ability to mentally survive when things don’t get easy. And things like: envy, counting your neighbors’ salaries, or living according to the principle “I have done something to him, he owes me back”, don’t help at all! Resilience is something very different. And, if you are not too social, for example, you can still “gain points” by being kind and compassionate.
I mean, Claudio got so angry because he didn’t have survivor’s qualities but “survivor’s qualities” require doing something totally opposite to shooting at innocent people who are not even armed.
In short: egotism and altruism are both equally necessary for survival, but one without the other is a minus.
JMO as an immigrant. And of course, you have to be prepared to be interested in other cultures.
Sorry for a long-winded post, I am wondering where and how he got so lost.
