You can live in a neat little bubble somewhere, have an easy going job, these days that comes with lots of home office days, have plenty of time for entertainment, sports activities, movies, series, wellness treatments, visits to hairdressers and beauticians and you can indulge in a fair amount of gossip, plan holidays in the sun, climb some mountain and do other instagrammable stuff. You are vaguely aware that somewhere in the margins, somewhere where all people are crazy and very different from you, you’re reluctant to call them primitive, there is a lot of suffering, but the source of your suffering is more on the level of ‘my cousin stayed in a better holiday on Bali than I did’ or ‘the neighbour’s wife has a tighter ass’ or ‘my colleague makes a bit more money than I do, but am sure he works even less than I do.’ You’re an oasis dweller. Conflict zones in the world are merely zones where you won’t book a hotel with an all in formula until things blow over.

You can be a palace dweller or one of their minions. This means that you profit enormously from the labour of other earth dwellers, also from the oasis dwellers, and you profit especially from keep a substantial segment of the population suffering in the desert. People who care about the plight of the people in the desert or oasis dwellers who wish to tear down your palace are either bribed with status and luxury and if they still won’t comply you try to cancel them. As a palace dweller you have everything except for two things: integrity and… enough. You never have enough, you always want more and to make this possible lots of folks need to suffer if that happens to work for you. If you can increase your wealth by encouraging oasis dwellers to care about some desert dwellers you will also do that. You have plenty of oasis dwellers working directly for you to put a nice face on your palace dweller existence. Quite a few journalists, whether they realize it or not, enable you to maintain your palace. Also quite a few police officers, politicians, soldiers are on the payroll. For the extremely dirty work you will even have some of the more violence prone desert dwellers on the payroll. The biggest threat to your luxurious, but always paranoid, palace existence comes from the people in the oasis who might start to sympathize too much with the desert dwellers and might get too offended by your palace and your eternal plans to keep expanding your palace.

Then there are the oasis dwellers who, perhaps through some design flaw in their human make-up, can’t be happy, try as they might, in their oasis, knowing that some people dwell in palaces and millions of people suffer in the desert and their suffering even benefits the palace dwellers and sometimes it even benefits the oasis dwellers. These are really annoying people who are everybody’s worst enemy. They are also their own worst enemy, because instead of ordering a happy meal at some Scottish sounding junk food chain they have to complaaaaaaaaiiiiiin about all the nasty things some people, who are not even their direct relatives, are experiencing in the desert. And the most annoying ones also claim that you don’t deserve your palace. They can’t really help the desert dwellers, but they send out a lot of encouraging words to the desert dwellers, which mainly pisses off some of the oasis dwellers who see ethe desert dwellers as a big threat to their comfortable existence. Even the desert dwellers don’t really like the sympathetic oasis dwellers, because in the end they usually don’t help the desert dwellers in any material sense. They are oasis dwellers who can’t enjoy their comfort because they know some other people don’t have those comforts, but they are at a loss as to how to change that. Here and there you’ll find a sympathetic oasis dweller who risks all his comfort – not me – to materially improve the plight of the desert dwellers.

Then all the way on the bottom rung of society there are the desert dwellers. The people who either stand in the way of your next palace extension or just happen to get caught in the crossfire, because sometimes the palace dwellers in one country are envious of the palace dwellers in another country.

Each category of dwellers have their own sources of pain and misery. To an oasis dweller putting on 10 pounds may feel like the end of the world, for example. And a desert dweller may lose his or her home, but may have the blessing of a community ready to take care of him or her, a community that will offer friendship and love, something oasis dwellers tend not to have much of. Oasis dwellers tend to be two-legged credit cards walking from shop to shop without much sense of a community.

Palace dwellers practically sleep with one eye open cause they could always lose their privileges and their kids seem so hard to keep from developping some kind of addiction.

Once you go from a mildly pleasurable existence as an oasis dweller to a sympathetic oasis dweller there is almost never a way back. If you are in the desert it’s going to be hard to get into the oasis and knowing what you know you are almost bound to be a sympathetic oasis dweller, which is not as much fun as you thought it was going to be. You can also be an oasis dweller with aspirations to become a palace dweller so your free time will go into a lot of podcasts and books and workshops telling you how to become a palace dweller.

So no matter where you look, suffering is going to be inevitable, but and a lot of pain can be avoided if you accept the words of Gabor Maté, born as a desert dweller and now a very sympathetic oasis dweller:

‘the attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain’

If you read this you are likely a sympathetic oasis dweller, so I guess, like me you are trying to enjoy life in the oasis a bit, while not being blind to the misery of the desert dwellers or the shenanigangs of the palace dwellers and their lackeys.