self pity is the difference between a hero and a loser

I am not a good judge of character, but there is one thing that I can always sniff out like a freaking bloodhound, and it is self pity. You know how when you don't have a dog and you go to someone's house and they have a dog, you can smell the dog in the air and they can't because they become nose blind? I'm like that, but with self pity. That's because I grew up in a house utterly free of the scent of self pity. It was a house with none of it. It was a house where everyone had a very stern inner voice that they talk to themselves with. Anyway, partly as a result of that and partly as a result, I think, of early exposure to Disney's John Smith, I became quite the collector of male vulnerabilities when I grew up. I have to say, I was actually a very good dater. And my attitude was that everyone has, like, three really interesting stories. And my job on the date was just to hear those stories, regardless of what else took place. And it means that you end up hearing a lot of young men's highest highs and lowest lows. And even when someone's telling you the story of their highest highs, there's melancholy to it, often because they know it won't happen again. So I further honed my expertise. And I could tell you in the course of that story, down to the like... picogram, how much self pity was floating around in that man's attitude. And let me tell you, self pity is what it all comes down to. Self pity is the difference between a brooding Byronic hero and an incel. Self pity is the difference between adolescence and adulthood. It is the difference between yearning and the ick. I think that we are in a cultural moment where self pity is extraordinarily tolerated and indulged. I think it's part of the reason we're in a new era of adolescence. By which I mean even adults not only behave like adolescents, but celebrate and elevate the behavior of adolescence. I have an essay on my substack about how the trauma plot of the like 2010s has been supplanted by the comeuppance plot. Because I think that's what a lot of people fantasize about now. Not that typical tale of the everyman who goes on the hero's journey and becomes a hero, but of someone who was already special at the beginning of the story and is merely awaiting their comeuppance. And for me, the point of dating men was to date a man, meaning an adult man, meaning someone who has traded self pity for self respect. And the comeuppance fantasy for actually doing useful things everyday.