So there's this football whose career hit a peak and he started regressing badly. No football club would sign him, no one would give him a contract, and even after he tried with a few other clubs, it just feels like the talent wasn't there anymore.
A few days ago he started streaming on tiktok to make a living, and a few people started laughing at him, for being a pro footballer once and now resort to streaming to actually make money.
and from my own reasoning, over 90% of people who are probably laughing at him have probably not experienced the harsh side of life.
Someone who is ridiculously rich can go back to zero, either from collective decisions that had to do with them, or external factors they couldn't control one way or the other, life can hit unexpectedly and humans can be very callous in their judgemental nature.
This is why I think everyone at some point in life needs to get mess up by life to learn the art of empathy, understanding and a sense of responsibility.
We have a lot of people in life who haven't been through any horrible life experiences and these are the regular people you'd find on social media, mocking everything they don't understand.
The shocking thing is, a lot of people are silently going to zero everyday, and the experience can be damning.
Survival or Die
When it comes to survival, shame is the always the first thing to go, it's always replaced with the urgency to go by, and we understand that people can get mocked because they choose to beg, ask for help or do demeaning things for money...
of course, this is mostly baffling to someone who doesn't understand what it means to go from being comfortable to "needing to urgently survive"
I think the idea is that people who go to zero even when they'd handled a lot of money and fame, and we tend to praise people from going from zero to millions.
While these two are not comparable we tend to always misunderstand the fact that life is not white or black, and there are no definite rules which can help you from getting it or losing it.
I've seen people go from being rich and comfortable to being broke and desperate, hell, I've experienced it myself, and honestly getting back up will require you to tear down your reservations, privacy, pride and every other attitude you built when you had it all.
Whether you like it or not, no one is coming to save you, and if you cannot become shameless with hustling, then you're probably going to starve.
I worked with someone who use to be financial stable, but I guess he made a few horrible decisions and lost a lot of that money.
This man had to come to the trenches to start hustling with people like me, and while it felt unnatural to do something like that, he had to actually survive with his family.
I never really understood it because I was 18 or 19 at the time, but this is the pressure you always get when you made money in the past and suddenly you cannot pay your bills anymore.
Life's crazy, and being depraved can make anyone desperate.
Personally I've done crazy things to make money, including exposing myself to daily racial abuse because I wanted to make money, the racial abuse didn't mean much to me because being emotional does not pay the bills, and you'll wonder why rich people gets sick or maybe even die when they go back to zero.
A lot of rich people cannot imagine themselves going back to the trenches, some of them would prefer to die than to go back to the trenches and that's because they've probably burned all the bridges, cut ties with the trenches forever only to be hit with a reality that takes them back to zero, and the experience can be humbling.
Being humble by life is something only a few people understands, you're not just normally humbled, you'll probably have to go back to some of your vomits and get laughed at by a lot of people, but like I said, life is so harsh, that a lot of people hardly experiences this, either because they're lucky or because they were more careful.
Conclusion
Overall, I don't attribute the stability of a person based on how they've taken care, sometimes it could just be that they were lucky, including other external factors that worked in their favour.
Overall, I think the lesson is that anyone can go back to zero, and people have to be sensitive to understand that anything can happen to anyone, no matter how they prepare enough, life is that crazy, and being humble enough in life, is better than being unnaturally humbled by life.
If you're currently hustling to stay afloat, then do your best to continue, the difference between up or down is time.