Are You a Crab?
It’s time for a change, said my friend, and stashed his considerable liquor rack into a shipping container. That was back in the Obama years, when the world hadn’t fallen ill yet, and the United States seemed a splendid place to move to. What drew him was nature, politics (can you imagine), but mostly the people, a different mindset that he craved. Whatever he imagined he needed at that point in his life, he would find it in the Land of Opportunity.
So, how did that go down with his family and friends? Someone finally fulfilling a dream, doing a big step towards his happiness, you’d imagine they’d be delighted or at the very least supportive, right?
Wrong, so wrong.
Sure, some were supportive. But a lot of people he loved met his plans with resistance, trying to sow fear, planting doubt.
Are you sure? Is that really what you want? It’s not better over there, you know, just different. This is just a phase. Forget about it. What, don’t you like it here? Is it so bad here with us? Did you ever look at health insurance over there? (Bla, bla, bla.)
When he told me about this odd behavior, we tried to figure out why people who positively loved him would try to put obstacles in his way. And then we realized this wasn’t about him at all. It was about them.
They were crabs.
Crabs? Well, not literally of course. They’re people with crab mentality. And because that is a phrase you might hear a bunch in the Philippines, let’s visit a wet market in Cebu together, shall we?
A Bucket Full of Crabs
Our habal-habals, our motorcycle taxis, stop at a single-story complex somewhere in a part of town you’ve never seen. It’s bustling with life, so even as you climb off the backseat of the motorcycle you’re watching out not to hit anyone, and not to get hit by the free-flowing traffic. You hand over some change to the driver who has already acquired the next rider, and I wave you over to the entrance of the wet market.
On the sidewalk and all around the building are stalls and stands offering anything from vegetables and fruits to sunglasses, herbal remedies, and soft drinks. The amount of colors is only surpassed by the noise and you let the wave of cars honking and motorcycles accelerating, people talking, shouting, advertising sweep you into the building. At which point everything changes, from bright to dark, from veggies to fish, from busy to cramped. And you notice the smell of everything. Not everything as in Everything Bagel, and not as in everything that’s there, but the smell of everything seems to be here condensed into this outstretched hall of narrow pathways between stalls offering fish and flesh of all kinds, and after a few seconds, your nose surrenders and you are blown away at all of this life in one single place. That’s when you notice a bucket of crabs.
It’s a simple, blue plastic bucket placed beside a table on which two Lapu-Lapu and other fishes shimmer below a light bulb, and two-thirds of it is alive with crabs. You hunker down next to the bucket and watch the crabs as they move and squirm, and you feel a bit of their confinement as people are squeezing by behind you and you try to keep your head away from the Lapu-Lapu without toppling that bucket of crabs. And then one of those crabs decides enough is enough and reaches for the stars.
Or rather for the rim of the bucket its claws go, pushed against the wall and inching its way up and up, and you find yourself cheering for it. The attempt is ultimately futile, of course: there is no escape for a crab in a wet market in Cebu, but the crab doesn’t know that. It only knows that there is inside the bucket, which is pretty miserable, and there is outside the bucket, which must be better at least, and that’s all the other crabs know, too. Escape, that’s the dream of this one crab and all the others. So what do the others do?
A pincer snaps out and catches the escape artist by its lower legs. It struggles, tries to move up still, but slowly, steadily (and you could swear with a smug smile) the crab at the bottom pulls the dreamer down. That’s when you realize that no crab will ever escape this bucket.
You might be asking: why? Why are they doing this? Why are they so cruel? And it is at this point that I must point out my missing PhD in crab psychology, so let’s leave the bucket of crabs and the wet market behind and return to the world of humans and witty quotes, where Seneca said it best:
“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
So what are the weaknesses behind the crab mentality? What makes one crab, one human, pull others down? Particularly if there is no gain to themselves? You probably can imagine a bunch of reasons, and so can I. But truth be told: I don’t have to imagine.
A Cocktail of Emotions
When my friend was preparing to escape the German bucket, I was happy and excited for him. But it would be a lie to say I was only happy for him. Reality is rarely pure, and what I felt was a cocktail of emotions of which not all were super positive. I also think that those emotions aren’t unique to me, and maybe even you will recognize yourself in some of those, which is the point. So, here are three nasty emotions I discovered in me back then that I believe fuel crab mentality everywhere:
Shredded Ignorance
Everyone doing what you do is a beautiful thing. There is safety in numbers and back then I could reasonably argue that what I did, moving with the herd, was the right choice, the only choice, really. I could go so far as convince myself that there was no choice. If you do what everyone does, you can happily fool yourself, live in blissful ignorance, and to a degree, I had done that.
This charade gets shredded to pieces the moment someone chooses the other path. Such people show us that we, too, have a choice, that the choice has been there all along. And they show us without mercy that to stay the course, to keep doing what we have been doing, is a choice as well.
In a way my friend was telling to the people around him: Hey, if you’re unhappy with your life, there is something you can do about it. And if you don’t change anything, that’s a choice made by you.
Doubt
With the realization that I did have a lot more choice than I wanted to admit came doubt. Doubt that I had made the right choices, that possibly I’d been a three-star chicken. (I love that quote from Pirate Radio.) Doubt about the past fuels another nasty enemy of humankind: regret.
Envy
Making a radical change is hard. Making a choice that’s far outside your comfort zone is hard. Going the other way: that’s hard. And if you see someone who “just does it”, who makes the hard look easy, who’s obviously not a three-star chicken … well, it can stir something not pretty.
Back then, when those conflicting emotions bubbled about, I knew what was going on. I had never heard about the crab mentality before, but I knew this was all about me, not about him, and I did my best to keep my emotion cocktail out of my efforts to support him. (Allegedly, it worked.)
Since then I learned a better way to fight any crab mentality in myself. Maybe it helps you, too.
How Not To Feel Like Crap
Trying to be happy for someone while you’re constantly reminded of your own perceived shortcomings just sucks. Any huzza rainbow desire of “wanting to be a better person” becomes a gale in the hurricane of self-doubt.
Instead of fighting symptoms, it’s an excellent idea to root out the evil at its source. Seneca pointed us to weakness, and as for me, my weakness was having a boatload of doubt about my life path. As long as that fundamental unhappiness was there, being purely happy for someone else was hard.
The solution then is simple (but never easy):
The best antidote against crab mentality is to live the life you want.
It’s simple and it’s hard, it’s dumb and it’s true. If you live the life you want, then you can let others live their lives without fear or envy: their choices cannot shake you.
A Few Steps
So, how do you do that? Living the life you want doesn’t necessarily mean you go the FIRE route. It doesn’t mean walking out of your corporate job with a bang. But it does entail taking stock and tiny steps.
A path forward is the following, which I now realize I took and that I recognize other people took who went from miserable to content:
- You let go of the choices you made. That means forgiving your past selves — because even if they behaved like fools they did the very best they could at the time. (This step is about the past. Learn about self-forgiveness. The enemy is regret.)
- You accept what is, the life you have right now. It sounds silly, but many people try to live the life they wish they had, and it doesn’t help them. You can’t plot a course anywhere unless you know and accept where you are at this moment. (It’s about the present. Learn about awareness, meditation, or any fancy synonym you like. The enemy is being busy until the day you either wake up or die.)
- You make one small change, today, and decide to be happy about this step because it’s progress. (The future is calling. Read about goal-setting. The enemy here is procrastination: spending time on all the things that don’t matter.)
When you do that, when you keep doing that, you’ll end up much happier.
And that’s why this path out of crab mentality works: because it’s about you and your happiness, about your sense of contentment. And that’s definitely something worth changing for.