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I look back over history and see that every system of social organization ever was rigged against the people at the bottom, and then I look further back into nature and see that nature is literally trying to kill you all day every day, and I just take it as par for the course.
Our current system is less rigged against me than would be literally any other system under which I might have lived at any point in the past. I’m more free and supported than almost any other human who has ever lived, and for that I’m grateful.
I guess you could say I deal with it via the deliberate choice to be grateful, and to ignore the people who think I’m foolish for being grateful.
My mental health is certainly better than it would be if I chose to be bitter and resentful of the facts of existence.
Being surrounded by hostile forces that want to exploit and eat me is just part of existence. I am also surrounded by forces that want to nurture and assist me. I focus on those.
The ideal is to be capable of fighting a war, and capable of laughing in easy joy at the same time. Why? Because existence is war, and war is dreary and miserable if it’s the only thing that exists.
Elie Wiesel wrote in Night about finding freedom while strapped down to a table being tortured by concentration camp guards. It’s hard to find a scenario in which a person is more fucked. But it was there that he discovered the freedom of his spirit. If he can be free in that situation, I can be free in this situation.