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Idiom: Hard done by
Probably many of us are feeling hard done by at the moment.
With all of the travel limitations, cancelled plans and staying at home, it’s only natural to think that we’ve been mistreated.
In the West, we’ve learned to love our freedom.
Here we haven’t experienced any real hardship on a national scale since the Second World War, and the vast majority of us have no memory of those times.
We’ve taken the freedom of movement for granted for such a long time that it’s tremendously difficult to stay in one place, even if it’s to protect our own lives.
Oh, we are so hard done by!
Or are we?
When someone feels hard done by, they feel as if they have been mistreated or otherwise have not been treated fairly for some reason.
Instead of feeling hard done by and sorry for ourselves, we should count our blessings.
If you are lucky enough not to be in the US, the UK or Italy, your death rate is not stratospheric.
We have homes to stay in, healthcare systems that haven’t collapsed, and peace in our streets.
Many people still cannot go to work, but they can go to the beach.
Millions of people worldwide cannot go to the beach even on a good day when there isn’t a pandemic raging around them.
We who live in the West have great lives.
We may feel sorry for ourselves, but if we stand back and compare our situation with that of millions of others, we have no reason to feel hard done by and every reason to feel extremely lucky.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.