Sure, Europe had its vagabonds and its disreputable characters, but our modern day concept of what it is to be a loser is more American than a McDonald's fried apple pie! After all, are we not the land of great opportunity where anyone with the right amount of gumption can climb to the top of the ladder and get as filthy stinking rich as Howard Hughes, Donald Trump, or Thurston Howell III? Well, if that is true, then the rest of us must be somewhat more mediocre and, by comparison, losers in the game of Life (or Chutes and Ladders, or Candy land, or Boggle). Therefore, America presents to the world its most ubiquitous invention since the start of The Industrial Revolution: The Loser.
Of course, it's all a state of mind. Theoretically, anyone who's ever suffered disappointment is a loser, in as much as what this person has always wanted does not come his way. Even people we think of as successful might actually fit this description and consider themselves to be losers. Conversely, one can be poor but happy. As Lao Tsu (or maybe it was a fortune cookie) said, "He who knows he has enough is already wealthy."
What we are concerned with here, however, is the American-made loser. Once upon a time, everyone had his place- there were many occupations one could fill in the cities and the towns, and if that wasn't to your liking, there was always the wilderness of the Great Frontier. There were equally as many ways for Americans to live off of the land: to hunt, to farm, to fish, to trap, or to just live as simply as possible.
Sadly, our country is not the same place it was when Thoreau penned Walden. There is no more frontier, and what wilderness there is has been fenced in and tamed. There seems no escape from suburbia, or urban sprawl. There is no more refuge for those who know they do not fit in and want to disengage from this society. Such individuals are forced to live and work within the cities and within the suburbs, and even the most sparsely populated settlements demand a conformity from them that is just as oppressive. This is how our modern loser has come into being.
So many people taking up so much space results in great homogeny. Go from city to city, across the continent, and you'll find that all of the highest to lowest occupations are the same. But what of those who know that nothing on this spectrum really suits them? Those who have the means to break away do, while those without the means have no choice but to languish. Here's your loser, ladies and gentlemen.
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