What I'm reading: Gulliver

Fintan O'Toole, Gulliver's Warning, New York Review of Books

But self-pity is not dependent on any objective reality of oppression or injustice. It is proportionate only to one’s sense of having “deserved much.” The sense of injustice it feeds off is entirely about one’s sense of one’s own proper status. To put it simply, if you always travel first class but one day, for some reason, you get relegated to economy class, you will spend the trip feeling terribly sorry for yourself. If you always sit in economy class, it just is what it is.