Poor You

My mother has always told me that taking pity on someone — or expecting others to take pity on you — is the same as telling that person “fuck you.” Just in a very nice way.

To me, there are two types of people in this world: internalizers and externalizers. Internalizers are a rare breed. They look inward to process what happens in their lives. They take accountability for their decisions. They own their deeds. Externalizers do the opposite — they look outward to make sense of the world, their circumstances, their choices. To them, responsibility never lives within. It lives in a group of people, in circumstances, in some other individual, in chance. Anything but them.

Externalizers love it when people take pity on them. They have no idea what it really signifies.

To take pity is to feel sorrow for someone else’s suffering. Sounds harmless. It isn’t. When you accept it, you forgo responsibility and ownership for the circumstances of your life — even the ones 100% out of your control — because you are denying your own agency. And once you deny your agency, you hand the world permission to dictate your outcomes. You deny yourself the lesson the circumstance was trying to teach you: correct your decisions. Correct your behavior.

Then the confirmation loop kicks in. People pity you, and you tell yourself, “You see? It’s not me. All these people who care about me are confirming that what happened was because of—” attach whatever external factor you like. No resolution. No lesson. Just a being that goes through life taking whatever life throws at it, with no choice in the matter.

That is simply not true.

I despise pity. When someone tries to take pity on me, I put a stop to it fast. I am responsible for what happens and what doesn’t happen in my life. Right or wrong. Even when I fall into a dark hole, I know it’s up to me to dig myself out. Maybe someone comes and helps — but they do it out of love and respect, not pity. They lend a hand to get me back on my feet, knowing it’s on me to push off the ground and start walking again.

And you’re not just responsible for yourself. You’re responsible for everyone under your care, personal and professional. If you are a parent, you are the leader of your household. Anything that happens in that domain — including your children — ultimately falls on you. That’s the way I see it. When my children misbehave or make mistakes, it’s also on me. What could I have done better? What’s the lesson here? How do I prevent it from recurring? What’s the best course of action, given that parenting comes without an instruction manual? Owning what happens in your home puts you in a position of absolute agency — to self-correct as needed and become a better parent, a better spouse.

Do you work in a team? Entire books have been written about this — extreme ownership, for one. It’s all the same idea: no matter what happens, you own it. The higher you climb the leadership ladder, the more intense that ownership becomes, because leadership sets the tone from the top. Own it, and never let anyone pin the outcome on “circumstances out of your control” to let you off the hook. That’s how you preserve your agency, your chance to become a better leader, and your right to own the scars of life — instead of letting someone take them from you with a “poor you.”

There’s nothing more demoralizing than a “leader” who never owns what happens in their team. Things go wrong and they blame everything but themselves. It guts the culture, because it signals to everyone else that it’s OK not to own the process, the outcome, or the lesson. The organization loses its agency and becomes a thing floating in the abyss of whatever sector it operates in, controlled by nothing and no one — because in the end, no matter the effort, nobody owns the results.

You’d think that in 2026 this would be crystal clear. Instead, the pity train has picked up speed. More people want on board. Why own your shit when you can log into social media and feed your deceived eyes a stream of curated lives and posts of pure perfection?

So it’s up to you. “Poor you, fuck you” — or own what you do and what happens to you. Become the self-aware human being who learns from their mistakes, sets the example, and truly cares for their family and their team. The independent thinker who looks inward to correct course — and who, when they keep falling, still gets up and keeps trying. Maybe you get worn down. Maybe you fall more than most. But when you look inward and take agency over your life, no one — and I mean no one — can look down on you.

Not even yourself.