saviours or survivors
guilt, giving and grassroots social mobility programmes
School assemblies were the perfect environment to fill vacant hearts. To paint the empty canvasses of adolescent minds into stained glass windows. They were designed for knowledge, learning, and most importantly...warnings.
I remember when ex-gang members would come into school (well I think they did, or maybe I’m living through the experiences of my friends). They would wave around their skin engravings and battle scars as a sign of surrender – a permanent white flag, if you will. A constant reminder of a life once lived and a warning to those who dare tread the path they once walked on. A perpetual “Keep off the grass” or “Do not enter” sign.
You know these guys. 5’10. Bulky. Mammoth of a man. They are the kind of guys who would relapse if they missed a day in the gym. They always have polos that never fit their Goliath frame and force a hall crammed with Year 8 students to say phrases like “I am not my environment” or “My life, my choice”.
They either served 11 years in prison for a joint enterprise charge or avoided prison because that faithful night when the police came, they ran left at the alleyway instead of right. Or in the extreme cases, where SLT didn’t do a proper DBS check, they slipped out that they served a long stretch for murder but got let out early for good behaviour. After an hour, the same message rang through our eardrums: we shouldn’t make the same mistakes they did.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Reminiscing about this lately got me thinking: What advice do we give those younger than us? Those who haven’t been through the same traumatic situations that many of us have. Why do we offer a helping hand to prevent people from going through the same experiences we’ve been through?
To answer these questions, I present two terms to you: the Saviour Complex and Survivor’s Guilt. Now some of you may be wondering what these mean. And I’ve got an answer for you from the most reliable source known to man... Wikipedia.
A “saviour complex” is an attitude and demeanour in which a person believes they are responsible for assisting other people. A person with a saviour complex will often experience empathic episodes and commit to impulsive decisions such as volunteering, donating, or advocating for a cause. A person with the complex will usually attempt to assist or continue to assist even if they are not helpful or are detrimental to the situation, others, or themselves.
On the other hand, “survivor's guilt” (also known as survivor’s syndrome) is a mental condition that occurs when a person believes they have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic or tragic event when others did not.
Many of us who have experienced unforgivable and unforgettable circumstances do our best to limit the chances of this occurring in the lives of the people we care about. We know how it feels and that we barely got out of it.
Maybe that's why rappers who move out of council estates come back to hand out Jordans at the gates of their old secondary school whilst throwing £20 notes in the air. Maybe that’s why everyone wants to set up a scholarship or charity or some sort of social justice program. It’s almost a rite of passage.
We’re all crabs in a bucket, so when one crab miraculously worms its way out, it feels entitled to throw back a fish every now and then.
It’s like we’re trying to balance the odds. We often can’t enjoy what we now have because we didn’t deserve it or “it wasn’t meant to be us”. I get a shiny new suit, car, job in Canary Wharf and house in Essex but you get a mentorship call once a month.
I have this thing of looking at a young man and being like "I would love to mentor him". Maybe that's because I care about the future of the youth today. Or maybe that's because I can't imagine how I escaped some of the things that I've experienced in life and don’t want anyone to go through that as well.
Some of us need therapy, not to create a mentoring scheme.
I think we all need to be careful. I get the guilt and wanting to ‘rescue’ the younger generation sentiment, but it’s okay. Not all of us should be role models. I still want to encourage people to look out for those who come after us. But the rate some of us are going, we’ll make them even worse than us.
So, by all means, keep all your social enterprises and after-school clubs. But don’t disappear on these kids when the guilt and/or philanthropic high wears off. Don’t shut down the initiative when sixth formers don’t want to spend their 45-minute lunch break hearing about your stories from “back in the day”. Please don’t come on Twitter and say “This generation is finished” when they would rather receive an interview at a consulting firm than the Essentialism book.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
As I Grow Older, I want to do a lot more work on myself before I start to work on everybody else.
I’m not saying you need to be perfect before mentoring or being a role model. But a Saviour Complex and Survivor’s Guilt are unhealthy and unsustainable motivators for helping the younger generation.
Heal. Respectfully.
Love, Peace, & Blessings,
Abs