Entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy gave Gen Z and millennials a wake-up call Wednesday, stating hardship is inevitable, but victimhood is a choice.
“Hardship is not a choice in life,” Ramaswamy told the crew of Timcast IRL. “Hardship is something that happens to you.”
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The 2024 presidential candidate detailed how his father encountered hardships through work and the lessons he learned from that.
“What did he do? He went to night school and law school,” Ramaswamy said about his father. “I was in sixth grade, I used to go with him and sit with him in the back of the classroom because we didn’t have child care or anything else.”
Watching his father work a full day and then going to school set an example for him that he carried with him when he entered the workforce in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the entrepreneur said.
“I remembered the example my parents set,” he said. “Hardship is something that happens to you. It’s not something you choose, but victimhood is a choice. We choose to be victims.”
“You don’t choose your hardship, but you do choose victimhood. You can choose not to be a victim, and hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.”
Ramaswamy recognized that legitimate grievances do exist that many millennials and Gen Z members growing up can have.
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“For most of human history, most people of any skin color or whatever, we all have some grievance we can latch on to, but I think a big part of where landed in this case of self-loathing was this deeper psychic insecurity,” he said.
“We’re actually afraid of trying to realize our full potential because if we fail, we’re afraid of that failure.”
