First-World Problems

Matthew Good

Once upon a time, during the Cold War in the latter part of the 20th century, somebody pointed out that each of the nations of the earth belonged to one of three worlds. The first was ours, the world of the developed and more-or-less-democratic countries. The second was the world of our enemies, the Communist bloc, led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and including its European satellites along with China, Cuba, North Vietnam and the like. The third world was the leftovers, poor countries whose allegiance was fought over by the first two worlds in that thankfully cold Cold War.

This tripartite division of the world collapsed along with the Soviet Union in 1991. No longer was there a second world, and it wasn’t clear whether to place the old second-world countries in the first category or the third, or somewhere else altogether.

Out of the wreckage of that neatly trichotomized world, however, the label third world remained robust. We had been searching for a politic designation for nations once thought of as backward, then underdeveloped, then developing. Even better just to refer to them as third world, with no need to consider whether their economies were in fact developing.

And first world has remained alive too, in a binary opposition to third world. But recently first world has acquired a new edge in designating a category of “first-world problems,” those that afflict only the prosperous.

First to use this phrase, apparently, was the Canadian rocker Matthew Good, in a 1995 song with these lyrics: “Somewhere around the world someone would love to have my first-world problems.” The term took a while to catch on, but in recent times there has been an avalanche of first-world problems on the Internet.

This year we can thank Weird Al Yankovich for his song “First World Problems,” with frustrations like “My maid is cleaning my bathroom, so I can’t take a shower; when I do, the water starts getting cold after an hour,” “Tried to fast-forward commercials, can’t, I’m watching live TV,” “My barista didn’t even bother to make a design in the foam on the top of my vanilla latte,” “My house is so big I can’t get wi-fi in the kitchen,” and a dozen others.

A number of websites offer further examples: “Texting isn’t allowed during my 60-minute acupuncture session,”  “My friend wrote me a check; now I have to actually go to the bank to get it deposited.”

Twitter collects first-world problems too: “Netflix keeps recommending movies I’ve already seen,” “Why is Instagram down? Where am I supposed to post my Starbucks selfies?” “Feel sorry for babies nowadays; when they’re grown up, there won’t be any decent usernames left.”

I think we have a first-world problem with first-world problems, though. As far as I can tell, none of them seems to be about about language.

And yet there are frustrations in language deserving first-world honors. For example:

—I want to use the Oxford comma, but it harms the environment by wasting ink (or pixels).

—Can I in good conscience shop at a store that has checkout aisles for 15 items or less?

How about it, readers? What first-world problems do you find with our language?