What we've lost since the Golden Era

[Paisley]

If people are really such self-satisfied ninnies anymore, just telling them to DWI is about as useful as telling a pig to dance. They're going to need a clue. Maybe not even a big clue. It could be something as small as reminding them that they're human beings, with common dignity, equipped with heads usable as more than just hat hangers. Some hint that you're better than that...don't let yourself down...have the sense god gave dirt, if you really want to be prickly about it.

Hmmm. A lot of my stress went away when I started doing this stuff for myself. Wait for someone else to do it, or give you approval, and you could be waiting a lifetime. Maybe it's always been so.

That, and I just won't hang around negative people. If I have to deal with one, I talk about positive things like focusing on the future, helping someone else, hobbies, etc. I almost never hear from them again. I find that most negative people don't want improvement, they want to wallow in their misery.

Re: accepting the reality of a situation, that's a good idea, but you don't have to embrace the reality. Change would never happen if we all embraced unpleasant realities.

 

[Fletch]

Hmmm. A lot of my stress went away when I started doing this stuff for myself. Wait for someone else to do it, or give you approval, and you could be waiting a lifetime. Maybe it's always been so.

Is it really that much less satisfying to acknowledge someone else's humanity instead of just putting them in their place? The latter happens all the time.

Sometimes it seems we live in a world of enforced emotional scarcity. Life today is competition, basically, and not just for material things. People assume things like love, friendship, peace and contentment are scarce, so they behave as if they really were.

And that changes the rules of interaction for everybody. Cutting someone a break becomes a personal weakness; strong people are hard people "on principle," even if the principle is nonsense and gains them nothing more than a quick atavistic head-rush.

Never mind that it should be impossible to truly take someone's peace of mind. Blocking them feels like a victory and gives a cheap sense of confidence and security. So we do it, or become bitter because it's done to us.

That, and I just won't hang around negative people.

I feel the same way. Mostly because I'm too negative to resist them.

If I have to deal with one, I talk about positive things like focusing on the future, helping someone else, hobbies, etc. I almost never hear from them again. I find that most negative people don't want improvement, they want to wallow in their misery.

Those are just the ones who need to be reminded they're human. I think a lot of them have forgotten, or forgotten the world has any use for them.

But I suppose that if you need someone else to do you even the smallest kindness, you're in a pretty bad way. Still, I keep thinking of it as "teaching a man to fish so he'll eat for a lifetime."

Re: accepting the reality of a situation, that's a good idea, but you don't have to embrace the reality. Change would never happen if we all embraced unpleasant realities.

I'd say a lot of us don't know the difference. There's a lot of unacknowledged existential dread out there: very often accepting reality seems to mean just giving up.

I'll say this for a life of emotional scarcity: it doesn't seem to toughen people so much as drive them inward and make them negative and needy. Maybe material scarcity is the key. I hope not.

 

[Paisley]

Fletch, you're talking about meanness. I'm sure it's always been around, and generally, there's no need for it. I wholeheartedly agree that it's miserable to be around.

I'm talking about having a quiet, peaceful, pleasant mind without harming anyone else.

I can't depend on someone else give me the reassurance or encouragement I need, so I do it myself. I'm happy to give the same things to others, and once in a great while, a negative person will respond positively to it. But I've found through painful experience that most negative people will take that, give nothing back, and drag me down with them. So I immediately respond to negativity by mentioning positive things, which might help them. But I avoid telling them what to do (they never ask, anyway). THEY make the decision not to pursue a friendship with me.

Re: accepting v. embracing a reality. A common reality, for example, is hating your job. The realities here are that you probably need to work full-time to make a living, that all jobs have their bad points, and there are other things you'd rather be doing. Embracing those realities would be, I think, putting a halo on your head for working at the job despite these difficulties instead of trying to improve the situation. Or self-mutilation, figuratively speaking. To improve it, you have to understand why you hate the job, having accepted the realities. Is it your boss, the hours, the work, the industry, coworkers? Are you contributing to the problems? When did they start? Could you talk to your boss about them? Would a transfer help? If they can't be solved, isn't it time to find something else that probably won't have the same problems?

I'm sure this sounds incredibly obvious, but many people bounce from job to job, or try to make themselves feel better with food, alcohol, shopping, or a dozen other things.

 

[Fletch]

Fletch, you're talking about meanness. I'm sure it's always been around, and generally, there's no need for it. I wholeheartedly agree that it's miserable to be around.

I'm talking about having a quiet, peaceful, pleasant mind without harming anyone else.

That's possible as long as you don't mind ticking off the mean people.

Strangely perhaps, I believe in meanness. I think it's not so much needless as tragic, and I think it is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. I think people in earlier times were more likely to respect that power and use it earnestly, however ill their intentions. And they may not always have been so ill-intended. You probably couldn't win WW2 without being mean, or training people to be mean.

Today we're too casual and detached about it. Our politics and entertainment trade in it. It's used like metaphysical hot sauce, to make us feel something, anything.

 

[Mr Vim]

It's used like metaphysical hot sauce, to make us feel something, anything.

Nicely put Fletch.

 

[Tomasso]

Nicely put Fletch.

I like that you check in every day.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

You probably couldn't win WW2 without being mean, or training people to be mean.

I don't think of our troops as having been trained to be mean. You couldn't do that anyway; I believe that is within someone's nature and off-limits. Actions and mindset, yes, that is negotiable. I differentiate between mean-spirited actions and those done for noble causes, the latter of course being subject to subjective interpretations.

 

[Tomasso]

Well said PSG. Otherwise Paul Tibbets would be the meanest man in the history of the world.

 

[Mr Vim]

I don't think of our troops as having been trained to be mean. You couldn't do that anyway; I believe that is within someone's nature and off-limits. Actions and mindset, yes, that is negotiable. I differentiate between mean-spirited actions and those done for noble causes, the latter of course being subject to subjective interpretations.

Having served in the Army, we are not mean in mindset, we are not mean in our intentions, but our actions do call for violence of action, it is one of our key terms in our operations sumarries. Having said that there is some merit to people thinking you are an evil S.O.B.

The Iraqi people living near our compound thought that troops with face masks, sunglasses and gloves were a special type of soldier that couldn't stand daylight, we did not discourage this rumor... and many of us started wearing sunglasses, facemasks and gloves.

But enough on that. I miss rotary telephones. I'm thinking of getting one in my house.

 

[Paisley]

That's possible as long as you don't mind ticking off the mean people.

Strangely perhaps, I believe in meanness. I think it's not so much needless as tragic, and I think it is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. I think people in earlier times were more likely to respect that power and use it earnestly, however ill their intentions. And they may not always have been so ill-intended. You probably couldn't win WW2 without being mean, or training people to be mean.

Today we're too casual and detached about it. Our politics and entertainment trade in it. It's used like metaphysical hot sauce, to make us feel something, anything.

I was speaking of normal, everyday life. Yes, there are situations where the claws and fangs need to come out, but say, driving to work isn't one of them.

I don't know how troops on WWII were trained, but in my day, we were trained to calmly and quickly take orders and perform our duties. Mean people tend to be in a turmoil. By "mean," I don't mean getting your point across in a no-nonsense manner--something that people tend to mistake for meanness nowadays. And whether it's better to be feared than loved depends on who you're working with and what you want to accomplish.

Re: politics and entertainment, I've mostly unplugged from both. I've been without TV reception for a year now and haven't missed it.

 

[Paisley]

But enough on that. I miss rotary telephones. I'm thinking of getting one in my house.

Visitors often ask me if my wooden, rotary phone works. [huh] "Uh, yes...does your phone work?"

 

[Mr Vim]

I like that you check in every day.

Well, I felt responsible to check in any time I can, as I started the thread and all. Thank you for the props.

 

[Mr Vim]

Well, its been brought up several times at work and that is my wardrobe when I am out and about in town.

Someone saw me dressed in the photo for my avatar and asked why I would dress up so much. I replied that it is a rather casual get up.

I know we've covered this already but I cannot overcome the feeling that people have lost the will to look good when they are not working. They wear clothing as causually as they can in public.

Most people in Juneau look like they are about to go for a week camping trip, jeans, sweatshirt, topped with a water proof shell, the men are always unshaven and unkempt. What a shame.

 

[Yeps]

Most people in Juneau look like they are about to go for a week camping trip, jeans, sweatshirt, topped with a water proof shell, the men are always unshaven and unkempt. What a shame.

Careful calling them "unshaven and unkempt." A lot of guys spend an awful lot of time and money keeping just the right amount of stubble to look relatively recently homeless and styling their hair to look like they cut it themselves with a swiss army knife, and then rolled out of bed this morning without washing it for a week.

 

[Mr Vim]

Careful calling them "unshaven and unkempt." A lot of guys spend an awful lot of time and money keeping just the right amount of stubble to look relatively recently homeless and styling their hair to look like they cut it themselves with a swiss army knife, and then rolled out of bed this morning without washing it for a week.

Nicely put Yeps, and I stand corrected... I apologize to all those who ask for the Neanderthal cut when they visit their barber and shave with a hot rock.

 

[Feraud]

Humility.

 

[AmateisGal]

Humility.

AMEN. :eusa_clap

 

[AtomicEraTom]

It also seems these days that a lot of people lack responsibility. I am 19 and been out of high school a year. I have a group of about 10 close friends, 3 or us have gone out and gotten real jobs. The rest of my friends are the same age, or older and are unemployed, working at grocery stores, flipping burgers, etc. And their only reason is they don't feel like going and busting their butts in a factory or some other such occupation.

The blunt truth is none of us want to go bust out butts at a job that's just going to make someone else rich, but you do it so you can move out, make a living, get married, raise a family, all that American Dream stuff.

All my friends still live at home, besides myself and one friend who lives in government housing, which our tax dollars are paying for since he's unemployed and has spent most of the past 2 years that day.

I guess it seems to me that young people don't want to pull up their boot straps and be responsible, and want to stay 17 forever.

 

[Atomic]

It also seems these days that a lot of people lack responsibility. I am 19 and been out of high school a year. I have a group of about 10 close friends, 3 or us have gone out and gotten real jobs. The rest of my friends are the same age, or older and are unemployed, working at grocery stores, flipping burgers, etc. And their only reason is they don't feel like going and busting their butts in a factory or some other such occupation.

The blunt truth is none of us want to go bust out butts at a job that's just going to make someone else rich, but you do it so you can move out, make a living, get married, raise a family, all that American Dream stuff.

All my friends still live at home, besides myself and one friend who lives in government housing, which our tax dollars are paying for since he's unemployed and has spent most of the past 2 years that day.

I guess it seems to me that young people don't want to pull up their boot straps and be responsible, and want to stay 17 forever.

I see a lot of that happening everywhere. Self entitlement kills me, and so many young people have it. My sister suffers from this. She feels my parents (and anyone else for that matter) should just give her whatever she wants because she's alive and breathing. Now, she at least is going to school for dental hygiene, but the few jobs she has had she's made a lot of enemies because she won't work hard but loves to sit and complain about how things aren't getting done to her satisfaction.

Maybe its just a matter of growing up a bit, though. I have a lot of friends who are just now (we're mid to late 20's) getting the hint that they have to work hard to get what they want and are willing to do so. Prior to this, they had things handed to them and weren't really willing to get moving because they didn't really have to. It funny how people start realizing what things are really worth and the value of things when they have to work for them. Hopefully my sister gets the memo...

 

[Fletch]

The blunt truth is none of us want to go bust out butts at a job that's just going to make someone else rich, but you do it so you can move out, make a living, get married, raise a family, all that American Dream stuff.

People don't realize that former generations weren't just working hard for themselves. They, too, had to help make someone else rich without much to show for it. They just didn't have the ( luxury / handicap )* of awareness.

I speak from some personal experience here; my attitude about the 9-5 was unusually cynical even for Gen X. My Silent Generation parents have always argued the opposite. To them, being taken advantage of by the system was simply the initiation fee for being allowed to do your thing - the basic training required for society to trust you enough to leave you mostly alone.

Some feel it would benefit us spiritually if that attitude were more universal today.

*Maybe both.