In the graysonian ethic, I write about something on these lines. Essentially, there is a group of people who think the solution to their personal problems is taking over the government. Unless your name is Dr Doom I don't think that this is going to help.
You can blame the youth and specific generations if you think it's going to help, but really it's a universal human trait to want to blame the problems in your life on someone else. Whether it's satan, tiamat, the jews, the whites, or capitalism, the really nice thing about any of those excuses is that suddenly whatever is going on in your life isn't your fault and anybody else who has succeeded where you have not clearly just has the backing of some powerful patron.
I'm not going to be so callous as to claim that everyone is playing with the same deck. In the same book, I point out that opportunity is the father of invention, and that no two people have the same opportunities, and plenty of people have different challenges. But the thing is, no matter what Walk of Life you're looking at, you might not be able to find people who grow old wealthy, but you can probably find people who grow old fulfilled.
We have to remember that we are living in one of the best times in the history of the world to live in, even with all the crazy stuff going on. Even in the midst of a recession, being overweight is one of the biggest hazards to poor people. In the past, under the same circumstances the biggest risk would be starvation and death. Someone pointed out that one of the reasons that cars from the early 1900s were much smaller than the cars today wasn't just because they were cheap to make, but because everybody was suffering from a form of malnutrition, and so they were just smaller people. They were shorter, they were thinner, overall they were just smaller. We can pay this as a vice of our present day, or you can paint it as a virtue of the amazing productivity of our modern age ensuring that people don't need to go to sleep hungry.
If, rather than looking at photos of our ancestors, we actually bothered talking to some of them, we'd realize that while it's easy to say "a man used to be able to support a family on one income", most people would consider the sort of lifestyle that that man provided his family to be some sort of violation of basic human rights. They didn't eat fruit all year round, their houses were much smaller and much worse, they spent most of their time outside because they had absolutely nothing to do inside. Going back a little bit further, entire families would share one bed because the concept of individual bedrooms was the sort of thing reserved for Kings.
So with that being the case, even our poor do live better lives then some of the rich of the past, and so you can't really say that someone's fulfillment or lack thereof is a result of a lack of material goods or services. What I've finally come to realize is that the old saying that the best things in life are free is mostly true. People who have been chasing brand names and MC mansions, people who just need to own a big house in the capital, they don't end up happy. Meanwhile a little low class family in the middle of nowhere can be more than happy.
Now of course that isn't to say that the poor are all happy and the rich are all miserable. That's the sort of thing that an idiot would say. What I'm saying is that there is no amount of wealth that will replace actual fulfillment. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there is no amount of food and shelter that will replace relationships and self-actualization.
You can blame the youth and specific generations if you think it's going to help, but really it's a universal human trait to want to blame the problems in your life on someone else. Whether it's satan, tiamat, the jews, the whites, or capitalism, the really nice thing about any of those excuses is that suddenly whatever is going on in your life isn't your fault and anybody else who has succeeded where you have not clearly just has the backing of some powerful patron.
I'm not going to be so callous as to claim that everyone is playing with the same deck. In the same book, I point out that opportunity is the father of invention, and that no two people have the same opportunities, and plenty of people have different challenges. But the thing is, no matter what Walk of Life you're looking at, you might not be able to find people who grow old wealthy, but you can probably find people who grow old fulfilled.
We have to remember that we are living in one of the best times in the history of the world to live in, even with all the crazy stuff going on. Even in the midst of a recession, being overweight is one of the biggest hazards to poor people. In the past, under the same circumstances the biggest risk would be starvation and death. Someone pointed out that one of the reasons that cars from the early 1900s were much smaller than the cars today wasn't just because they were cheap to make, but because everybody was suffering from a form of malnutrition, and so they were just smaller people. They were shorter, they were thinner, overall they were just smaller. We can pay this as a vice of our present day, or you can paint it as a virtue of the amazing productivity of our modern age ensuring that people don't need to go to sleep hungry.
If, rather than looking at photos of our ancestors, we actually bothered talking to some of them, we'd realize that while it's easy to say "a man used to be able to support a family on one income", most people would consider the sort of lifestyle that that man provided his family to be some sort of violation of basic human rights. They didn't eat fruit all year round, their houses were much smaller and much worse, they spent most of their time outside because they had absolutely nothing to do inside. Going back a little bit further, entire families would share one bed because the concept of individual bedrooms was the sort of thing reserved for Kings.
So with that being the case, even our poor do live better lives then some of the rich of the past, and so you can't really say that someone's fulfillment or lack thereof is a result of a lack of material goods or services. What I've finally come to realize is that the old saying that the best things in life are free is mostly true. People who have been chasing brand names and MC mansions, people who just need to own a big house in the capital, they don't end up happy. Meanwhile a little low class family in the middle of nowhere can be more than happy.
Now of course that isn't to say that the poor are all happy and the rich are all miserable. That's the sort of thing that an idiot would say. What I'm saying is that there is no amount of wealth that will replace actual fulfillment. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there is no amount of food and shelter that will replace relationships and self-actualization.
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