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It's a natural progression of a profit-only driven society. When you measure everything in $$$ you get what you have. You dehumanize every relationship and make it all about the money, everything is viewed through incentives and penalties and "what's in it for me".
I think all of us who are older think back to earlier times and miss some of the things we took for granted. When we came out of HS we pretty much could find a job immediately, and if we worked hard we could afford a new car and a home. Women, for the most part, were able to stay home and raise the kids, and Mom was always waiting there with cookies and milk when we got home from school.
Crime was always there, but never like it is today. The worst that would happen was a fist fight, and someone shot was unheard of. We respected our elders, our teachers, and the police. Most of all, we were optimistic about the future.........we were always striving to better our living situation and get a bigger piece of the American pie.
I didn't know many people who were divorced because Moms and Dads hung in there, even if their relationship wasn't the best. They sometimes did it just for the sake of the kids, but that isn't all bad, if you think about it.
Today parents and kids seem disconnected somehow. It could be technology or simply the way people think today, but I don't like what I see. Personally, I am so glad I grew up when I did and if someone waved a magic wand and let me be born later I would have to turn them down.
Don
I think some of this may just be nostalgia. As far as crime rates go, they have actually been getting lower and lower for a long time!
As for the bold, I think this is truer then ever today, and is what has caused the changes you don't like. But rather then trying to get a bigger piece of the pie, I think people are fighting harder and harder to keep their piece of the pie from shrinking.
Huh. I remember the good old days. We could go out and run around our neighborhood for hours without checking in. We could spend all night on Halloween going door to door for candy, and sit down when we were tired and eat some of it without it being checked a million times. We were secure in the knowledge that our roles and destinations were laid out in front of us and we had only to step into those roles.
We couldn't be gay. We couldn't be atheists. We could barely be African American. We couldn't be any other religion except Christian. Rape was blamed on the woman. Child molestation wasn't talked about. Being beaten by your husband was ignored. Being beaten by your parents was ignored (ask me how I know that). Any stranger walking into our neighborhood would have thought he had walked into a Norman Rockwell painting. But there were undercurrents. The woman down the street and her sons were beaten by their father. When she finally got divorced, he came back and poured sugar in her gas tank. Both myself and my friend from next door were put into foster homes when we were 14 because of family problems. My friend's older sister was impregnated by her father. My neighbor on the other side used to worry herself sick about having another baby. My aunt miscarried into the toilet and was relieved because she didn't want any more children.
Sorry, I don't think the good old days were all that good. Yes, there were some wonderful things about them, but there were some awful things about them too. And as for taking the time to slow down and smell the roses, well, look at it from Laura Ingalls Wilder's point of view. She wrote something back in the 20s, I think it was, about how she and her husband were wishing for the good old days of their parents' time, when their parents had time for visiting and good times. Laura and her husband felt that all they did any more was work, work, work and there was never time for anything else.
But as she put it when she reflected on it, there are still 24 hours in a day and the days and nights are as long as they have ever been.
The point is, maybe it's not the lack of hours in a day, or our circumstances that cause us to be constantly on the go, nor technology, nor the internet, nor anything else that has us so stressed out. We do it to ourselves. And if we want things to slow down, we're the ones that have to take the steps to do so, each in our own lives.
It's a natural progression of a profit-only driven society. When you measure everything in $$$ you get what you have. You dehumanize every relationship and make it all about the money, everything is viewed through incentives and penalties and "what's in it for me".
I must disagree although fifty years ago I would have agreed with your assessment. People in that era accepted the fact that life is competitive so that success could easily be measured in dollar terms as it has been for millenia. It was accepted that people with more money could purchase better lives. That's no longer the case; people with scarcely anything demand the same lives as those who are properly called wealthy. They demand the latest and fanciest entertainment devices at the cutting edge of technology, yearly travel that would have been inconceivable for all but the wealthiest just a few years ago, adolescence without worry often extended to middle age, and never any need to suffer the consequences of their actions. They whine about the demands of jobs rather than trying to advance in them. They complain about previous generations, never seeming to notice the number of successful people in their own. They seem to think that previous generations held sinecures with respect to employment in jobs that required neither intelligence, training, or much effort. They demand better jobs, but they offer nothing. They rage about jobs going overseas or to immigrants but never provide any evidence that they could offer equal job skills.
They demand the good life; they are not, however, willing to earn it. LL, how many hours per week do you spend in the productive effort required to meet all of your financial goals, sixty, seventy, eighty? The whiners believe that they deserve as much as you but without effort.
I was born in 1990 and I've noticed that things have become really dull and soulless over the past five or ten years. Maybe it's just the fact I'm older but it just seems like art is incredibly boring these days, music and film and all. Nothing endearingly cheesy like Full House or Clarissa Explains It All is made anymore. I hate how self aware and sarcastic everyone is, I hate big box stores like Walmart and Home Depot, I hate how American culture is taking over the planet to the point Australian teenagers are sounding like Californians and I hate how everyone is always stuck to their phones.
By the way, we are currently building our retirement home, and it will have an 8 foot covered porch running along the front of the house (for extensive use, not just for show) .
Exactly what we built during the summer of 2013!
It's on the south side of the house. Started as a deck, as we had too much to build all at once. Moved in during June of this year, and I built a roof over it, and put on removable screen panels (lot of bugs up here). This summer, I made same-size panels of polycarbonate glazing, and all winter it will be a sunroom!
Talk about extensive use! The slider from the living room is open all day long, to this deck/porch/sunroom. I do my outdoor cooking on it, we dine out there, and when friends and family visit, it ends up being the "go-to" area of the house to visit. Best investment we ever made! Hope you enjoy yours, too!
It's a shame, however, that we had to wait until retirement before we could use such a thing.
I must disagree although fifty years ago I would have agreed with your assessment. People in that era accepted the fact that life is competitive so that success could easily be measured in dollar terms as it has been for millenia. It was accepted that people with more money could purchase better lives. That's no longer the case; people with scarcely anything demand the same lives as those who are properly called wealthy. They demand the latest and fanciest entertainment devices at the cutting edge of technology, yearly travel that would have been inconceivable for all but the wealthiest just a few years ago, adolescence without worry often extended to middle age, and never any need to suffer the consequences of their actions. They whine about the demands of jobs rather than trying to advance in them. They complain about previous generations, never seeming to notice the number of successful people in their own. They seem to think that previous generations held sinecures with respect to employment in jobs that required neither intelligence, training, or much effort. They demand better jobs, but they offer nothing. They rage about jobs going overseas or to immigrants but never provide any evidence that they could offer equal job skills.
They demand the good life; they are not, however, willing to earn it. LL, how many hours per week do you spend in the productive effort required to meet all of your financial goals, sixty, seventy, eighty? The whiners believe that they deserve as much as you but without effort.
I kind of agree. However, the ones that don't want to work or the ones who cannot afford an education still have open lines of credit. Profit is still possible on those people. By virtue of things becoming more expensive and by virtue of labor being sourced from other countries, the onus has been put on survival of entities that are not "real" such as corporations and a layer of people who own stock in them or who run them The onus is not anymore on the survival of the American citizen.
What makes the above so heart-breaking is that the system is betraying its very own people, in the chase for $$$.
What you have today is a result of two currents: one is pulling to make money, no matter what, environment, animals, people be damned. The other is a knee-jerk reaction to the former and is pulling in the direction of egalite, liberte, fraternite. They are literally ripping the country apart and have no touching points with each other.
As for the bold, I think this is truer then ever today, and is what has caused the changes you don't like. But rather then trying to get a bigger piece of the pie, I think people are fighting harder and harder to keep their piece of the pie from shrinking.
This is so true. We both work full time jobs with full benefits. We own a house in a suburb. We are quintessential middle class. Yet, our dollar vanishes faster than I can say "cha-ching."
I love porches. I wanted a house with a porch. Except all the porches I saw were on houses that were either out of our price range or eroded. And to put in a porch, well, that requires money.
I saw a house plan once that had a lovely porch that curved around - one corner. If that were my house, I'd have that porch surround the house and curved at every corner. My idea of contentment is to sit out on the wide steps of a porch and watch the tall grasses ripple in the breeze while the sun sets on a nice June day.
Hmmm, instead of putting in a porch, if you can spare the room, how about just knocking out some walls and making a porch out of a say, a front bedroom? Would it cost more than adding a porch to a house? I've also seen many 3 bedroom houses with the bedrooms right in a row, the middle one usually not even big enough to swing a cat in. I always wondered what it would cost to simply knock out the back wall of that middle room and have an enclosed porch between the other two bedrooms, with maybe a skylight in what was once the ceiling.
Um, I think I went way off topic on this post, so if the mods want to delete it, that's fine.
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I hate how self aware and sarcastic everyone is, I hate big box stores like Walmart and Home Depot, I hate how American culture is taking over the planet to the point Australian teenagers are sounding like Californians and I hate how everyone is always stuck to their phones.
