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04-29-2019, 02:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-29-2019, 02:50 PM by AspieMillennial.)
This mentality is foreign to me but I see it a lot in other generations. I've been told "You're a civic and civics aren't known for looking for stuff on their own. They just like big and corporate." and about how other generations are the ones who made up movements to rebel. But I don't have any time to wait for some other movement who will probably reject me anyways for the age group I'm in. Why is it less valid to search for things and find meaning on your own than it is to do so as some part of a big movement? People are telling me my experiences do not exist or matter. Once they hear a generation their mind goes blank with buzzwords. There are plenty of places to look for everything yet everyone tells me that what I do doesn't exist or that my own personal experiences do not exist. That I MUST be defined as what's out there now just because my parents fucked in some random time period. It all seems arbitrary and absurd to me. I'm a loner by nature so it's easy for me to define my own interests. I don't see why that somehow doesn't exist just because I'm not a part of this giant movement.
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The GI Generation, your predecessors, did not start out with a love for entrenched power, inequality, and cultural conformity. They developed these as they saw a huge improvement from the hardscrabble lives that most knew, and put the fault on the aristocratic elites that had developed in the Gilded Age under the Gilded Generation who accepted entrenched power, inequality, and conformity as the way of generating material and social progress. (The Gilded took on the Civic role due to their roles in the Civil War).
I look at Donald Trump as the exemplar of all that is wrong with the Boom Generation -- the ruthlessness, arrogance, and selfishness -- with none of the potential virtues (culture, vision, and principle) that exemplify an Idealist generation at its best. The Civic and Idealist approaches to making a better world are very different, and a Crisis Era allows success or creates failure to the extent that the very different approaches to making a better world coincide. Donald Trump's idea of a better world is one of high consumer costs, low labor costs, and the acceleration of resource extraction -- a slumlord's dream. If Trump is not a slumlord in the sense of struggling to avoid bankruptcy with destitute tenants, then his America is a slum of the soul. What can one expect of someone so soulless as he?
I have my idea -- it is experience, and not hoarding, that creates a rich life. Surely you have seen tales of hoarders who can't divest themselves of things that, now worthless, 'might be precious someday'. They have bought a bill of goods. They have no idea of what they have, and their lives may be in danger for having so much stuff that their dwellings become firetraps or that what they have can crush them. The hoarder is the optimum as a consumer for Big Business... until the oily rags spontaneously combust and cause a deadly and destructive fire.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(04-29-2019, 02:48 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: This mentality is foreign to me but I see it a lot in other generations. I've been told "You're a civic and civics aren't known for looking for stuff on their own. They just like big and corporate." and about how other generations are the ones who made up movements to rebel. But I don't have any time to wait for some other movement who will probably reject me anyways for the age group I'm in. Why is it less valid to search for things and find meaning on your own than it is to do so as some part of a big movement? People are telling me my experiences do not exist or matter. Once they hear a generation their mind goes blank with buzzwords. There are plenty of places to look for everything yet everyone tells me that what I do doesn't exist or that my own personal experiences do not exist. That I MUST be defined as what's out there now just because my parents fucked in some random time period. It all seems arbitrary and absurd to me. I'm a loner by nature so it's easy for me to define my own interests. I don't see why that somehow doesn't exist just because I'm not a part of this giant movement.
Largely such people are ill informed and do not understand that generational archetypes are aggregates rather than descriptive of individuals. My advice is to ignore them and for you to do you, and not worry so much about whatever buzzwords others are thinking. Those who think in buzzwords typically aren't capable of deep thought anyway, and are less well read than they think that they are.
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(04-30-2019, 09:22 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: (04-29-2019, 02:48 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: This mentality is foreign to me but I see it a lot in other generations. I've been told "You're a civic and civics aren't known for looking for stuff on their own. They just like big and corporate." and about how other generations are the ones who made up movements to rebel. But I don't have any time to wait for some other movement who will probably reject me anyways for the age group I'm in. Why is it less valid to search for things and find meaning on your own than it is to do so as some part of a big movement? People are telling me my experiences do not exist or matter. Once they hear a generation their mind goes blank with buzzwords. There are plenty of places to look for everything yet everyone tells me that what I do doesn't exist or that my own personal experiences do not exist. That I MUST be defined as what's out there now just because my parents fucked in some random time period. It all seems arbitrary and absurd to me. I'm a loner by nature so it's easy for me to define my own interests. I don't see why that somehow doesn't exist just because I'm not a part of this giant movement.
Largely such people are ill informed and do not understand that generational archetypes are aggregates rather than descriptive of individuals. My advice is to ignore them and for you to do you, and not worry so much about whatever buzzwords others are thinking. Those who think in buzzwords typically aren't capable of deep thought anyway, and are less well read than they think that they are.
Wow! We actually agree on something.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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05-01-2019, 04:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-01-2019, 04:54 PM by AspieMillennial.)
(05-01-2019, 11:22 AM)michael_k Wrote: (04-29-2019, 07:44 PM)Mikebert Wrote: For example, I compiled a composite of people observations of generational change to give these approximate dates for cultural/experiential generations.
1946-1962 Boom (Prophet)
1963-1980 GenX (Nomad)
1981-1994 Millennial (Rogue)
1995-XXXX GenZ (Civic?)
If we were to go back in time eighty or so years to the 1930s, when the Interbellum Generation/Early G.I.s (born between 1901-13) were equivalent in age to the Millennials of our current decade, is it possible that they would have seemed like a 'rogue' generation back then? I've heard there were comments in the day about the youth of the Roaring Twenties and how pathetic they were that seemed similar to the stuff said about Millennials during the 2010s.
To me, it seems like progress is a bad word with some exceptions but it mainly seems negative. I know it seems stupid to you but to me "progress" means "let's do things that make things worse for people in the name of virtue signaling." or "Let's make things equal by making things worse for specific groups because we think they are privileged." or "Let's make a world where everyone has a low standard of living in order to save the climate." or "Let's all ban specific words, phrases, and thoughts because they go against progress." "Let's ban guns because they are scary and this is progress." "Let's have poor people forced to go on inefficient bus systems that make it harder for them to spend time with their families and exhausted at the end of the day because of progress." "Let scientists grow potential lab meat so that poor people can't afford real meat." "Let scientists screen for types of minds in order to abort them or change them with CRISPR". It's like the more progress there is the less I like it. Screw progress. Progress either means taking away freedoms because of some mass hysteria or trying to create a dystopian world most of the time IMO.
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(04-30-2019, 10:20 AM)David Horn Wrote: (04-30-2019, 09:22 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: (04-29-2019, 02:48 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: This mentality is foreign to me but I see it a lot in other generations. I've been told "You're a civic and civics aren't known for looking for stuff on their own. They just like big and corporate." and about how other generations are the ones who made up movements to rebel. But I don't have any time to wait for some other movement who will probably reject me anyways for the age group I'm in. Why is it less valid to search for things and find meaning on your own than it is to do so as some part of a big movement? People are telling me my experiences do not exist or matter. Once they hear a generation their mind goes blank with buzzwords. There are plenty of places to look for everything yet everyone tells me that what I do doesn't exist or that my own personal experiences do not exist. That I MUST be defined as what's out there now just because my parents fucked in some random time period. It all seems arbitrary and absurd to me. I'm a loner by nature so it's easy for me to define my own interests. I don't see why that somehow doesn't exist just because I'm not a part of this giant movement.
Largely such people are ill informed and do not understand that generational archetypes are aggregates rather than descriptive of individuals. My advice is to ignore them and for you to do you, and not worry so much about whatever buzzwords others are thinking. Those who think in buzzwords typically aren't capable of deep thought anyway, and are less well read than they think that they are.
Wow! We actually agree on something.
Well Mr. Horn, as they say a broken clock is right twice a day. It is hardly shocking that we'd agree on something eventually.
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(05-01-2019, 04:40 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: To me, it seems like progress is a bad word with some exceptions but it mainly seems negative. I know it seems stupid to you but to me "progress" means "let's do things that make things worse for people in the name of virtue signaling." or "Let's make things equal by making things worse for specific groups because we think they are privileged." or "Let's make a world where everyone has a low standard of living in order to save the climate." or "Let's all ban specific words, phrases, and thoughts because they go against progress." "Let's ban guns because they are scary and this is progress." "Let's have poor people forced to go on inefficient bus systems that make it harder for them to spend time with their families and exhausted at the end of the day because of progress." "Let scientists grow potential lab meat so that poor people can't afford real meat." "Let scientists screen for types of minds in order to abort them or change them with CRISPR". It's like the more progress there is the less I like it. Screw progress. Progress either means taking away freedoms because of some mass hysteria or trying to create a dystopian world most of the time IMO.
More or less exactly what "progress" means for a Progressive. As someone who spent decades on the Left, and knows how they think, they feel that social evolution has to be directed by human action rather than simply allowed to run its natural course. The latter is the preferable and indeed more prudent course.
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(05-01-2019, 08:25 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: More or less exactly what "progress" means for a Progressive. As someone who spent decades on the Left, and knows how they think, they feel that social evolution has to be directed by human action rather than simply allowed to run its natural course. The latter is the preferable and indeed more prudent course.
After a few hundred millennia, we know how the human brain is wired. We respond must vigorously to threat and fear, and less-so to more positive emotions. Our threat/fear response is pretty simple: solidify ones position and disadvantage that of your opponents. Given that, leaving things to chance guarantees greed, hording, resentment and strife. Based on the past, strife = violence.
So I'll pass on leaving it to chance, and prefer a more thoughtful approach. The one thing you do have right, to much "thoughtful" can become suffocating, so a reasonable balance is needed.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(05-01-2019, 08:25 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (05-01-2019, 04:40 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: To me, it seems like progress is a bad word with some exceptions but it mainly seems negative. I know it seems stupid to you but to me "progress" means "let's do things that make things worse for people in the name of virtue signaling." or "Let's make things equal by making things worse for specific groups because we think they are privileged." or "Let's make a world where everyone has a low standard of living in order to save the climate." or "Let's all ban specific words, phrases, and thoughts because they go against progress." "Let's ban guns because they are scary and this is progress." "Let's have poor people forced to go on inefficient bus systems that make it harder for them to spend time with their families and exhausted at the end of the day because of progress." "Let scientists grow potential lab meat so that poor people can't afford real meat." "Let scientists screen for types of minds in order to abort them or change them with CRISPR". It's like the more progress there is the less I like it. Screw progress. Progress either means taking away freedoms because of some mass hysteria or trying to create a dystopian world most of the time IMO.
More or less exactly what "progress" means for a Progressive. As someone who spent decades on the Left, and knows how they think, they feel that social evolution has to be directed by human action rather than simply allowed to run its natural course. The latter is the preferable and indeed more prudent course.
Sometimes I think "progressives" are the domestic version of the neocons. They shout a lot of buzzwords while knocking things down and making them a disaster. Progressives are the ones who started sterilizing people for instance because of eugenics because they kept thinking how much better it would make the world. Guess what? It failed. Progress failed.
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(05-02-2019, 01:30 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Sometimes I think "progressives" are the domestic version of the neocons. They shout a lot of buzzwords while knocking things down and making them a disaster. Progressives are the ones who started sterilizing people for instance because of eugenics because they kept thinking how much better it would make the world. Guess what? It failed. Progress failed.
Any group that intentionally moves the Overton Window risks the unknown lurking outside the current norm. Yes, mistakes have ben made and will be made in the future. It's the price of progress. Then again, failing to take those risks carries the counter risk of sclerotic rot. For example, not trying agriculture would have left us all living in caves.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(05-02-2019, 02:15 PM)David Horn Wrote: (05-02-2019, 01:30 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Sometimes I think "progressives" are the domestic version of the neocons. They shout a lot of buzzwords while knocking things down and making them a disaster. Progressives are the ones who started sterilizing people for instance because of eugenics because they kept thinking how much better it would make the world. Guess what? It failed. Progress failed.
Any group that intentionally moves the Overton Window risks the unknown lurking outside the current norm. Yes, mistakes have ben made and will be made in the future. It's the price of progress. Then again, failing to take those risks carries the counter risk of sclerotic rot. For example, not trying agriculture would have left us all living in caves.
True. I'm not opposed to all change because some changes are very good and make lives better for people. I am however, opposed to progress for the sake of progress.
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A so-called "thoughtful approach" is more often then not poorly thought out if it is thought out at all. Put simply Dunning-Kruger is strongest with those who are high and mighty visionaries. Rather I think leaving things to the natural course of events is more prudent. As I've gotten older and hopefully wiser, I've learned that I know very little and probably don't even know the things that I think I know.
F. A. Hayek Wrote:We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
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(05-02-2019, 03:02 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: (05-02-2019, 02:15 PM)David Horn Wrote: (05-02-2019, 01:30 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Sometimes I think "progressives" are the domestic version of the neocons. They shout a lot of buzzwords while knocking things down and making them a disaster. Progressives are the ones who started sterilizing people for instance because of eugenics because they kept thinking how much better it would make the world. Guess what? It failed. Progress failed.
Any group that intentionally moves the Overton Window risks the unknown lurking outside the current norm. Yes, mistakes have ben made and will be made in the future. It's the price of progress. Then again, failing to take those risks carries the counter risk of sclerotic rot. For example, not trying agriculture would have left us all living in caves.
True. I'm not opposed to all change because some changes are very good and make lives better for people. I am however, opposed to progress for the sake of progress.
Then accept the status quo, because progress is the product of change -- most of which has a factor of unknown risk and reward. Remember Post-It notes? They were the accidental result of work on a totally different product. Solyndra, on the other hand, was an attempt to make cheap solar power that failed miserably. Unless you are willing to risk failures, successes never have a chance to happen.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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05-03-2019, 10:46 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-03-2019, 10:48 AM by AspieMillennial.)
(05-03-2019, 09:56 AM)David Horn Wrote: (05-02-2019, 03:02 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: (05-02-2019, 02:15 PM)David Horn Wrote: (05-02-2019, 01:30 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Sometimes I think "progressives" are the domestic version of the neocons. They shout a lot of buzzwords while knocking things down and making them a disaster. Progressives are the ones who started sterilizing people for instance because of eugenics because they kept thinking how much better it would make the world. Guess what? It failed. Progress failed.
Any group that intentionally moves the Overton Window risks the unknown lurking outside the current norm. Yes, mistakes have ben made and will be made in the future. It's the price of progress. Then again, failing to take those risks carries the counter risk of sclerotic rot. For example, not trying agriculture would have left us all living in caves.
True. I'm not opposed to all change because some changes are very good and make lives better for people. I am however, opposed to progress for the sake of progress.
Then accept the status quo, because progress is the product of change -- most of which has a factor of unknown risk and reward. Remember Post-It notes? They were the accidental result of work on a totally different product. Solyndra, on the other hand, was an attempt to make cheap solar power that failed miserably. Unless you are willing to risk failures, successes never have a chance to happen.
Solyndra was the result of a deliberate scam. Failures need to be risked but sometimes the logic just isn't there. Lately whenever I see things progressing, things have gotten worse. I'm very skeptical of progress because whenever I've seen it called for, things get worse. Some progress is good but I look at it from a cautioned approach. Progress is usually a code word of "give up this or that freedom for the sake of society" or it's trying to gaslight you into accepting being accused or victimized.
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