06-03-2022, 05:23 PM
(06-03-2022, 04:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:Paragraph by paragraph response:(06-03-2022, 02:34 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: If your husband or wife isn't abusive, you have an obligation to stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of your children. Your child's happiness is more important than yours is, especially because you were the one who chose wrong, not them. Americans (this goes across generations) love to talk about "selfishness" this and "helping humanity" that, when they're too self-absorbed to take care of their own damn kids. At least people in the 90s and 2000s actually realized the divorce epidemic was a bad thing. Now we just view hoe-ish lifestyles (among women and men) as normal and just shrug our shoulders when asked how it affects the kids....in the event we even bother to ask at all or get their perspective. The cherry on top is that we then (act) surprised when kids have all these mental health problems.
Fuck this "living your best life" bullshit. Sometimes people just need to...shut up and do their duty.
Good points. I don't know if I would have adhered to them, though, or else in fact I didn't, because I myself did not see having a father or even a mother as that important to my own upbringing. My parents were happily married, but I was not happily tied to them or to my siblings. So from my point of view, "family" seems less important to me than it does to many others. And I did not want to do my "duty" and do service work in my early 20s, because to me then, my education and my participation (such as it was) in the outstanding youth culture of that time and in the activism of those times was more valuable to me than "doing my duty," and I didn't think indeed that we are here to "do your duty", but to "live our best life". But that is how I felt then, and I understand other viewpoints. If I were 20 years old today, and saw the crappy youth culture and the cost and trends in education today, I might well choose to join the Peace Corps or something, and I admire those who do this.
It is important not to have children if your own behavior or situation will affect them badly. I didn't. Being children of an unhappy marriage may be even worse than being without a parent, especially if that parent soon finds a better marriage mate who is willing to provide and care for and love their step-child. So one-size-fits-all moral pronouncements don't work too well. Morality is based on the golden rule, not on specific duty or institution requirements. In our age, people are discovering that they can find the lifestyle that works best for them, and determine their own ethics, not just obey what family or society requires them to do as a duty. And living a life of duty is not living a genuine or authentic life. A real life is centered in the heart chakra. But that then imposes on them the need to choose one's course of life wisely. That may not always be so easy. So that's why more-conservative or red-state/county people might choose instead to obey social and authoritarian dictates. And then, of course, to knock and rail against those who choose not to do that. Our level of social evolution feeds the culture wars.
P1: I was much the same way. Like you, I never married or had children. My parents were happily married for 55 years before my dad died. My mom lived about 3- 1/2 years afterwards. I did not have a normal growing up experience as I got sent to boarding school when I was ten. I had a condition which later became widely know as Asperger's Syndrome later on. Was then finally able to kind of put two and two together to figure out why my growing up was not normal. Once I turned 21 I decided it was time to rebel against the experience, and to this day I feel that much was hidden from me at the time. The one-size-fits-all approach you mention was quite normal during the 1950s but much of that world was fiction even at that time, although really not understood until later. When the 2T busted loose in the late 1960s Me Generation lifestyles postponed marriages, sent the divorce rate soaring, and launched our world into a new social paradigm, much of which has since been rejected, especially sexual permissiveness. The election of Reagan in 1980 did usher in a more conservative mindset, especially following the AIDS scare a few years later.
P2: Again for the same reason I didn't. But I also developed a desire to be a successful ladies' man which never really materialized. If I were to ever write an autobiography it would be titled "Ladies' Man Dreams". I often question whether the term ladies' man, while once carrying a certain mystique, hasn't become more derogatory in the politically correct present. In many ways intolerance of those who don't follow certain practices seems to have actually increased rather than decreasing. My Asperger's was no doubt a big factor in my failure to achieve my ladies' man goals. Dreamed of being out on the town most if not all weekends with in many cases a different woman each time. Condition no doubt kept me from making the kind of income necessary to be able to achieve this. Today there may be even fewer who could afford this lifestyle.