Wrong Turns In Life

[pbrower2a]

(09-06-2017, 04:24 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(08-01-2017, 03:21 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-31-2017, 07:03 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: So that others might learn .... and ... for pure pleasure of venting.

What were your wrong turns in life?

What was wrong about them and what were the lessons learned?

What would your X year old self tell your Y year old self and / or, what would you tell up and coming Millennials and eventually, Homelanders. A few Homelanders are now approaching tweenerhood, which is typically where wrong turns start to happen. Some of my earliest wrong turns happened when I was 9.

In view of Asperger's Syndrome I wish I had been a philosophy major and psychology minor, or vice-versa, in college. Knowing about it would have saved me much pointless hardship.

But I am going to give some more general advice.

1. Learning is worth the cost and potential disappointments. It may be the difference between getting work that you like and getting work that you hate -- and work that you hate will grind you. It may prepare you for a life unavailable to you; you may find that economic forces and the general corruption of our social order consign you to a job that you hate. So save every penny that you can to start a business. Train yourself for a job that pays better than what you get stuck with first.

2. Do not trust the political system. If the American people can end up with Donald Trump as President, then anything bad is possible. Expect government to first reward those who bought the politicians.

3. Expand your world. Even if you are too broke to travel beyond some dreary hick town, you can read. There is much video. Maybe travelo0gues will better enrich your life than will fecal television.

4. Don't allow your economic condition to be the cause of your esteem or lack thereof. Profit for elites, the only obvious virtue in America today, depends on multitudes being poor. Poverty is not shame. In a thoroughly-corrupt system it may be the strongest evidence of your integrity.

5. Stay clear of status symbols that demonstrate only two things: that you have the funds for buying them and that you are foolish enough to waste money on them. Truth be told, the Old Rich snicker at such things anyway. You can spend thousands of dollars on a wristwatch, and what will that wristwatch do that a throwaway watch from Wal*Mart will do? It will cost you savings or the opportunity to do something really interesting, and it will show the rest of the world that you are a schmuck insecure about how  others perceive you.

6. Develop loyalties to family and community, even if those are terribly flawed, unless those are so dysfunctional as to cripple your life. Much of the needed improvement  in America will come from people deciding to make miserable places, including ghettos, barrios, the Reservation, and dreary hick towns more tolerable. San Francisco may  be a paradise due to the climate, but you may be priced into such a place as Lima, Ohio. Then make the best of Lima (which will be tough) and try to make it better. Incremental improvements, like moving to Fort Wayne or Toledo, may be all that are available.

7. Get in shape and stay in shape. Obesity is a choice, and a bad one. Avoid street drugs and drunkenness.

8. Don't watch so much TV. Don't be a big sports fan.

9. Remember this: everything corrupt, cruel, inequitable, and repressive in our society has powerful interests behind the nastiness.

I have the condition and yet somehow have managed to be able to reside within the quite pricey Chicago area. I have done it by renting rooms in private homes for the majority of my adult life. On one of the other threads I posted a blurb in response to your coming clean about the condition but it somehow got lost in the shuffle. Hope you got the chance to look at it. Many times I tend to feel a tad emotional about being cursed with this condition that has largely prevented me from living the lifestyle I had one aspired to.

Thank you for reminding me of your post.  I am going to re-post the content here  in appreciation:

Quote:I need to respond to all this because I have the condition as well although it affected me in somewhat different ways, creating much emotional jeopardy down through the years.  Emotional jeopardy is an unusual game; sometimes you just have to play, which means that you have to be vulnerable. I also was bullied frequently as a child, and the year I was in fourth grade I was removed from public school following the Thanksgiving break. My parents supplied a tutor for a couple of years before space at a private boarding school became available. Much has gone wrong in my life through the years from that point on. Loud noises really don't bother me much except when trying to carry on a conversation. In fact my mother always said I played music and radio too loud. (No longer do much of that, though). Never did have trouble climbing stairs, but too have had difficulty obtaining and holding jobs at times although I had two jobs that lasted seven years, which in this day and age is about par for the course. By that length of time they will usually figure out some way to consider you too big an expense.

In the dating realm, we may not have had the same experiences, and this is where the topic of emotional jeopardy comes in. I wanted an active dating life very badly and did at times have some successes and had a few relationships that possibly could have led to marriage. I admittedly blew my last opportunity in the early 2000s because of my own restlessness. I had a fall in 2008, the same year the economy had its own fall. While I recovered well physically my financial stability took a big hit from which I have never recovered. Did obtain a job by the end of that year only to be removed unceremoniously in March of 2009. That's when I learned without a doubt how, in today's workplace, office politics and political correctness trump reason, and that petty jealousies can and often do lead to real-world consequences. A book I wrote titled JUDAS TIMES SEVEN is a somewhat fictionalized account of my experience, as I never learned the truth as to what went down and why after I developed an attraction to a woman who also was my lead person for most of my time there.

The only way in which we may have gotten better regarding our common condition is that we have at least come to recognize that vulnerability isn't a sign of weakness. It actually provides us with strength to overcome the toughest of obstacles. There are those who have told me that I managed to overcome tremendous odds in order to be able to live independently. And yet I don't come even close to considering myself as any kind of hero. If I were going to write my own autobiography, which I may take on sometime before my last breath occurs, I would probably title it "Ladies' Man Dreams", as I had almost an obsessional dream of being the ladies' man who could win the affection of nearly any woman I desired. The obsession was so intense that anybody who tried to get in the way, even family members, I considered to be the enemy. Now 72, I figure that it's now safe to go public with it because it is no doubt too late in life to try to become that ladies' man now. And do you feel that the term "Ladies' man" is more derogatory today that it may once have been? I have heard that there was a time when it carried a certain sort of mystique.

If  one knows about Asperger's in oneself or a loved one, then one can make adjustments. Perhaps the wisest thing to do is to hone the efforts of someone with Asperger's even if the activity seems statistically a poor chance. Just because the statistics are more favorable for most people as office clerks than as creative people, someone with Asperger's probably has no chance as an office clerk in which facial recognition, office politics, and relating to banal conversations matters greatly.  I may have no natural empathy or optimism -- but I can pretend empathy and optimism because even a pretense of those can do good. Imitate a virtue (empathy) or a practical behavior (pessimists get exactly what they expect) and you earn a reputation for decency and practicality. Note well: normal people must learn empathy and optimism. Of course I must watch myself, just as an alcoholic must watch for the snares of situations in which alcohol might be available and resist alcohol.

Having read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, I have come to the conclusion that doing really well in American life depends upon extraordinary preparation before one starts making money at what one does. Everything basic has been done. There are no simple, profound truths to be discovered in any field of endeavor. Even in physics the last such discovery was relativity which has been known for 112 years.

Want to be a violinist in one of the top orchestras in America? Gladwell suggests that it will take about 10 thousand hours of dedication to musical education and practice of the violin to get that good. To be sure you will not get a chance to do such if you lack in the obvious necessities of near-perfect pitch and the talent for reading music. But lots of people with the talent fell short of playing a violin for a symphony orchestra because they never got access to a violin, could not get the privacy for practicing three hours a day, or got stuck with child labor (including farm chores) that ensures that one can never reach the apex of virtuosity necessary for meeting the standards of a first-class orchestra. Add to this, one must care. Get involved in an incompatible activity, like modifying cars for speed or racing cars, and you will not become a very good violinist because such also takes time. Yes, auto racing takes much time, effort, and experimentation. This applies to writing, popular music, or painting.

10,000 hours is roughly the time needed to become a PhD or get a medical degree. Put my level of learning back in the 19th century (without the anachronisms) , and I would probably be a college professor. With what I have I am lucky to be a substitute school teacher.

But put such a quest to someone with Asperger's who can do the repetitious, purposeful activity -- and one might get a fine cartoonist. Or anything that requires almost superhuman excellence as an intellectual or creative activity.

Maybe I have some chance to get married. As a man I have some chance to marry a woman in later middle age -- a widow or a single professional. I am good with children, so I have value right there. The older that a man gets, the better his chances get. As with other handicapped people I am cautious. That is good for survival.

I am contemplating a book... "My Other Life" in which I know about Asperger's  and make the appropriate adjustments. Life without Asperger's? No. I would be a hero out of one of those trashy romance novels. Besides, "Federal Judge" is too boring for a story.