Some people are so inconsiderate.
We were meant to have a tradesman come here today to continue on where he left off. He is working on the second toilet and yesterday put in the sealing treatment for moisture. He said he would be here, but he never showed up.
Look at this mess.
And now we are going to have to wait even longer for him to show up again, just because his wife gave birth today...
No work ethic.
He is having his first daughter after four boys, so while happy for him, I also feel a bit sorry for him, as I don't think he really knows what he is in for. A client and I were talking about parenting for an hour today and how things are seemingly very different in the lives of children from when we were kids ourselves. We were talking about the growing social problems in Finland, the increase in hard drug usage that isn't recreational, homelessness, social disconnection and various other things that have fundamentally changed the culture of being a kid, and I only see it getting worse.
I think that a lot of the social problems stem from social disenfranchisement where community has been eroded away, even though people are more "connected" than ever before in history. A lot of the younger people are depressed and on medication, struggling to find a place to fit in and unable to build lasting relationships - and still people wonder why antisocial behavior is on the increase.
As a father to a daughter, these things worry me, because when I was a kid and in my culture, women were protected, but it seems that is no longer the case. Perhaps it is part of the new "equality" that has been driven for so long - they are now open targets to the violence that many boys have had for years. I can teach my daughter how to protect herself and make smart decisions, but at the end of the day, she will be a teen with limited experience, a lot of bravado and the belief that she can look after herself - and will at times likely put herself in harms way. Kids are kids. When social networks are no longer as personal, everyone ends up more on their own and a few poor choices can lead to being completely unprotected.
But, this same erosion makes people act in different ways too, makes them feel less accountable for their actions, more entitled, less connected to consequence of behavior. We are surrounded by the stories of violence and have become accustomed to the reports of gangs rapes and murders, people getting shot and stabbed in the streets, instable people killing their partners - as if it is normal, as if it has to be this way.
Of course, we are seeing more stories on these kinds of topics because of the way the media works, but when real life experience starts to look like a news report, there are issues. In the last couple years, I know from within my extended circle of a couple rape cases and one murder case where a husband killed his wife. This is Finland, one of the richest and most highly educated countries in the world - yet is far from immune to social issues.
It isn't normal, it is only going to get worse as more pressure is put on society through continued social breakdown and economic hardship. I can teach my daughter all I can and she can learn it all - but she still has to interact with thousands upon thousands of people who have learned very different lessons in life. We can learn to control ourselves, but we can't control everything in our environment. We also can't live locked away and fearful of the world, so we are trapped having to face the dangers the best we can, hoping we get lucky in the encounters we have.
The world worries me as a parent, because while there is so much potential, so much of it depends on people collaborating and finding common ground from which to build upon, yet we keep polarizing and fragmenting from each other, diving ever-deeper into self-isolation in its many forms. The more it happens, the more it will and while we keep advancing technologically, the things that are truly important to us as a species seem to be getting pushed into the background, in favor of useless replacements to fill the widening voids. Tools that mimic the feelings and rewards of living in a healthy society, while offering nothing of the sort.
While I am hopeful the challenges can be overcome, I also understand that society is always in a state of flux, but it is the environment that evolves it, that guides it into the future. For a very long time we have been progressively getting better in so many ways, but once we start to take our skills and nature as a species for granted, we can start to turn and shift in another direction, one we might not want to go.
We can see the battle now, where there are a lot of people searching for and creating meaning and purpose in what is ultimately harmful to our progression, a devolution of society, a degradation of our potential. but, the complexity is high, the nuance and variations uncountable, so it is easier to focus on a narrow point and polarize it for clarity, jumping from one to the next without ever considering how they are connected or whether they are in conflict with each other.
Society is made up of relationships, yet we can't even see how our own actions relate to our world and each other, let alone the dynamics of all that lies outside of our knowledge and ability to understand. There are milestone markers on the road, but the journey is never finished until the end.
I hope and work toward a world where my daughter can have her place in a healthy world. But at times, it feels like an uphill battle against the inevitable. It would be easier to bury my thoughts and entertain my mind with something else, but I believe that is how we got here in the first place and it isn't the way out.
The worry of a parent is never complete.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Oh man, I am so surprised to read this as we work with these things every day and so you can say hat it's right up our street. A certain numbness has set into societies and everyone endures and mind their own business, living in prisons surrounded by electric fencing to keep the criminals at bay.
They call it GBV (Gender Based Violence) over here and our stats read that every 3 hours a woman is killed. Most often by a husband or a boyfriend. The world is becoming alien to me, as communities no lomger exist and it's every man for himself by himself. Yes we are connected by fancy mobile phones but the phones have also become the major tool of the drug syndicates to ply their wares.
All that I can say is that this is only the tip of the growing ice berg.
People have nothing and they are hungry, so it turrns into desperation ang mass anger dut to the inequalities and the riches that are flaunted in front of them every day. Covid has not improved the situation and money is becoming scarcer by the day for essential services.
So, watch this space.
Some ex-clients of mine were in SA for a couple years, living in these compounds, running the same few kilometers a day, changing direction for something different. They said it was like a prison - but better on the side of the fence they held.
I get the sense that much of the world is below the surface, hidden away in the daily grind. It is slowly getting exposed, but it also keeps burrowing downward.
Every suburban house now has high walls and electric fencing Taraz. Individual family prisons.
In the richer areas they have cameras, movement detectors and alarms and every second house has one or two big guard dogs.
24 hour security cars patrol the streets day and night and most houses have panic buttons to alert the patrols in case of danger.
Child trafficking is also big time here and you dare not leave your child out of your sight. So yeah, things are getting tougher by the day.
Oh yeah, there is another dark world down there that has a massive folllowing of all nations.
Don't you find it incredible that in 2021, these things are still an issue, considering all that we have developed in other areas?
Absolutey, even though we are normally 20 years behind the first world countries, I can only ascribe it to a colonial mindset. They are saying that if all of persons that are currently before the courts on corruption charges should step aside until their cases are completed. Then there will be no one at the rudder of the government ship. This country is in a terrible state and worsening by the day.
Out of 144 municipalities, only one municipality has a sewage works that is above par. The rest dumps millions of liters of sewage into the rivers and the ocean. They have retrenched all of the white engineers when apartheid was abolished and replaced them with comrades. Now there are no engineers and all of the SOEs are bankrupt and malfunctioning.
So now they have inported 150 engineers from Cuba at great cost to fix the water works, but there's big resentment as we have 200 white engineers with more than the neccessary experience sitting at home. Legal action is in process and we will see what happens.
I just don't know why every resident of this country cannot take hands and work together to rebuild the mess that we are in.
The nerve of some people XD
No real difference, they're all problems XD
True, but like with everything else, don't let that fear rule you :)
I think girls are easier when they are young, more of a worry as they get older :D
It doesn't rule, but it does weigh heavy on me at times when I hear stories of what happens in the world today. You'd think society would improve exponentially, like tech, but it seems that the more we advance technologically, the more base we become socially.
Depends XD both my older kids were reasonably easy when young (but I am comparing them rather unfairly to their autistic/adhd younger brother who really was a massive handful), then puberty happened and oldest was lucky to survive to his 15th birthday and after coming close middle child is on track to make hers.
Society will only advance/improve glacially while people are desperately clinging to the status quo (by conflating it with traditions, some of which are definitely worth keeping).
I count myself lucky that Smallsteps is as easy as she has been (which in some ways, hasn't been easy). The guy who just had the baby also has one child with DS and life has been hard for them and I know several others who have had all kinds of various issues. Parenting sucks, but someone has to do it.
The status quo will kill us all eventually.
Perhaps we're simply re-adopting the default human condition.
Perhaps, but part of our condition is being to evolve ourselves using our brains to restructure socially as well as build tools. If we are heading to a default condition where fear and violence evolve us, we have chosen to give up on a fundamental part of who we are.