Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago
> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
Some interesting people find your examples interesting: perhaps native to their personality.
However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.
A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.
Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
Did they?
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.
Citation needed.
Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
I think you're projecting.
So you're cool with living in extreme poverty because it's not "fatal"? "Bring it on"?
Lots of things that aren't fatal are still very undesirable.
Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.
Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.
I concede that the way much of the US looks from car windows might be bad for people's mental health, but I doubt any of the badness is prevented by playing music or listening to podcasts in the car.