Watching others find ways to live, and watching myself reach out to the world through the cold, unloving connections of bits and bytes, I wonder…
While keeping the research of the particles of life moving forward, just so we can reach a milestone 14,284 days from now…
I wonder.
The old ways are still valid comparison points, I tell myself.
Political boundaries were meaningful at some point in time.
Every supercivilisation concedes old economies of scale to the previous generation.
I wonder why parents force so many structured activities on their children when children will become better adults if given time to explore subjects their parents don’t care to know about or simply don’t know exist.
How much of a general education is good for one person?
In sixth grade, I’ve said here at least once, I learned about the Soviet Union making students choose the direction their education would take at around age 10 or 11 (my same age at the time), and about Germany giving students the Gymnasium route, if they chose, after their primary school years were completed.
In secondary school, I could choose a vocational/technical program, a college preparatory program or a general education program for my high school diploma.
Specialisation divided me from my primary school classmates at age 15.
My observations about life in general began to take a new direction at that age, despite my desire to learn about all ways of life.
I lost track of the thought patterns of students outside the college preparatory track.
Yet, I still kept trying to apply my theories about general personality types to a smaller population.
Thus, at university, my theories were destroyed.
Was it inevitable? For me, obviously, yes.
Snobbishness did not equate to applied intelligence as it had amongst my friends in secondary school.
People with a so-called redneck personality were just as likely to pursue a career in engineering or science as a person who had never seen a can of PBR beer.
And in the streets of downtown Atlanta, those who never completed a formal education were just as likely to drink high-shelf liquor and drive expensive cars as those who had PhDs and invented the Next Big Thing.
The Internet, a general means of access to self-education, did not exist in my youth. Television, films, books, magazines, newspapers and contact with other people were the limited means to teach oneself.
I couldn’t instantly tweet with a person on the other side of the globe but I could exchange letters with an international penpal.
Ham radio gave some semblance of tweeting/texting. Both provide no clear understanding of body language (but voice-based ham radio communication did provide intonation (Morse code was the tweeting/texting of its day, of course)).
But one body is still one body, subject to circadian, natural wake/sleep cycles. Despite external devices and integrated prosthetic body part advancement, we chiefly depend on the speed of our central nervous system to process stimuli.
We may have speeded up the ability to herd our species but we are still flesh-and-blood states of energy.
Enlightened youth want more and they want it now, while older people want to keep their well-established lifestyles.
In general.
I enjoy watching the misdisuninformation cycles that those with something to sell/tell start by dropping a pebble, the concentric circles distorting and being distorted by all the competing messages vying to become stimuli to individuals and groups.
I have nothing to sell or tell.
I want to live a life that is amenable, even if “amenable” is a word I have to look up its meaning to determine if I’ve used its definition in the right context here.
So far, I’ve enjoyed the luxury of sharing my observations freely, keeping myself from succumbing to the temptation of luxury.
As we become more fully aware that consciousness is a deception that can fool us into a self-destructive supercivilisation, we will give more and more thought to the fact our bodies are made of competing subsystems working for the greater good of the body.
Nurture creative criticism in our children so they will understand friendly competition is the route to a world of competing subcultures working for the greater good of the body.
Cutting off negative pathways is painful but so is removing a gangrenous body part for the sake of the body.
There is no ultimate solution. Life goes on.
We adjust to the changing times or we don’t – either response is acceptable.
Give room for the voices to be heard – the best solution in the moment often comes from a place we won’t know existed because a parent gave a child time for self-education outside the prescripted norm.
The size of the pathway or nervous system pipeline is key to understanding how to read the health of a subculture. Overcrowd the pathway or overclock the pipeline speed and you create side effects that quickly turn into pathological terminators.
Are any of these theories universally valid or have I created a thought set that applies to a limited population?
treetrunkdings 