ForumsWEPRLetting Out My Mind

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NoNameC68
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NoNameC68
5,045 posts
Shepherd

Today's world is far more different than it ever has been in the past. What you read may sound drastic. You must understand that what I talk about is about humanity as a whole. Not everyone is the same, so I talk about the majority and I am aware that there are always exceptions.

I am about to talk my mind. I shall explain myself as clearly as I can. I am open to comments, but if you comment then make sure you have read the whole thing first. If you do not understand a single word I said, then do not waste space typing "...what?" or "huh?"

These are my ideas and opinions and I am even going to share things that I myself have never witnessed or experianced. Feel free to state your opinion. In fact, feel free to express your own mind on a problem you see in your life or the world!

This is my mind, there is no sure topic, in fact the topic will change fairly often.

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Its funny, we are always tought things when we are young. We beleive the lies they tell us, yet they make the truths sound like a joke to the point that we ignore the truth in the long run. We are always tought lies when we are young. Sometimes we are lied to so we are protected from the harsh realities of the world, sometimes we are lied to so those lieing to us can protect themselves. Not all lies are bad, but most of the time they scar us one way or another, no matter what the ententions of that particular lie. One of the greatest ironies in life today is finding out that your heros are not who you thought they were. The sad thing is that these heros, for a lot of unfortunite people, are their own parrents. They tell you to work hard, to be respectful to others, to not steal or cheat or hurt those you love. Sometimes they are our parrents, sometimes they are other people we looked up too. They do that very same thing they told us not to do. They spend more time telling us what not to do, than fixing their own habits so they can show us what to do. It is not always one's own fault if they are an influence to others, but if they choose to be an example or a teacher to someone else they must hold themselves responsible. It is wrong for a parrent to cheat when they teach their own children not too.
There are many lies we are taught as children. We are taught that our heros come without sin or our enemeis have never once been good allies. We are taught that everything we learn from our teachers and government are truths. I beleive that these lies do not need aproached at this moment. Instead I shall now explain the few truths we do learn, but take as a joke.

Pute anything on TV and it shall become hardly anything more than a joke in time, especaily in today's society. Anything you see on TV will have less of an impact on your life than if you realy did see what happened in person. This is especaily true with those cartoons aimed towards younger audiances. I am not saying shows like Dora the Exploror, Sesame Street, and Barney are bad shows... but the things they teach you about sharing and being nice can, and usually do, become a joke in time. Parent's today are turning into secondary teachers, primary teachers becoming the TV. It is ok to allow young children to watch these shows once in a while but too many parents today are sitting their children in front of the TV way too much.
What could go wrong with sitting a 2 year old in front of Barney and Dora the Exploror a few hours a day? What they learn will not stick, every hour they watch TV is an hour less that they get to learn to be kind through their parrents. What is the one thing most kids do when they hit 2nd grade? They begin to make fun of baby stuff like the shows they used to watch. We should love those around us. Saying this usually is a good thing, unless your in 2nd grade and repeating Barney in a mocking way. That rule to love those around you becomes a joke.
I am not saying that children should not watch any TV at all, in fact it's good for them to learn from both the parrents and TV. Just remember that a child who sees their father helping a stranger up who stumbled to the ground, will most likely never turn that memory into a joke--compared to watching someone on TV helping a stranger up, which easily could become a joke in time. Not all kids are the same. Some kids could watch TV all day when they are young and grow up to be normal. All I can say is that when I look at my friends and the people around me, none of them show a hint that they learned anything from those baby shows. The few good people I do know usually have had such a crappy life they avoid being like the people they grew up with, or they had parrents who showed them by example how to lead their lives.

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Too many people today are fat,spoiled, and weak; not only physicly but mentally as well. Children used to go outside and play with sticks and climb trees and had to be home at a certain time so no one would worry about them. They would get bumps and bruises, scratches and broken bones. They became one with nature, or at least lived alongside it. Today we talk through phones and the internet, we dont get scratches or broken bones to toughen up our body or our minds. When something goes wrong in our life, generally we lose inturest of the internet, tv, and video games. They become meaningless. We become lost and we break down over things that are not that big a deal. Those who grow up outside, with friends they talk to in person, know the pains in life. When you trip and scrape your knee, look at the cast you wore when you broke your arm, look at pictures of you and your friends with scrapes all over you -- small things like the internet not working or missing a TV program does not become as big a deal to you. I honestly beleive that people who get hurt in the real world are less likely to slit their own arms or hang themselves than people who lock themselves up all day sitting inside.
It is way to easy to ignore the pain in the world. We only have to turn the TV off or hang up the phone to escape and distract ourselves with some other luxery. People were not always so fortunite to have an option to ignore the real world. What happened in an area became news to everyone around there and everyone had to face the facts. It is facing pain that we learn to live with it, learn to avoid it, learn to fix it.

Technology is not a bad thing, but our dependance on it is. Technology is ruining most individual's abilities to move onto bigger things. Technology is making us dependant on luck of the economy. What I said is nothing new. In a sence we were doomed since the beggening of human history. In other ways, it is the technology today that is hurting us most. Technology is not all bad. In fact technology is helping us live longer, but sadly I also beleive we could be living much more happily without it, or at least live better without depending on it as much as we do today.

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I have spoken my mind. Some of what I said may sound radical, but what I talked about were the long term effects of every action. I am not realy against parrents. In fact, the main thing bothering me are how kids grow up in genneral, not just how they are raised.

I could go even deeper but it would take a book to speak my full mind.

  • 6 Replies
thelistman
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thelistman
1,416 posts
Shepherd

Sounds like my parents. That's probably what my parents said when they were young. And their parents as well.

The world changes. Accept it and things will be easier.

kingryan
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kingryan
4,196 posts
Farmer

Wow.

You have clearly put a lot of thought into this....and I agree and disagree...

1. The only real thing that I disagree with is that sometimes we have to rely on technology to get things done. If we didn't have any technology we couldn't ring and ambulance immediately...we would have to send someone to go and get them. And then once the person went to the hospital, without technology how would we be able to work out what is wrong.

2. Children these days do mock everything that they have learnt. PlaySchool is a good show, but it is mocked and laughed at. Also, I think it is terrible to sit a child in front of a TV and leave them there for hours. I myself watch very little TV (mainly because I am on the computer, but that is besides the point...).

3. Another thing that adds to the terror of the world is FPS games and other human killing games. They are basically teaching kids to shoot people. This is stupid. I hate games where you have to shoot humans. Halo with the aliens is ok...but COD...nope. Also, fighting games are bad too, I myself am a pacifist, and I think it is wrong to fight and few things are solved by fighting...but then why is it promoted by these games.

4. Also, why are Educational Games mocked so much. They are good...and if they are fun it is good for the kids to play them.

These are my views....

KingRyan

Strop
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Strop
10,817 posts
Bard

Because this is interesting, I'm going to reply.

Because I have very little time to do so, I'm going to go straight to specifics.

It's hard to tread the line between pointing the finger at parenting and pointing the finger at parents because we are all similarly defined by circumstance, context and as presumably responsible individuals at the same time.

The major concerns I have that I've been raising over the past few years run parallel to the major thematic focus of NoName's post: Younger generations are being raised in a set of conditions that do not appear to equip them with the necessary skills of adaptation nor cohabitation. In a way, fostering our 'individuality' has become distorted into a non-sustainable practice that will have broader ramifications on the most basic of our infrastructures.

I've focused my preoccupations on this on a number of themes:

1) Like the post above, technology. Specifically how online communication has great potential...for those who bother to exist above a lowest-common-denominator. Unfortunately technology panders to the LCD such that while a minority will enthusiastically exchange ideas in a free-market manner that the pioneers of online communication originally intended, most of us will be content to a) watch porn b) click the mouse mindlessly c) shout at each other in massive tides of mob mentality of awe and disgust. We essentially become reduced to on-off switches.

In fact, if you look for my mock-preface to that 'book on Newgrounds' (because Asherlee said I could write a novel on the forums if you let me), this is exactly the point I made in it (yes, I can't actually type 1300 words without putting *some* thought into it).

2) Secondary to this, targeted marketing of youths. Commercialism took a turn in the 90s and the consumer market boomed. Now saturation is being achieved- the kind of things that carry the associations that you're giving to fully fledged adults two decades ago are being foisted on kids with ages in the single digits. There is a reason to be alarmed that 7-year old girls are putting on lipstick in earnest (unlike the time I put on my mother's bra when I was the same age...that was for the lulz.)

A more general point is that I get the feeling that for all our 'understanding' of developmental behaviors and psychology, it's being grossly misapplied. Somewhere along the line, children are simultaeneously consider to be moral 'atients' and thus defended to all rights, but considered moral 'agents' in that we are required to use reasoning with them. The latter isn't a simple thing- reason is only developed, not given. What results from both parts is a generation of increasingly spoilt kids who don't know how to keep it real because the social sentiments have restricted vital avenues of parenting...not least because kids exploit these restrictions in ways that were never intended but should not serve as surprising.

Like it or not, we still are reward-driven biological machines to some degree.

3) Another part of the individualistic drive...the results-oriented mindset. I also mentioned this earlier so if it's possible to search the forums I suggest you do that instead of me rehashing the passage again, as even though I'm on autopilot it takes time to type. In short, results-oriented mindset goes "I'll do it if I can get something out of it" which, guess what, undermines the original premises of the individualistic philosophy of 'realising potential'. This world should be teaching the young a process-oriented mindset so that we actually figure out how to support what's available to us.

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Another way of expressing the thematic thrust of the original post is that 'conditions for living in society today are diverging from absolute conditions for living'. This may seem true in parts- given that the circumstances many of us find ourselves being driven towards applies pressure away from other things that we might consider healthy. Living on the internet, for example, is great for quick and versatile socialising and I am eternally thankful otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have gone around life feeling pretty alone...but after several years of it I've had to admit that real life is like a breath of fresh air. To take a less abstract example, one might be forced to work very hard and be very stressed which takes them away from physical exercise yet one thing that doesn't change about our lives is that we currently inhabit...physical bodies. It's not such a good thing to be the pasty-white bureaucrats of the world, in this light.

Bottom line: moderation and balance, too, is a process.

NoNameC68
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NoNameC68
5,045 posts
Shepherd

I have been away from the computer for about a week and I am finaly back.

Anyways... thats quite inturesting, Strop. I am glad you found this topic inturesting.

I am actualy very pleased with the replys I have gotten on here. I am glad that thought has been pute into them.

Also, kingryan, you do bring up a good point about technology being helpful. I was mostly refering to personal possesions when I said technology. I should have said "Most technology is ruining the average individual's abilities to move onto bigger things."

Cortexal
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Cortexal
80 posts
Nomad

I do agree with Strop! And it kind of sounds like my parents when I was a kid.

NoNameC68
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NoNameC68
5,045 posts
Shepherd

Opinions on anybody's post will be highly apreciated, but also feel free to let out your own theories that you may have had. They can be about any aspect of life, they do not necessarily have to be about technology and parrenting.

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