Tehra wrote:
Are you saying there's a difference between considering and saying?
Case in point.
To articulate one's attitude takes more courage and self-awareness than most possess. But then again many of us here don't refuse to say as much.
Eturnalshift wrote:
So you're assuming all those are professional experiences? Anyways, a persons professional experience - something that makes up about 1/4 of a working adults week - doesn't help shape who they are and they can't craft a story from it? I remember you telling us how you worked at a pawn shop, you were friends with some jew-hating Nazi and that you spent some time in jail... yet, none of that is interesting and it's certainly not part of who you are (even though, if I remember correctly, you were telling us stories so we could understand why you are the way you are)...?
To stand apart from the crowd and look at everyone else as they're nothing because you read about people as people in some history book, rather than truly mingling and getting to know people... just doesn't... make much sense?
This too is case in point.
What you are saying is enormously shallow and materialistic. Your argument is that the degree to which one is interesting is their net worth, or how much they materially get done in life - to make useful products, to cure cancer, to fight wars...etc...as if soldiers, seamstress, and technical people are particularly interesting individuals.
You can spend your entire life blowing things up or hunched over a machine and never challenge your beliefs or really think, think about what you've seen. Certainly that's the case with most people. You could talk to hundreds of thousands of people in the armed forces who are living, breathing stereotypes and no experience in their careers has changed or could change them from who they were when they joined up. You could talk to countless medical or educational professionals, or people in any field, who couldn't face life if they had real insights into the nature or consequences of their work. Most people could spend a hundred years doing whatever it is they do and not ever be changed by the experience any more than they were in the first year they did it.
On the other hand, many people's entire world is shattered in an instant by an experience. Sometimes it's a chance meeting, you see "how the other half lives", or you develop a conviction that this is just or this is wrong. Or sometimes someone's world gets a whole lot bigger in just a moment, learning about something out there.
I would definitely say I found it worthwhile and enjoyable to meet and talk to people who were really individual and lived lives and had experiences off the beaten track.
And as to history, you can't understand anything without context. Being ignorant of where this world came from is no different than any other sort of being sheltered.
