• @EnderMB
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    467 months ago

    There is a term for this, but I can’t remember what it is.

    It’s a phenomenon where a person goes through their formative years in a given structure, where you are raised by your parents, go to school, and are given set goals for every year - do X and you’ll get to Y. This goes all the way up to your early twenties if you go to university, possibly longer if you join a structured company with similar guardrails, or much longer when you join the armed forces and live in a regimented way.

    Once people leave these guardrails, some really struggle with the freedom they are granted. No one has a goal to point you towards, no one cares if you fail, and ultimately your life has a degree of freedom you haven’t experienced ever.

    One thing we’re terrible at as a society is either guiding people with no clear path, or supporting those that don’t want a clear path and want to find one of their own. Some people really struggle with this, and the freedom of being able to do shit like overindulge on drugs/alcohol/food with no support or community support can ruin lives.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      77 months ago

      A lot of things are worth doing for the sake of challenging yourself, but then battling your own mind about if something is a wasted effort or not is the real war.

      As a general rule, anything you have to repeatedly do you should master.

    • Nfamwap
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      67 months ago

      A few years ago I worked as a telecoms engineer. The role itself was pretty free-roaming and a large part of your working day was unsupervised and allowed you to make your own decisions and your day to day achievements were pretty much all down to you and/or the guys you were working with.

      Anyway, the company had a spell where they hired a lot of ex armed forces personnel into various engineering roles, many of whom had done long stints in the military. Pretty much every veteran I worked with was smart, hard working, organised and a joy to work with. With one caveat, most of them needed an ‘order’ to do a particular thing, or pushing into thinking for themselves. They had spent their entire working life in a structured, order based environment, that left them unprepared when they were given the freedom to think for themselves.

      I can totally get how homelessness and addiction problems can beset people when the structure they have spent their whole lives within, is suddenly not there any longer.

      • @[email protected]
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        fedilink
        17 months ago

        That’s so interesting. Objectively, it’s neither good nor bad. The indifferentness of the universe to our coping with freedom is wild and interesting, a rollercoaster on its own

    • Too Lazy Didn't Name
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      English
      37 months ago

      I think this is the cause of a lot of veteran houselessness and suicide unfortunately.

    • @Aux
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      -57 months ago

      Removed by mod