Another big one is obesity - most people in the Western world are affected by it, and therefore we all are indirectly; and even skinny people can be full of saturated fats at the biochemical level. And yet we are pumped full of ads for it 24/7. You can stop watching TV or reading things where those show up… but nevertheless it surroundeds you still.
Some people fall prey to all of the things - alcoholism, obesity, overspending, and more besides - while some may be immune to some of them, but nobody among us is perfectly capable of avoiding all of them. So as you said, perfection isn’t a goal that we can reach so much as something to strive for, but it is so very much worth striving for!
I agree with you, and it’s damning that dietary disorders are so overlooked, including anorexia I have myself ): Another part of the medal, still shitty.
I find that schools should be a place to somehow form that first layer of defence against these patterns, and they aren’t that good at that currently, nor many of them have a proper psychological counseling or even understanding how kids work. If all these shitty marketing practices would take to time to being shut off, let’s at least patch the youth to ignore them.
Bolsheviks, with all their failings, did exactly that by starting with literacy campaigns and providing their thoughts as a learning material to deprogram people from tsarism (and program them into bolshevism, yes), and it worked. The fight we’d have in eleven years already started with children entering their first grade. There’s no such angle, imho, to combat these problems, but making them immune here from the very start.
The same with climate change and political populism: a decade-long investment to really affect things in the future with much smaller efforts than reprogramming an adult who already formed their habits. By educating them and kicking off grifters at that level, we’d ensure they are much safer than us, that they don’t need to learn it on their own.
If there’s a slight chance you can do so with small things like voting, talking about how it’s important, arguing with other parents at regular school meetings, do it. I do it too.
I am not sure how democracy can survive, globally. It takes so very much effort, but people are so extremely lazy, yet those two factors seem like they work against one another? Many parents just want to use schools as daycare centers, and I’ve even heard of some schools having to potty train the youngest ones, who somehow never did learn that at home.
While at the same time, globalization and mechanization make schooling irrelevant for so many, who will earn less in service jobs that don’t need it, but still are told to vote, as if they are capable of properly understanding political discourse, and especially how to spot misinformation. Places like Russia heavily push misinformation, and many of the dumbest Western societies seem to lack any defense against it, by people who kinda don’t even care which message they send so long as it lines their personal pocketbooks.
In this time period we live in where technology is at a higher level than it’s ever been, so very many people fall through the cracks and cannot access the most basic tenants of previous eras - like the ability to work hard and thus buy a home, or at least be able to afford rent so as to avoid becoming homeless.
In the face of all that, schooling seems to be not a priority for people just trying to hold on for dear life through these economic upsets. It’s like in chess, in order to perform a really cool end-game move, you have to survive the next few rounds first, and then the next several after that, and so on. So even if schooling would have been “the solution to all (many) of our problems”, it nevertheless may get ignored, especially as several Western nations go through major constitutional crises in the next decade.
Another big one is obesity - most people in the Western world are affected by it, and therefore we all are indirectly; and even skinny people can be full of saturated fats at the biochemical level. And yet we are pumped full of ads for it 24/7. You can stop watching TV or reading things where those show up… but nevertheless it surroundeds you still.
Some people fall prey to all of the things - alcoholism, obesity, overspending, and more besides - while some may be immune to some of them, but nobody among us is perfectly capable of avoiding all of them. So as you said, perfection isn’t a goal that we can reach so much as something to strive for, but it is so very much worth striving for!
I agree with you, and it’s damning that dietary disorders are so overlooked, including anorexia I have myself ): Another part of the medal, still shitty.
I find that schools should be a place to somehow form that first layer of defence against these patterns, and they aren’t that good at that currently, nor many of them have a proper psychological counseling or even understanding how kids work. If all these shitty marketing practices would take to time to being shut off, let’s at least patch the youth to ignore them.
Bolsheviks, with all their failings, did exactly that by starting with literacy campaigns and providing their thoughts as a learning material to deprogram people from tsarism (and program them into bolshevism, yes), and it worked. The fight we’d have in eleven years already started with children entering their first grade. There’s no such angle, imho, to combat these problems, but making them immune here from the very start.
The same with climate change and political populism: a decade-long investment to really affect things in the future with much smaller efforts than reprogramming an adult who already formed their habits. By educating them and kicking off grifters at that level, we’d ensure they are much safer than us, that they don’t need to learn it on their own.
If there’s a slight chance you can do so with small things like voting, talking about how it’s important, arguing with other parents at regular school meetings, do it. I do it too.
I am not sure how democracy can survive, globally. It takes so very much effort, but people are so extremely lazy, yet those two factors seem like they work against one another? Many parents just want to use schools as daycare centers, and I’ve even heard of some schools having to potty train the youngest ones, who somehow never did learn that at home.
While at the same time, globalization and mechanization make schooling irrelevant for so many, who will earn less in service jobs that don’t need it, but still are told to vote, as if they are capable of properly understanding political discourse, and especially how to spot misinformation. Places like Russia heavily push misinformation, and many of the dumbest Western societies seem to lack any defense against it, by people who kinda don’t even care which message they send so long as it lines their personal pocketbooks.
In this time period we live in where technology is at a higher level than it’s ever been, so very many people fall through the cracks and cannot access the most basic tenants of previous eras - like the ability to work hard and thus buy a home, or at least be able to afford rent so as to avoid becoming homeless.
In the face of all that, schooling seems to be not a priority for people just trying to hold on for dear life through these economic upsets. It’s like in chess, in order to perform a really cool end-game move, you have to survive the next few rounds first, and then the next several after that, and so on. So even if schooling would have been “the solution to all (many) of our problems”, it nevertheless may get ignored, especially as several Western nations go through major constitutional crises in the next decade.