This is more your wheelhouse then mine, but that's the same conclusion I came to. One of the big reasons I left IT and eventually became a cop was needing some purpose. I would also add the disconnect from nature and death. Perhaps a bit of Agrarian Romanticism, but it's tough not to be grounded and purposeful as a farmer. Traditionally anyway, I suspect today's mechanized slaughterhouse, GPS-guided self driven tractor, industrial mega-farms have the same hold.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.
I suspect we are, but facts matter. If you want to believe people are evil, however you are defining that, knock yourself out.
However, don't slander people who disagree with you as lacking the intestinal fortitude to face your "truth" or the self-awareness to look inside themselves.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.
I used to often wonder if I was a good person who just wasn't necessarily very nice, or a nice person who wasn't actually very good.
That's probably because I genuinely appreciate good manners, but at the same time I have the same animal impulses as everyone else so eventually my politeness wears thin and I struggle to remain friendly. If I wasn't inclined to be polite, or "nice" I doubt I would have spent much time on the thought at all.
Anyway I was riding down to Spokane to stay with Sidheshooter and go to another round of ECQC, and like a lot of motorcycle trips I spent most of it thinking. And it occurred to me that A) I was wasting a lot of time on what is really a pretty pop psychology question I'd invented for myself, and B) there's no answer because the question is kind of meaningless. Everyone is a complex mix of instincts, desires, frustrations, fears, beliefs, and traits, and of course I'm not really "good" because nobody is "good" deep down. They're something more complicated than "good" and hopefully they just do some good things and try to treat people around them reasonably well.
You know in my last job I had to do a lot of mentoring with younger guys coming up in my industry and some guys would end up telling you about their life stresses and general experience of day to day existence and it often struck me how hard they were working to try to fit themselves into a social construct that was pretty bizarre, if you think about it. I started saying to them things like, "hey look, if you're doing your taxes and you feel like you're going to lose your freaking mind if you have to talk to one more pantywaisted bureaucrat who quietly mumbles off an infinite list of rules you were supposed to follow and you feel like there's a part of you screaming at you to smash his head like a grape...dude, stop beating yourself up about that. Everyone acts like the society we're in should be making us happy but why would it? If you put a troop of chimps in the middle of fifty pinball machines and those were their constant surroundings the people running that zoo would get arrested. We're just primates. Stop expecting yourself to be happy while you apply for a mortgage or buy new pillows to go with the fifty other stupid pillows in your house. If the world of colour-matched dinettes and home equity lines of credit and letting yourself get talked down to by Karen in HR makes you want to go full killdozer, that's not because you're fucked up. It's because you're not fucked up. Just cope as best you can. Stop beating yourself up for not liking this."
I found most of the guys I talked to had never really had someone tell them it was okay to hate lots of the stuff people expected them to do, and that there were all kinds of guys who were being made miserable by the expectations placed on them. I don't know if that's just a certain cohort of guys who were having that specific experience of life or whether other groups are more used to this idea and this is common knowledge for other people or what.
But I know that the things I do that some people would think are "bad person" things, are mostly things about myself I think are pretty okay.
And the thing that I think is worst about myself, which is that I avoid conflict too frequently, is probably one of the things most people around me would think was an asset. But I genuinely wish that I had less "give" and more "take" in my personality.
It’s interesting a thread that started as observing things we regret in ourselves has changed into a thread questioning why we exist.
Hmmm... I don’t have an agenda with that just a curious thing.
I regret that I have such a strong need for approval - I emailed a pastor to go to lunch about it earlier this evening. I don’t want others approval, but yet I find myself almost by nature seeking it.
That’s not all bad - because it makes me compassionate in a measure, but on the other side of the coin it makes me inauthentic which I detest.
I think that’s my big one.
God Bless,
Brandon
I'm a Infantry Rifle Company GySgt..... I'm not a good person to anyone...or at least thats what the LCpl's think. Oh well. Life goes on, till it doesn't.
Last edited by rcbusmc24; 06-24-2019 at 10:04 PM.