I'm so tired of dumb people

Every fucking day I am forced to either read or listen to something so unbelievably, heartbreakingly dumb from someone else that I can hear my own brain cells dying one by one. They are killing themselves just so they don't ever have to go through that horror again.

I've never been one to judge people harshly. I know that I have said and done things in the course of my own life which in retrospect I ought not have said or done. There is perhaps nothing more quintessentially human as doing or saying something truly stupid and living to regret it. I would say, in fact, that the real sign of trouble is, if you can look over the past and not identify anything which you would have preferred to do better had you known more at the time, because it likely means you haven't grown much. In general, I take what I feel is a fairly liberal and forgiving attitude to the human aptitude for abject stupidity.

Nevertheless, I am routinely disgusted and horrified by the stupidity I have to witness every day. It's the kind of stupidity where whatever has gone wrong is so fundamentally flawed that one cannot reasonably expect to convey the problem to the perpetrator, unless somehow there is to be a years long program of professionally directed reeducation.

Perhaps in the end, I am just relatively overprivileged and accidentally elitist. Maybe the problem is not so much that other people are so heartrendingly stupid, but rather that I was ill prepared for life, by way of having basic education which appears to have been denied most people I encounter. One way or the other I came to this site because I am frustrated as hell.

People do not appear to understand concepts such as:

- A person does not have the money for something. Sometimes things cost a certain amount of money, and someone who would theoretically benefit from that resource nevertheless cannot obtain it because it costs money which the individual does not possess and has no way of getting. There seem to be certain generational gaps that make this harder to understand. In particular, I find that people born during the 1940s and 1950s do not understand the concept of being literally unable to afford something. People born prior to 1940 usually understand it, and people born past about March 1960 usually get it, but for people born between those dates, it would appear that the universally understood meaning of the phrase "I can't afford it" is, "I choose not to make that a priority right now." I noticed this when I was a child. The same person who said "I can't afford it" in response to their child needing a dollar's worth of school supplies would turn around and spend $80 on a new item to wear to work when they already had more than enough. They bought their child school supplies last year and they didn't feel they should be required to do it again so they "couldn't afford" a package of pencils. They could afford eighty dollars spent on new work togs, however, because fashion changes every year, and you certainly can't go to work this autumn in the same clothes you wore last autumn. After all, you are filing papers in the back of a three person office, including yourself, just like you have been doing for the past twenty years, so you have to stay fashion forward. That's a necessity, unlike your child's school supplies, so of course, you "can afford" that. What you can afford is a matter of what you value, and therefore, if anyone "can't afford" something which you consider important, you just have to yell at them about how important it is to get it, and the money will magically appear.

- things change over time. It is no longer 1997, 1977, or 1957. Most people don't go to church anymore, and those who do often show up in blue jeans. Houses can no longer be purchased for sixteen thousand dollars. Cars in working order are no longer available for two hundred dollars. Mainstream society may not be pleased on the whole with the acknowledgment that gender is not a binary, but traditional societies the world over noticed this a long time ago, and so-called developed nations are finally having to get their heads out of the sand. Women can have careers and money and their own lives with or without a man involved, so a man who would like to be married to a woman has to bring something to the table other than a small paycheck and a big attitude. Being an old white man with a little extra money is no longer enough to make everybody else bow down and call you master. The fact that Dump got reelected shows how hard people are struggling against all of this change, but the change has already happened, and it's not going to be undone no matter how much screaming and scheming he does. The world has changed and we are not going back. All these people are doing is making the inevitable a hell of a lot uglier and bloodier.

- Everyone's life experience is not necessarily just like yours, and that is perfectly acceptable. I'm tired of telling people things about my own life experience and being made wrong because it is not the exact same life experience as the other person possesses. Just because you have not had a particular problem does not mean that the problem does not exist. Just because you do not have a particular experience or ability does not mean no one else has experienced it or is capable of it. Still more relevant in my mind is the question, if the only perspective that is real or meaningful to you is your own, then why bother talking to anyone else? Stand in front of a mirror and start talking. You'll get more out of that than a conversation with anybody else, right?

- objective reality matters. A lot is subjective and a lot can be argued about endlessly, but some things can be observed and factually described. Deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting the facts with the intention of deceiving another person is called lying, and lying is bad, because it makes it hard for other people to know what is real and make good decisions. Yes, there are situations where there is such a thing as a legitimate ruse de guerre - if a Nazi asks you where the Jewish person went, you either tell them you have no idea what they're talking about, or you redirect them. However, if the person with whom you're dealing is not obviously crazy or evil, the truth is expected and advisable.

This is literally the kind of thing you would have been taught in kindergarten when I was growing up, except that you didn't need to be because even television taught you these things if your parents couldn't be bothered to. It's a matter of basic understanding of the world. I can't tell you how tired I am of dealing with people who can't think through things like truth versus lying, being able to afford something or not, and time moving forward, and different human beings having different life experiences. It fucking exhausts me.

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anonymous Relationships November 22, 2024 at 4:25 am 0 0