Youth—A Bundle of Feelings
While my aversion to social chit-chat with people I will never or seldom see again is well known by those who know me well, the reasons for this peculiarity are not. Part of it is simple enough—I don’t get a lot of personal contentment by it anymore. But this peculiarity also has a history dating back to my youth. In my early teens I would offer being a hermit as a life goal. It was never a case of no one speaks or interacts with me in social situations—they do and I can handle my side of any conversations. Strangely, seldom am I unhappy afterwards that I did attend an event, but even if I have agreed in advance to attend, when the time comes I invariably have other things I would rather do and these other things usually win out.
Be all this as it may, given a choice, I would rather, at my age now, muse about some area of life and write it up, than spend the same amount of time chit-chatting with other people in any gathering with more than a few people. The quality of chit-chat is inversely proportional to the number of people in attendance. I always smile when I see, at a restaurant, a huge table of people celebrating some sort of occasion. The reality is pretty much that the only people they are chatting with are those immediately on either side of them. Even in medium size groups, the nature of the chit-chat differs to smaller groups of less than say 2 0r 3. Endless one liners rule the day in these larger groups. And this is fine, for maybe an hour at most. Then it becomes, to me, a tiresome re-run of nonsense. More boring than annoying. Perhaps my point here is better made this way: An evening in large groups with endless ha-ha one liners does not bring much meaningful insight into anyone or their life. If there are just a couple of people present for some length of time we end up with far more insights about the person with whom we just chatted. Then I enjoy the conversation because everyone really does have an interesting story to tell. I am intrigued by interesting personal human diversity, but not banal chit chat filled with boring personal stats. If I want that I can read obituaries.
Before retiring, the most interesting aspect of teaching was not the classroom lectures but the individual meetings with students one on one in my office. Most Professors are not all that receptive to conversation with students outside the course material. For whatever reason, and maybe another musing, people tend, when conversing one on one with me, to unburden themselves with whatever is bothering them in their lives. Maybe it is me who directs the conversation in that direction. Perhaps the reputation of not being very social made them feel safe to do so. Like who am I going to tell, I appeared to be off in my own little world. All my life, even when younger, a lot of people felt free to tell me things they would not tell others. The net result is that I found human diversity more intriguing than irritating. To some degree, the more different someone is from me personally, the more likely they have an interesting story to tell. Another result is that the more we become aware of what others face in life, the less critical we become of those different from ourselves. In depth conversations with all kinds of people from all walks of life impact on our own feelings about life and others. Put it this way, if I am overly grateful about the good things in my life, it is precisely because I am well aware of how much more trauma and unfairness many others have faced in their lives. It seems unfair to look down upon someone else just because I have been more fortunate in life than them. Instead, almost by instinct, I let them sense, one way or another, that I empathize with them and will help, if I can.
Ok, am wandering a bit here, a specialty of mine. What is there about youth that stands out?Youth, it seems, more so than in later years, is a bundle of feelings less based on reality. When young, our grasp of reality is limited, and feelings drive much of what we do or say. Social interactions in youth are really difficult and more nerve wracking. How we felt about a lot of things in youth were based on limited understanding or experience, and thus were likely to be errant in nature. Back in youth it was easier to see things in pure black and white. There were clear cut good guys and bad guys. Americans were the good guys and the Indians were the bad guys. The U.S, was the good guy and Russia was the bad guy. If blacks didn’t like it here they could leave. The residents of my neighborhood were the good guys, those in less affluent neighborhoods were the bad guys. The only true religion was the religion we inherited, and so it went, on and on.
This sounds a tad ridiculous, but for me as a child, a pet dog was a perfect fit for my innermost feelings. Buff the dog had feelings too, written always on his sleeve and his feelings and my feelings were what we dealt with together. If he was sad I tried to make him happy. If I was sad he tried to make me happy. A pet never rejects us or turns on us no matter the situation. When company came in the front door I went out my bedroom window and took off with Buff. In school I never signed up for any group activities. My parents were not the kind who made their kids join anything. And I didn’t. My friendships, outside my immediate neighborhood friends, were always one on one. My dad, over my mother’s vocal objection, would drive me to spend the day with a friend who lived in the roughest and poorest section of the area. I have no idea why we were friends as we had little in common. He was a poor student, non social, and hung out with an antisocial and crude crowd BUT never when I was there for the day, all I got were the tales of adventures on the wrong side of the track. He got killed in a car crash when young via reckless driving. It seemed to me early on that the young, who see no future in life, behave recklessly and often mistreat others as a way of life. Not so much that they are all evil, but bitter about the cards dealt to them or their position in life. When ghettoites and the affluent clash it is more, on the part of the ghettoite, “you don’t like me and I don’t give a shit about you either.”
Being shy and insecure is not always a bad thing, especially in youth. It makes a young person more an observer of life than a participant. Unlike today, where circumstances are quite different, my days, except for school, were not planned out for me. If I wasn’t in school, my parents usually had no idea where I might be, or doing what, except I was expected to be around for meals or I had to make my own meals. It wasn’t for lack of effort, but my mother’s endless questions about where I had been and with who, gained her little info. “I don’t ask you questions like this about who you have been with all day and doing what”. My dad would do his best to stay neutral. “He seems to pick his friends with care—we have no evidence that they are doing anything more than harmless nonsense and just exploring life together.” But he would sometimes take me aside and in effect say: “You know right from wrong and I depend on you to behave accordingly. I want you to discipline yourself when it comes to behavior. You seem to love nonsense and that is ok I guess, but it better always be harmless nonsense. Freedom comes with responsibility.” And that would be about it for any interference from my dad in my daily life. My dad, with preciously few exceptions, none of which I can remember now, ever had anything bad to say about anyone. My mother didn’t think much of nonsense, to her it was bad behavior, while my dad would stay neutral, never reprimanding me nor give any evidence he was amused by it either. I don’t think I ever observed my dad engaging in pure nonsense about anything. And interestingly, I can’t remember him ever being the object of anyone else’s nonsense. If anyone could rise above it all, it was him. He was never the object of funny ha-ha’s, nor was anyone ever the object of any funny ha ha’s from him.
It seems youth is more feelings than reason. And we got the feelings from those around us. How we thought about a lot of things were simply taught to us by the adults around us. America was always right. Our inherited religion was the true religion. Most all our attitudes about others was based on feelings. Empathy or appreciation of minorities of any sort was nonexistent. Hate was not so much behind prejudicial feelings as it was pure ignorance of what minorities were up against. If certain groups didn’t like it here they could leave. There was no real thought behind making fun of the ugly kids or the dumber kids, or those with weird personalities. Looking back I don’t know how many kids in these categories ever got through the day. These ‘different’ kids were endlessly the butt of jokes. If we dared interact with these ‘off limit’ kids we would be teased endlessly about it. In short, much of youth is lived through the attitudes prevailing at the time.
The social uprisings in the 60’s by various minority groups was not really appreciated by myself and many others until it was almost over. It really is hard to see things through the eyes of others who are protesting legitimate grievances. Whether or not we ever reach the point of understanding social grievances by minority groups depends a lot on our professional career and the amount of real contact with these ‘others’. Every society is responsible for the kind of communities that exist within it’s boundaries. That such brutal and unforgiving ghettoes exist throughout our country—urban, suburban, and rural—is an aspect of governance that has dismally failed. And these ghettoes continue to grow in size, in violence, and in the depth of poverty. America could get away with this when the frontier still existed, but today there is no where to run. Living in one of our ghettoes is not just temporary bad luck but has dire medical consequences. Long term high levels of stress hormones in anyone runs the real risks of various medical consequences on almost every system of the body during the most vulnerable aspect of our lives——the formative years. The Nobel Peace Prize of some sort should go to those parents who manage to raise kids in a ghetto without high levels of stress hormones in these kids’ bodies. To me, these parents are heroes—saints of some sort. The odds are against the best of parents in such situations.
One reason kids need to become independent of their parents after the formative years is so they can become ‘free’ to adopt thought-through reasons for their ‘feelings’ as adults. Some family units never break up and remain isolated ‘family values’ cabals, seemingly forever, noted especially for their rigidity and intolerance to others. Economic status doesn’t exempt any family from this misfortune. Even their relationship to each other is not healthy. Most people, at the end of their formative years, need to ‘get a life of their own’ independent of parental dominance. In most cases we don’t really become a ‘valued’ member of society until we fully mature as an independent self-developed social being. Maybe there are exceptions but they are few. When people say ‘Poor Lincoln’, ‘Poor Obama’, ‘Poor Bill Clinton’ and so on, this is an ignorant comment. These are examples of people who grew up in poor but secure environments and had to develop their own personalities and view of life and other people. A secure environment is not always the ‘perfect family’. It would be hard to define a ‘perfect family’. What is perfect for one child often is not perfect for another child. Just understanding this takes away some of the harshest feelings we might have towards certain others. What most people really need are opportunities to become better individuals while at the same time receiving no avoidance of punishment for their personal crimes against others. When it comes to crimes against others there can be no tolerance. No society can tolerate any product of the worst ghetto for crimes against others that they commit as adults. A society that tolerates the existence of ghettoes throughout it’s territorial domain will soon enough implode for it’s neglect of these hell holes. We, even in America, have managed to wall these people off from the rest of society, but we are beginning to pay a terrible price for this neglect. This neglect, along with human overpopulation and inability, in a global economy, to have global living wage minimum wage laws—is putting everyone, everywhere, in a corner from which there is increasingly no path to escape. Mother nature will correct what we have created here and the correction will leave no one protected. In the absence of global responsible reproduction, the consequences will be dire and randomly cruel. No class or area will escape. We already see it in places like Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the list grows with every year that passes. We cannot see it in our own ghettoes, but we have blinders on. Inside these economic ghettoes is a cauldron of disaster brewing with only short snippets seen when they riot. These little riots are but a sign of what awaits us when these riots become coordinated via modern gadgetry. The police and national guard cannot be everywhere at the same time. Our blindness is everywhere. We still, for the most part, do not want to give children in these ghettoes good schools, good teachers, good health care, personal security, and economic opportunities. In some ghettoes the unemployment rate for young people is 60-70% and for many residents it has been a lifetime occupation to be unemployed.
Youth is a difficult experience, difficult even in the best of environments. Very few blossom into something successful on their own and achieve success solely because of their own efforts. The number of T.O.’s in life are few and far between. It takes a genetic lottery prize to have the amount of willpower and focus to achieve a particular success on your own, and even here success will be limited to the object of total focus and willpower. The total amount of willpower we have is limited and needs to be spread around carefully, and if spread around, then success in any particular area will be limited. Most of us cannot be successful at a whole bunch of things. And most of us, to succeed at hardly anything, we need help from others. Where our lives are not much affected by the Golden Rule, success becomes quite limited. And help from others, is not by any means guaranteed in life.
Youth is a stressful and perplexing time for most young people. Others play a major role in how we feel about so many things. By adulthood we still have such feelings and yet, to become our own unique individual, we need to venture out on our own, escape the formative years nest, question everything we have ever learned about anything, and use reason to cement what we really think and feel about things from then on until death. It is hard to develop a real sense of contentment and achievement if we never make the effort to see and feel things as a consequence of our own thoughts through perceptions of life as it comes through our own prism. It always surprised me how many people just get stuck in the learned ways of youth with few changes, little creativity of their own, and essentially remain puppets of their past. It is also true, or so it seems to me, that even if we develop our own unique essence, in our terminational years many of us settle into our own daily routine and cease trying to change ourselves or much of anything else in the world around us. Maybe at that point in life that is ok. Those who cannot let go of matters that should be handled by the next generation tend to reap nothing but frustration as they feel the world is passing them by. The elderly who cannot learn to enjoy being in the grand stands, and be content to see things through their aged eyes as good theatre, will end up being grumpy curmudgeonous whiners, bitter beings, and a botherating pain in the ass. Those of us time-worn, gerontic, somewhat fossilized, ancient with more and more doddering, tottering, and having seen our better days, achieve the highest contentment when we can adequately amuse ourselves. I reckon we will still die anyway, but if we have the right or means to control our own dying process, then most of the trauma and desperational days can be avoided. Not a bad plan if we can pull it off. The terminational years of life can often be the best ones of our lives. Like every other phase of life it takes a little luck, the rest we have to work through ourselves.
