MATURE LANGUAGE WARNING. I’M IRATE.
I fell asleep sometime after 2am. I couldn’t sleep. It was my own fault. I stayed up on Reddit, and the stuff I was looking at caused my heart to race and ache. People are so, SO awful to other people. Here’s a quick summary of the garbage going on in this world, or at least the tiny shred I was witness to last night.
A guy was charging police officers with a knife, and the cops exercised extreme restraint and tried their best to help the man, but ended up being shot and killed. The comments clearly indicate it was a suicide by cop, and then went on to fucking shit on the guy for how selfish he was that he made someone else kill him. You know what’s really sick and selfish? Suicide being ILLEGAL. If someone doesn’t want to play this sick fucking game of selling your life so that you can live, they shouldn’t have to. Instead, everyone is sympathetic for the cop who has to live with killing someone, something he chose to do.
I’m in no way saying that you shouldn’t support him, he’ll need the support now too, and we should support people who go through difficult ordeals. He wanted to be a police officer, and keep people safe and protected, that’s the job he chose to do (not that we can chose not to work, but whatever). That dead man is now the most safe he has ever been, and while killing someone takes an emotional toll, so does waking up every day wanting to die, and NO ONE was thinking about how much pain that man was in to make him attack other people so that he could have peace. How badly do you have to hurt, that you would cause that cop to suffer the emotional toll of killing? Huh? Think about that.
Someone else claimed that Americans overspend, and then “pretend to be ‘poor'”. So, what they’re saying here, is that if you don’t have money, you don’t get to chose what to do with it. Yes, lets take away more choice, agency, and LIBERTY, WHICH WE ALL HAVE A RIGHT TO THAT IS CONSTANTLY AND BLATANTLY IGNORED. The definition of liberty, from the Oxford dictionary is: “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behaviour, or political views.” Our behavior is constantly limited by authority. What time you have to go to school if you’re a child or student. What time you have to go to work. Where you’re allowed to drink, smoke, wear a shirt, etc. These are arbitrary limits placed on our behavior that violate our right to liberty. We’re so controlled by so many external forces, what choices do we even have left to make? How we want to suffer our whole lives?
Another one that restored some faith, but totally missed the mark was a dad of five kids. His six year old daughter gave a handmade picture to her eight year old brother, who tore it up in front of her and told her it meant nothing to him. Dad, then being the ignorant emotionally-minded fool he is, tore up one of the sons handmade drawings and said the same thing to him. Now, everyone in the comments got to the point, dad handled it wrong, but no bothered to explain the thinking. No one bothered to say, “you’re teaching him that when something bad happens, he should respond with something else bad” which is the really key part of the incident. Kids learn from their parents, and son is going to learn that when someone hurts his feelings, he should hurt them back.
The idea of revenge is one of the most ignorant and stupid things human beings do. It’s not rocket science to see how this occurs. We want people who hurt us, to know what that hurt feels like, but revenge is the worst way to accomplish that. Moreover, most often, if someone does something that shitty, it’s because something already happened to them that they want to exact revenge in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle, and people need to THINK. It’s like the Appalachian feuds of old, where family A would steal family B’s sheep, and then B throws a rock through A’s window, then A beats up B’s kid, and you have a full on war because someone couldn’t forgive someone else.
The root of revenge and forgiveness comes in the value too. Was that sheep worth your wife’s life? Fuck no, but you were too ignorant to understand that. We think that we “own” things, and that things “belong” to us but they don’t. The screen you’re reading this on, DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU. The laptop I’m writing this on DOESN’T BELONG TO ME. Ownership of things is one of the most foolish things human beings ever decided to do, right up there next to money, which creates a “standardized” value for everything, no matter what the actual value is to someone. However, under a system where everyone EXPECTS to own things, it’s hard to think outside of that box. I’ve heard a ton about “entitled millennials” but how entitled are you that you think something someone else made, thanks to the miracle of nature providing the resources for that thing, BELONGS to you? It belongs to the world, every single thing does.
In tribal societies, everything is shared, they understood what nature meant for us. It’s a tight-knit community which we don’t have anymore. Among your friends and family, if someone wanted to borrow your phone or computer for an hour, would you let them? There are enough resources in the world that if we shared things with people, everyone would have access to everything. When I was a kid, I was the only one of my friends to have an Xbox (original). So my friends came over to play it, and that made us all better people. Now we each have our own. We live far away from each other. We don’t come together for many reasons anymore. Think about all the things that we can get individually now, by spending more money, just so we don’t have to do things with other people, or share. Netflix for entertainment, so now we don’t go out with our SO’s on movie dates, we stay home (and save money). Food, so that we can eat alone in our homes instead of around a campfire with a community. Cars, so we can get where we want to go without having any opportunity to stop and interact with people.
Our lives are driving us farther away from life.
As for the standardized value bit, think of this scenario. You drove to work this morning and needed gas. Maybe it cost $2.50 a gallon and you drove 20 miles to work so you spend that $2.50 so you could go make more money to buy more gas so you can keep going to work. What is that gas really worth to you? Another person got a call that their mother had passed, and the funeral is 20 miles away. They pay $2.50 for gas too, but that gas is worth so much more to them than it is to the commuter. Everything we pay for, SOMEONE ELSE has told us what it’s worth to us.
If you make $15 an hour, you had to work an hour to fill up your gas tank enough. If you make $100 an hour, you worked about six minutes to fill your tank. Who decides what that gas is worth? Why isn’t it me, the consumer?
I’ve gotten pretty far away from my main point here, which is that people need to think about things more. I know I’m rambling and may come around to change my thinking on some of this later, but that’s the whole point. Think about what impact people have on people. Think about the world around them, and how sick and twisted it is that people make the decisions and choices that they make. Think. Process. Reflect.
In psychology, you can explain a person’s behavior through two primary influencing factors called Nature, and Nurture. Nature, is our genetics, our biology, what we’re born with, and what our bodies do internally. Nurture, is our environment, our upbringing, and all the external factors that affect our behavior. If you eat a meal because you feel hungry, that’s a behavior driven by Nature. If you eat a meal because you went out with friends and everyone else is and it smells good even though you aren’t hungry, that’s Nurture.
Now, nearly nothing is driven entirely by one or the other. In both food examples above, there is a bit of the other in there. When someone rips up their kids artwork, is it because they’re an angry person? Or because that’s how their own father raised them? It’s likely a little of both (likely a thin majority of the latter). If someone is so tremendously unhappy with life that they need someone else to kill them because they can’t bring themselves to kill themselves, it’s a little of both Nature and Nurture, although again, I think it’s a bit more Nurture than Nature at that point, since the person needed an external force to make a decision he couldn’t make internally. That also tells me that it was likely more external forces that made him feel that way in the first place.
This world is not human friendly. Most of what hurts us and sucks about life, human beings have caused, TO OTHER HUMAN BEINGS.
Think about what people must be going through. Think about how your actions affect others. Think about how messed up it is that I even have to explain this. Think about how messed up it is that I lost sleep because of this. Sure, it’s my fault for being online in the first place, but that doesn’t excuse humans being shitty to other humans. I could change my behavior and self-limit my liberty, but that doesn’t solve the problem at hand does it?
Think.
P.S. This is an unusual emotionally charged post for me, and is not written in my usual style, with my usual calm, logical approach. I am very tired. I am alone. I am sober. I am struggling.
