Published on 12, July, 2020
...all I want to do is go out and get a nice bottle or two of red wine.
Not to get bladdered. Not because my body is craving booze.
But just to get some relief from all the greed, selfishness, vanity, savagery, bigotry, trash and plain stupidity I can't help noticing all around me!
I don't need to make a list. It's everything from violence in Gaza and Derry, to desperate refugees being turned back out to sea by populist governments, to people leaving their crap everywhere, to pre-school kids of Generation Z with their heads stuck in their phones.
The human race is nuts. It's doomed.
I've found myself sleeping much more now. Over the weekend, I've napped at regular intervals. I've tried reading, but can't focus on it for long enough. Sleep gives me some reprieve. Death's second self.
I just want to escape.
"Accident black spot? These aren't accidents. People are throwing themselves into the road willingly to escape all this hideousness. Go ahead, darling! Throw yourself into the road!"
Withnail - 'Withnail and I'
(now I'll shut up and go hide again...)
I'm around 40 days sober. I'm hating it right now. Just wanna turn my thoughts off.
Well done on your around 40 days sober. Why do we, humans and maybe particularly autistic people, seem to be cursed with this brain activity? Maybe you can redirect your thoughts to something else? CBT again?
And yes, many people can be superficial as Tom says in the head post. I worry about addiction to electronic communication, since I seem to do it so much. But 'kids these days' - I met a bunch of older teenagers last night and they were polite, competent, and concerned over a local patch of natural land near me. I still locked up my bike just in case, but... There is nothing either good or bad but thinking make it so.
I seem to have a lot of differences of opinion with people over this subject. I find it really upsetting how drastically (in my opinion) smartphone technology has changed people and society. It was little more than 20 years ago when you could go out and if you saw someone using a phone in public, you laughed at the pretentiousness. Now... you're an oddity if you don't have one in public. People cling onto them as if they're some kind of life-support pack. I find it so sad, too, when I see very young children using them. I walked along the beach on Saturday morning and a young dad was walking there with his two sons. The younger boy was about 4. He and dad were having a whale of a time horsing around, laughing, playing. The older boy, about 6, was lagging behind with his head stuck in his phone. Several times the dad called out to him to catch up - but he might as well have been whistling in the wind. I was telling a young woman at work about how Macron is banning their use in all French schools for pupils under 15. Her response? 'That's so unfair - and dangerous.' Dangerous, I wondered? How so? 'Because if there's an incident at the school, like a shooting, the kids can call home.' Oh, I see. I couldn't resist it. 'Yes,' I said, 'They can ring home and say 'Hi mum and dad. There's a gunman in the school. I'm sending you the last selfie you'll ever see of me alive.'' She grumbled. 'It's a generational thing,' she said. 'It was safer in your day.' My day? What, back when we had no CCTV cameras, you mean?
Cassandro said:on the whole, I think the kids are all right
I wish I could agree with you. I don't think they are. I was reading a report conducted by the Chartwell Foundation in 2013 which showed that as many as 40% of US children under 2 were already familiar with using mobile devices. That was 5 years ago. I can't remember the figure I read for UK children under 6 who now own a smart phone, but it was surprisingly high. As with computers, say, 30 years ago, kids now have to learn this stuff. It isn't really an option. And I think it's quite scary. We know (from the guys who invented them) that these apps and social media sites are designed to be addictive. Easy to understand why with a business model predicated on advertising. There's no freedom from it for kids now. Their friends are all on there, constantly chatting and exchanging stuff - so you have to keep in the loop with them. If you don't, you run the risk of getting shunned, bullied, etc. You run the risk of getting bullied anyway online. And groomed. And trolled. And hacked. And any number of other things else. I cycle past a number of school bus stops on my way to work. All the kids have phones. Very, very sad. This is bound to have a detrimental effect on so many things in their lives, I think - not least concentration levels.
I agree about older age groups, though. With colleagues at work, ages range from 18 to late 40s (apart from me, at 59). I'm the only one who can manage to get through the entire day without looking at my phone once. Two guys in particular - one in his early 20s, the other in his mid-30s, have the thing to hand practically all day long. Whenever I'm working with them, they're engrossed in the phones. Which is okay, I suppose, as it saves me having to try to make conversation...
My worries are both more specific and more general.
The specific one is just a current niggle, which is people walking along staring at their phone and completely oblivious to their surroundings. There's NT protocol that you make accommodation with other people you're sharing space with, and even make eye contact, which makes sense to me. Even if I have a little problem decoding other people's intentions, I can make allowances for that. Now people are weaving left and right all over the pavement and they have no idea where they're going themselves. For example a mum with a buggy or pram may be taking up the middle third of a shared cycle lane: because she's staring at her phone, she can't see me on a bicycle, and I have no safe way of passing. (I suppose you could say I shouldn't be in a hurry, but, well there are better things to do with my life.)
As I say, on the whole, I think the kids are all right. They always have been, and it's more the over-30s I still don't trust despite being one. Crime rates started falling in the late 90s, although I think it's levelled off now, although you might think openly carrying valuable bits of electronics might encourage robbery. I'm a late adopter in this respect and don't have a smartphone - I'm also worried it would be crack cocaine to an information junkie. There was a time when using a phone in public would just be considered rude - I believe there was an SF story, probably by Heinlein, which predicted the technology but not the shift in social mores: 'I can't talk now, I'm on the hyper-train' or something.
My more general worry I suppose isn't limited to phones, but more like what you say, experiencing the world through screens. I also relate this to urbanisation and separation from anything 'real'. People judge the information they get from one unreliable source via another and expect all information free at their fingertips, just get biased and polarising opinion instead, and think signing an online petition is political action. I'm one of the worst offenders myself – of course we are capable of being deceived that way if we don't find things out for ourselves.