Some things in life are worth a little bit of analysis, for instance, the difference between what is considered thoughtful and what is considered mean. It’s “thoughtful” to rip some flowers out of the ground (or chop them at the stems or purchase them pre-killed) to give to your girlfriend. Don’t ask me why destroying something beautiful is thoughtful. It would be like smashing a Ferrari and giving the scraps to a boyfriend, but that’s mean. Similarly, it’s mean to wake someone up early, even if that person is sleeping too much or really should get more done during the day.
Here’s a few more to get you thinking:
T: Buying someone a birthday present
M: Reminding an older person it is his/her birthday
T: Offering to pick up a heart-clogging, fast food cheeseburger for someone
M: Suggesting someone starts exercising more to improve his/her health
T: Telling someone who looks bad that s/he looks good
M: Telling someone who stinks that s/he stinks
T: Telling someone s/he is smart for doing a simple task
M: Telling someone s/he “isn’t the smartest person in the world”
I guess people don’t want the tools to make things better. They want the tools to deceive themselves into thinking things are better.
perusing your posts and found the ‘cultural’ category and happened upon this post which sparked some interest and analysis in me
cultural taboos in the west (america esp) are an interesting phenomena to observe. americans have become so preoccupied and collectively unconscious that upholding cultural/religious morals isn’t an active, thought-involved process and instead is a factor of responses to stimulating one’s ego. logic and rationality are of little concern in many peoples’ day to day lives where fulfillment and purpose are sought by continuously creating ‘problems’ and then ‘fixing’ them to become ‘satisfied’ by applying temporary solutions. so therefore it’s only temporary satisfaction. like with a bouquet of flowers. watching the beauty fade as the plant ceases to grow and the petals wilt and it dies.
a small amount of true logic/acceptance/happiness is much more stable than the cycle of temporary satisfying by finding ‘problems’ and finding ‘solutions’ to them. these solutions can be thoughts or actions but the purpose they serve is to in some way justify what we hold to be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (morals). increased notions of individualism and the need to define one’s ‘self’ and individual significance in society result in increased hostility and competition among individuals in our society.
i think for these reasons so many americans really just have no sense of a purpose or meaning for the way we live our lives in our society so they just arbitrarily ‘live’ (unfortunate and depressing really) and by doing so everyone just ‘does what everyone else does’. Culture is a term for the collective ‘what everybody else does’ and rules and morals that govern our way of living and because people are so completely directionless our culture is evolving into a significantly less conscious and less active human experience.
for americans this is very true concerning the concept of death. people are afraid of it. dying is an idea with which many americans encounter difficulty coming to accept because the idea is not involved in ‘normal’ thinking and functioning in society (displayed by parents, peers, everyone and thing involved in one’s life before beginning to think freely + from various perspectives). it’s generally accepted that you just don’t think about it.
so ideas closely linked with death (like increasing age) are considered taboo and offensive in conversation. it’s an attack against one’s ego reminding one how insignificant he or she is and so tabooed.
i just read through this again and i’m pretty sure it makes sense and pertains to the post
regardless: it’s a bunch of thoughts and ideas in my head that i found an (at least i believe) appropriate place to put into writing and share with someone else.
That’s an intriguing analysis. We’re (Americans) such a society of young people, which is quite the opposite of many societies (especially in east Asia). I had never thought about it in terms of death, instead looking at it as a matter of physical vitality or lack of. I guess that is just another side of the same coin. I love where you wrote “logic and rationality are of little concern in many peoples’ day to day lives,” because that’s (unfortunately) amazingly true for so many people.