My wife took Smallsteps for a girls night at a hotel in the city to finish off their holidays. While I am glad they can do it, I also think it is pretty excessive. But, I think it is because I grew up in a different time where summer holidays were spent at home. I was saying to my wife that even though we haven't travelled outside of Finland, I think we have done more this summer as a family than I did with my family over the space of every summer.
Maybe it is a change in culture.
As mentioned at other times, I believe that more often than note, we have encouraged the state of victimhood, rather than encourage survivorhood. We have incentivized the biggest loser in such a way, that people go out of their way to be losers, because that is the path to getting attention. It is about attracting supporters and extracting sympathy, and it has led to many people expecting support to stay the same, with excuses to why they can't change, than for being the best version of themselves.
Similarly, I think another cultural change has been one where we encourage excuses as to why we should have, rather than take pride in doing without. In the past, generations would say "when I was a child" as a way to reflect upon scarcity and unavailability. Now we just keep pushing on our children all the things we didn't have when we were young, with no mind to the cost - like the insanity of birthdays and Christmases now, where people are spending thousands to fill the material world of toddlers.
We know the dangers of spoiling children, with creating the Veruca Salts of the world, yet perhaps due to living up to the expectations of society, or fulfilling childish desires, we keep doubling down, keep spoiling. We talk about being the best version of ourselves, but are we really building the conditions in society that create the best version of our children?
I don't think so.
And I am often criticized by friends and family for my views. I am seen as "extreme" in many ways, because I don't buy into the idea that average is good. Average is not good, unless the people who make up the average are healthy and happy in their world. The average weight is too much. The average debt is too high. The average happiness is too low. We shouldn't want to be average, because that doesn't take us to a place where we are a better version of ourselves, as it keeps the majority of us the same.
On average, we should want to be better than our parents, but as parents, we should also want our children to be better than us. This is how we evolve as a species. Getting "better" doesn't mean creating an easier life though, does it? Even though obstacles in one are might be removed, we should still be looking to advance the problems we can solve, which means increasing the difficulty of the challenge. Instead, we seem to just be trying to fill our children's lives with the childish freedoms we thought we were missing, and avoiding hardship.
But, were we missing out, or is it that the hardships we faced as children helped us be better versions of ourselves as adults? It is a counterfactual of course, because we don't know what we would have been as individuals, had our early life been different, but what made us what we are and brought us to this day, is something to reflect.
Taraz
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