Having just spent some time picking on society in general and other members, it’s only fair to focus on our own shortcomings. I appreciate I don’t really know you, but people are people, so I can probably make some pretty accurate assumptions about you.
“The things you really need are few and easy to come by; but the things you can imagine you need are infinite, and you will never be satisfied.”
That’s a quote from some ancient Greek fella called Epicurus. Not the kind of message you’re likely to be presented in your average advert.
On the contrary, we’re constantly being told we need this or we need that. There was a time that things were made to last and we bought things expecting them to give us years of service. Nowadays, fashions change so quickly, it’s hard to keep up. Apple tease us with a new iPhone every year. Temu is pushing new clothes designs constantly. Every car manufacturer rejigs its models every few years to give existing owners of perfectly good cars a reason to buy a new one that still crawls through rush-hour traffic at a walking pace.
The American oil tycoon H.L. Hunt said “money is just a way of keeping score,” and all the stuff that we acquire is basically serving the same purpose. It’s not so much the things making us happy, but just having a new thing that’s driving the happiness. But it’s just a quick fix that fades away leaving us looking for something else to raise the mood again.
We don’t really focus on our own happiness. We don’t take the time to stop and work out what happiness really means to us and what we really need to achieve it. And because we hold our own true happiness in such low regard, we care little for the happiness of others.
Might that go some way to explaining how social media is so often such an obnoxious place to hang out?
We All Want The Same Things
We’re all much more similar than we are different. We’ve seen before how people all want the same things, regardless of where on the planet they live. If we worked together to try and make it happen, the world could be a very different place.
Instead, though, we double down on our differences and make it easy for the wealthiest in our societies to take advantage of us. A rising tide may raise all boats, but not if we’ve smashed holes into their hulls first.
Have you seen the video of US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene following a school shooting survivor called David Hogg down the street while expressing her own views on the young man’s campaign for greater gun control?1
While it shows an unfortunate lack of empathy considering the experience he’d been through, it helps illustrate how we instinctively focus on our differences rather than our similarities. I’m confident that both Hogg and Taylor Greene want to live in a society where they, their families and friends are all safe and never at risk of gun violence. Yes, one wants to see greater gun control and the other doesn’t, but I’m sure they actually share that basic goal.
The USA is a democracy. If the American people want greater gun control, they can vote for people who will work for that. However, there’s no need for any of us to treat anyone else with a lack of respect just because they have different views on how to achieve outcomes that they feel are best for society. Focusing on their similarities would be a starting point that would be far more likely to lead a constructive debate rather than shouting about their differences.
We can’t force people to accept a point of view or belief. Force may break someone and end their resistance, but it doesn’t change their beliefs and there will always be others that come after them to take up the fight.
If we want to change people’s views and opinions, we have to talk with them. We need to understand what they believe and how they feel and we can only start to do that if we listen to them. If we’re shouting at other people, we won’t hear a thing.
Those Who Live In Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones
In a perfect world, all of us would be perfect.
However, even those of us who look perfect on Instagram aren’t. We all make mistakes, yet despite knowing this, we still judge others against a yard-stick of perfection. If someone falls just a little way short, we judge them poorly. Or pile onto them in a great Twitter storm with the rest of the pack. I know I highlighted how the media know how to press our buttons, but we’re just as ready to press our own buttons and jump all over anyone else who we think has failed to reach the high standards we don’t set for ourselves.
We should spend more time reflecting on our own mistakes than getting so carried away worrying about other people’s mistakes. If you were to write a book of all your mistakes, how big a book do you think you’d have? And which would be the blockbuster chapter?
I think I’d probably have to write a trilogy at least, but then I have dedicated myself to cause of doing stupid stuff for nearly six decades now. Actually. maybe three books isn’t so bad after all.
Have you ever taken Viagra?2 The word that launched a thousand spam emails.
No, of course you haven’t. It’s intended to help older men with erectile dysfunction. My favourite part about the Viagra story is the fact that it was discovered as a side-effect when Pfizer scientists were researching a new drug to treat angina. It must have been a surprising side-effect to encounter.
Anyway, when I was 30 or 31, I took a Viagra pill, even though I didn’t fall into the normal cohort of little blue pill users. Let’s just say that in my younger years, I conducted my own research into a broad-ish variety of drugs and their side effects.
It was a Saturday morning, back in the day when John Peel’s Home Truths aired on Radio 4, with the morning sun burning through the open window and the strains of an opera soloist drifting up the hill on the whispering breeze.
I’m not sure it added owt to the experience, but hours later there was still no sign of subsidence. We should have broken camp long ago, yet the chief’s tent was still pitched.3 So the future Mrs Forclift suggested a walk to the pub for lunch.
Why not? Walking it off seemed like a sensible idea and it was a lovely day. A two-mile walk along dry mud tracks and country lanes to the nearest pub seemed quite idyllic. However, it soon became clear the metal zipper fly of my jeans was going to feature prominently on this walk.
If I’m to be honest, after just a few hundred metres the feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Perhaps the same frisson of excitement you might anticipate if Queen Camilla was rubbing your bald head gently with a nylon pan scrubber, while King Charles, handcuffed to the bed, watches on naked, but for the Imperial State Crown covering up his own crown jewels.
Things soon changed though.
At half a mile, Little Jethro had been buried in a bucket of scalding hot sand infested with hundreds of baby Farciminis Manducans Cancri, often more commonly known as Sausage-Eating Crabs.
At a mile, the orange Tango man4 had snuck into my pants (HOW?) and was slapping me in time to our walking pace.
At a mile and a half, the CIA had exfiltrated me to a black site in a remote part of Central Asia and they were taking it in turns to poke Bob and the boys with the exposed ends of cables plugged into a socket high on the wall.
By the time we eventually reached the pub after two miles, beads of sweat were balling on my forehead and rolling down into my eyes, blinding me. I was hallucinating. I believed I’d just done a 26-mile route march with the SAS while wearing a cheese grater for a codpiece. Will I ever see home again? The green green grass of home…mama I love you, mama I care…goodbye Michelle, it’s hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky…tell Laura I love her…
“I’ll find somewhere to sit while you get the drinks.”
“No, you get the drinks, I’ll find seats,” I grunted through gritted teeth.
“Oh okay, what do you want?”
“I don’t care, anything, just be sure to bring an ice bucket back with you.”
That was a pretty stupid thing to do.
Perhaps not the kind of thing that will raise outrage among the masses, but dumbish nonetheless. And it’s very much the fact that it won’t raise outrage that I chose that story to illustrate how stupid I can be. If I took 20 minutes, I suspect I could come up with a dozen things that would also illustrate my stupidity, though without the giggles and would get me cancelled from every social media platform I don’t use, if I was daft enough to share just one of them here.
It’s not an exercise I’m going to try though, as the confidence I can find these things makes the point. I’m not in a position to judge others for doing stupid things.
Can you convince yourself that you are?
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2342448/Marjorie-Taylor-Greene-harasses-David-Hogg-gun-laws.html ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil ↩︎
- Fudge me! Wikipedia, you really are the gift that keeps on giving, though I feel a little bit queasy after reading that – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapism ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV8zGNe7Ebg ↩︎