Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents' forums (2015)
issendai.com
issendai.com
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems-whittling-yo...
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems-qualities-th...
All that said, now as a parent myself, I feel sorry for him. I consider his childhood and realize he didn't have a chance - he was screwed up from the very beginning. Parenting is darn hard and even if you spent your early years baby-sitting or as a camp counselor or something, it still doesn't prepare you for when they are your own and you have responsibility for them 24x7 from now into eternity. Throw in an unhappy marriage or a failed career and is it any wonder so many parents end up estranged from their children?
So, yeah, the brief article matches my own experiences and those of other people I've spoken with who are estranged from their parents. I think about it regularly, as if I mistreated my children in the same way I can't say I would really blame them for not wanting to associate with me in adulthood when they are able to make that decision for themselves. As my kids have gotten older, I've even made a point to explain to them that every parent is just a human who is mostly winging it trying the best they can -- and that's the thing kids tend to realize, IE: my parent might not have known what to do, but if they showed love and concern, that tends to trump any mistakes.
Slowly but surely, everything I thought I knew about my parents has changed now that I am a parent. I used to harbor bitter resentments against my mother, and wanted her to know how she failed me… now I just see an old woman who gave what she could to her five children and is just as much a “beloved child of God” as each of them. I am also acutely aware that, as long as I’m not abusive, absent or wildly inconsistent, my behavior as a parent is probably more important as my child’s future model of parent behavior when it comes time to raise the next generation. I like to joke that I insist on my son giving his grandmother a hug each time he sees her as a favor to my wife: down payment on more grandchild hugs for her in the future.
My father (a term I use only to describe lineage) was mean and heavy handed. Belts were common, switches less so but not out of the realm of possibility. He was violent with my mother, his next wife's, my oldest sister and me. Probably more but those are the ones I remember. To the world outside, he was a good person but to me, he's both my demon and my motivation to be good person, a good father and a good spouse.
Ask him and he'll tell you that things we witnessed never happened. The tray of brownies fell, he didn't throw it. That burn mark on the ceiling is just there; he threw the iron "in the general direction because if I'd wanted to hit her with it, I would have."
We've been estranged since I was in 17. We agreed to let him back in once. Lasted six months. Never again. He doesn't know where I live and unless my kid wants to meet him some day, he'll never be given the opportunity.
My mother and I finally fell out because of COVID. There were other things going on but COVID was the last one. I drew a line that said unless you get vaccinated, you can't come in my home. (She got every flu shot and vaccine, until this one.) She chose politics, I chose to protect my kid and wife. Since she won't be visiting ever again, we decided the easiest path was to just stop talking. If my kid wants to meet "mean nanna" some day, I'll arrange it but my wife and kid come first.
I live my mother. It's an unfortunate outcome. My father... I couldn't care less. He's been dead to me for years.
I don't support the "doing their best" philosophy. Everybody does their best; at the very least, in the sense that actions are rationalized as the best in the moment.
The website deals with this theme at least twice. One point is [here](https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/dysfunction...), under "Disfunctional beliefs":
- If I put up with a certain level of mistreatment from my own parents, then you should put up with the same level of mistreatment from me.
[*] Psychology as an analog to medical science is also a con job. Psychotherapies don't need to prove efficacy in clinical trials like drugs do. Whenever anybody does bother to do a study like that though (again -- purely voluntary) therapy never shows itself to be very effective at doing anything. But especially not for people with personality disorders.
A minimum of progress could avoid, for example, the abusive parents calling the social services, and/or going to court, and/or receiving a restraining order.
There's lots of behavior that therapy can (potentially, of course) at least mitigate or teach to handle.
> every parent is just a human who is mostly winging it
Every parent is doing it for the first time, more-or-less; we're all beginners. Kids are designed to be parented by first-time parents. Thay're amazingly resilient in the face of not-very-good parents.
Of course, lots of kids have elder siblings; I don't mean literally "first-time". But few parents have more than three kids, so what I mean, I guess, is that for most parents, it's the first time they've raised one or more kids.
The way you were parented affects the way you do it yourself; it's the only model you have. Sometimes you will try to do it the opposite of the way your parents did it to you, but I think that is usually rather superficial - the attitudes trickle down the generations, however hard you try to break the chain.
In my experience, beyond the suffering and abuse, it is nearly impossible to describe to someone else the experience of extended engagement with someone with narcissistic personality disorder or someone with borderline personality disorder. Friends and family often have no frame of reference in dealing with NPD or BPD. It makes finding help and treatment much harder. Often you have to discover on your own that you have been the target of NPD or BPD abuse. It takes time.
> Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience. These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety. However, if they don’t make a solid emotional connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been.
* I may be slow in this regard.
When I pushed my parents bad behavior front and center, I got hung up on. The next time we spoke on the phone the incident was not mentioned - like it never happened.
> Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotion-ally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip- flopping in ways that made no sense.”
I already figured this all out by myself.
The book is only wrong when it says things like "never noticing." I noticed.
> Growing up with an inconsistent parent is likely to undermine a child’s sense of security, keeping the child on edge. Since a parent’s response provides a child’s emotional compass for self- worth, such chil-dren also are likely to believe that their parent’s changing moods are somehow their fault.
This is what I did. On edge. Insecure. Victim of abuse. It's visible in body language.
The book is wrong in the same way once again. Because I remember by the time I was 16 years old I was entirely conscious of the idea that feelings were bad and had a conscious belief in the pro-active suppression of negative emotion, including through the use of drugs. I remember getting into an internet argument about the topic at that age. The only part I wasn't aware of was how completely fucked up dysfunctional it was.
He was completely spoiled, was never physically or emotionally abused (he did most of the verbal abusing, often calling my wife a terrible mom, an abusive mom, worthless, useless, stupid, etc...). He also often physically tried to abuse his younger brother (my other step son).
If you asked him today why he is estranged with his mom, he would tell you his mom is an awful abusive parent who never loved him and was the cause of all the issues. My wife and I know that he is just a toxic kid who never wanted to grow up (now 20, not in college, no job, his dad pays for everything so he can play video games 24/7).
I think there are gonna be as many situations and nuances as there are people here.
My older brother was convicted of murder, currently in prison serving a 40 year sentence, physically assaulted my mother and put her in hospital when he was a teenager, theft, drugs the whole lot.
Even though she doesn't want much to do with him, she still can't bring herself to cut all ties.
Parent-child ties are a strange dynamic.
If you think about it, what is the distribution of parents and children? It's the same with population in general. So all types of people become parents. Same for children, and you get n^2 types of relationships.
If it wasn’t for the fact that my salary affords us the ability to adequately represent ourselves in court she would have lost all rights to her son.
This kind of thing is readily apparent with people getting together online to talk about politics. But what about other conditions? Are bad bosses more likely to find validation among other bad bosses? Is any of my sociological bullshitting here true?
Having not used it much, LinkedIn does feel a bit like this.
Abusive parents are unlikely to form a community on that basis, but there must be parenting forums run by and for abusers-in-denial.
One more thing. The way things went down totally shocked me. I was a child of my mother's second marriage and I learned the hard way that my half sibs had always resented me. Now that I know that, things about my family make more sense. My feeling is, if you at all feel your sibs may resent you because life gave you luck / looks / smarts / a better father / you name it, proceed with caution.
My grandparents had pretty much everything divided and handed out before they died. Two of them were living on property/in houses that were given to them by my grandparents. After funeral expenses, hospital bills, and everything else, there really wasn't much left.
If you want some real advice: Don't count on it. Set yourself up in a way that you aren't waiting for your parents to die. Have absolutely no stake in the outcome. And if you are the executor, be as open and transparent as possible. If anything, it'll make the lawsuits quicker.
This.
People change their wills, sometimes secretly. Maybe your parent favours your sibling, and you didn't know; maybe they want to leave everything to the cat.
Make your own life, and if something trickles down, that's a pure bonus.
The executor is the one responsible for distributing assets (including real estate and anything of value) from the estate. You want that role.
From my understanding a Living Trust is really just a way of bypassing the Will and probate process, and actually allows for less oversight. This might make things easier, or it might make it harder to get justice.
There are also irrevocable trusts that allow for making designations that can't be taken back, which perhaps may fit your situation. But since they're irrevocable they need to be drafted and planned more carefully.
Of course if they're not looking to you to fulfill such a role or discuss such things, then perhaps it's not your scene no matter how much you think it is. Whatever the case may be, you're better off having these conversations sooner rather than too late.
IME a parent's death is when all those unresolved childhood disagreements come back to roost.
The will is scrupulously fair - straight 50:50 split, no special provision for need or whatever. Both kids are named as executors. I bung them some money from time to time, especially if one of them is in need. I always give them both the same amount, even if the other isn't in need. My hope is that they won't fall out over my legacy. I don't think they will.
Greedy, grasping offspring is a thing. I have friends who have that problem. They don't care to spend time with their offspring, because of tedious conversations about money. I'm so glad I don't have that problem. My kids never ask me for money, even if I invite them to ("Are you OK for money?") I never asked my parents for money either - I didn't want to feel beholden to them.
IMO problems between honest people arise when an estate drags out due to large non-monetary assets like houses, causing legitimate differences in opinion. If they both just want to sell it, that's easy. When one wants to keep it to live in, or if there is a lot of land and someone wants to subdivide to get more money, then you get into arguments. Or other intangibles like if one of them ends up spending a lot of time personally taking care of you, what's that worth post facto.
FWIW I don't know how the probate process is in your state, but you could look into a living trust to keep the process easier and more private. States that have adopted the uniform probate code are pretty straightforward, but ones that haven't can get somewhat tedious even for uncontested estates (eg publishing a list of all your assets in the public record).
TBH you probably have a gut feeling of whether your kids will work together or argue, and if you want to head off problems the only way is to talk about it ahead of time and plan for the things that will cause friction.
Yes. They are not co-executors (they can choose how they divide the burden). And I know it is a burden; some people hire an accountant to do it for them. It took my sister about 6 months to do probate for my father. I'm glad I didn't have to shoulder that.
So as far as I'm concerned, that's up to them. I trust them both. I trust them not to fight. But in the end, even if you've done your best to set things up properly, people can still find a way to generate a conflict.
Most of the legacy happens to be a couple of homes; they'd be hard to divide, but both my kids have their own homes. I imagine they'll just sell both properties. I appreciate your remarks about divisible land legacies; my property isn't easily divisible. At any rate, my will is quite clear; the division is to be 50:50.
I really hope neither of them ends up having to care for me; but if that should happen, I suppose I'd just compensate them for their trouble while I'm still alive.
Trusts can be simple or byzantine. I don't think I need to make a trust at all. My affairs aren't complicated, and there are no secrets. I mainly want to protect my legacy from my two ex-wives, who have each already taken everything they're entitled to.
Incidentally, I was a bit miffed that my Dad appointed my sister as sole executor; but I never mentioned that to anyone. Fact is, she is a competent maanager and administrator, and I'm not. He did the right thing.
I am in South Africa, BTW.
Essentially they risked never talking to you again, losing a living link with their deceased step father, over what? An end table? A book case? Is this really how you want to play this out?
After the passing of a grandparent I took some items home that I thought I was saving from being thrown out with the trash, but it turned out a sibling really wanted them and felt wronged that I had taken them without their approval.
I think GP's situation is more serious than this, but in some cases maybe honest misunderstandings plus digging in heels causes some unnecessary grief.
When my father died, it was even easier; the will was a mess, if you ask me, but my sister was executor, and she did a really good job. He had been in a care home, and had already disposed of most of his personal posessions. My siblings all played very nicely, and edge cases were settled very amicably. In fact, if anything, it brought us all together.
Make a will, and use a lawyer.
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-miss...
If you haven't dealt with someone with NPD or BPD, I'd like to clarify this a bit. I'm sure that any of the prolific commenters on HN could be found to have contradicted themselves and/or distorted reality occasionally. This is about patterns of behavior, and it's usually coupled with minimizing any specific examples of the behavior while never engaging with the fact that the problem is the pattern of behavior, not any one example.
I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality[1]. If the estranged kid(s) really were the ones with personality disorders, I suspect the emotional responses to being cut out would be something along the lines of "Sad, relieved, guilty about feeling relieved."
1: Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
Of course, they're all master manipulators, ironically able to lie better than the common people because they can leverage that apparent veneer of truthfulness to deceive even more completely.
Of course when reading over it in the regular fast way of reading through the comments, one might think there is a contradiction, because you said there would be one and so we read it that way. But there really isn't. It's an evasive manoeuvre. Of course they know what you're asking and they specifically do not want to lie and so they choose words you are going to very likely parse in a particular way.
If you think about it, is the "there's a contradiction in the following sentence" way of stating this any different/worse/better than the original? I would argue it isn't. Same level just on opposite sides of the argument.
You can deceive somebody and still be 100 % truthful.
I've had people argue that answering a question with an intentionally misleading non-sequitur is not lying. e.g. "Did you reaearch your topic?" "I went to the library"; they didn't say when they went to the library nor that they did any research at the library. Or more recently: "Have you been vaccinated?" "Yeah, I've been immunized".
To me such non-answers are clearly a lie because it's not really any different than saying "Yes" and then claiming you were talking about the popular rock band from the 70s for no particular reason. I can see how some people would disagree and I'm not interested in arguing semantics, so I try to avoid the word "lie" in general when "deception" seems less contentious.
Spies seem masters in this, applying it for the good (of whomever they serve).
Bill Clinton's famous 'never had sex with that woman, miss Lewinsky' also comes to mind.
I think it could also be trained (including with humor, even when obviously a lie), as its basically a subset of social engineering or confidence game. When people succesfully lie, they are telling a truth from a certain PoV (one which benefits them). And, it can be a useful trait, too, depending on your where you stand (also a PoV).
Side note: the word lie is indeed not preferred, a better one is deceptive or manipative.
That being said, BPD was hyped in 90s where a lot of women got the diagnosis, while they were underrepresented in autism diagnoses.
"Up to 100MBit" in the marketing material as well as the contract. When you complain that you only get 0.5MBit it's basically "buyer beware" because you bought "up to" not "always exactly" 100MBit of connectivity on a shared medium (cable). As long as it's true that the medium actually supports 100MBit there's nothing wrong with this except for it being very deceptive. This kind of thing is all over the place and a lot of people fall for it all the time. And then complain loudly but mostly toothlessly. The internet itself I guess has changed some of this as it's easier for companies to get bad enough publicity out of such things than back in the day but it's doesn't change the underlying facts and mechanics.
No, it's not. Making an utterance with the intent of someone else inferring a particular thing from it is implying that thing.
They present information in a way to get you to assume things that aren't true to either paint their desired victim in a bad light or them in a good light. And when presented with clarifying data, will try to act like its your fault that you misinterpreted what they said. Even though it's what they wanted.
One tell is someone who seems to collect bad relationships. Who has a never-ending stream of stories of people just being awful to them. And their only admission of having done anything wrong is just some sort of vague platitude. It's always of the variety "I'm not perfect either" never "I shouldn't have cheated".
Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car.
Yesterday my shoelace broke and my dog got hit by a car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory#The_two_princ...
Ordinary humans can predict what inferences their interlocutors will make. Their interlocutors know this. Therefore, both parties use this to communicate just as much as they do overt utterances. This being so, they can mislead with inferences as well as they can with overt utterances. This is not called lying, but ordinary users of language do not consider it less morally inculpating. In fact, they may consider it worse inasmuch as it leaves them less recourse when it is discovered.
In reading about neurodiversity I’ve encountered several groups of people who struggle with relevance theory. Not understanding how this works can drive a pretty big wedge between you and the people you’re trying to bond with, especially if you don’t know you’re doing it.
It's a common tendency to link related subjects together. So people infer that sharing a sentence/utterance means the two are directly related.
Causing inferences like, "Oh, did he have a heart attack and run over your dog??".
It is true that some people prey on these inferences and use them to lie/manipulate but it is also very possible that they are just two things that happened on the same day - related only by their traumatic impact. TLDR: Yesterday sucked because these two separate things happened...
To a person who experienced these events, it's completely possible that you don't know people think your uncle ran over your dog. When he actually died in his sleep and your dog was run over by the neighbor.
Yes, speaking strictly grammatically. But that's not how people communicate.
"Yesterday my uncle died and my dog got hit by a car"
A lot of people communicate this way.
I get the sense that you're on some vendetta against all of my comments for some reason, but I'm not on a weird strike against anything except poor assumptions.
But, agree to disagree I suppose.
> No. Your argument is a linguistic work-to-rules strike.
It's both.
Getting a diagnosis might make the rest of your life easier.
> 1: Here's an example with details changed...
How is this not supposed to be an example of a contradiction? You pre-empted your "they distort reality" comment with the presumption that there are contradictions, then go on to give an example that doesn't contain any.
It just contains lazy details, which justly lead to incorrect inferences. Whether this is indicative of intentional manipulative behavior or distorted views of reality is hard to say without more context.
- They contradict themselves.
- They habitually selectively report facts to distort reality
The footnote belongs with the second behavior which is why the [1] was on the second sentence.
It banks on inferring, "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." to explicitly mean "Joe was driving drunk". It isn't a completely off-base interpretation, but it isn't rock solid either. More context is necessary before this conversation has any real value.
Continued:
"It was Joe's birthday he got a bit tipsy. He was feeling a bit full of himself and hit on my girlfriend all night. Afterwards I still decide to drive him home so he didn't die. I mean, what kind of friend would let his friend drive himself home after drinking on his birthday? And even then he continued to be a complete ass. I was so enraged that I didn't even see the deer jump out in front of my car"
Hence: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash" could very well be a valid interpretation of the evening if you consider all possible context. Especially if you are trying not to throw Joe under the bus as a sleazy friend to your therapist.
But also, it could definitely be the drivers fault in this hypothetical scenario. Hard to say.
The problem here is that humans have a tendency to believe they have all the information they need to pass correct judgment (source: life experience, and if I'm wrong about this, that means I'm probably right, right?). Usually, they don't. In my experience, everyone embroiders details to make themselves look innocent, and often without even noticing. It's very difficult to parse truth from people's tendency to simplify and exaggerate based on personal bias.
If there is a conflict there usually is a good reason - but sometimes that "good reason" is based on a misinterpretation that others won't understand.
I can't place fault on Joe or the driver in this situation because: I wasn't there and I don't know all of the context.
A lot of people on the internet use that moral confusion to whitewash their ingratitude. Framing their obligator as morally reprehensible or psychologically unfit, by recalling other peoples sob stories, in order to reduce their own personal recompense. It’s like leveraging the legitimate tragedy of a few for the convenience of the many.
And I’m saying this as someone who sponged off my parents for years and didn’t pay them a dime on rent.
I should know; I've been there, done that, and I grew out of it (I think). Something about my future children being as ungrateful as I was really rankles me.
My own parents were not abusive, and I wish distance didn’t make it so difficult for them to be a larger part of my family’s life. They’re flawed and have their poverty/alcoholism/death baggage - but I feel really fortunate to have had them as parents.
On the other hand, I have other people in my life whose parents were abusive (including being legally defined as such). Depending on the specific dynamic, most are trying to sort out how to ‘shrink’ the relationship in a way that maintains bonds and contact but with boundaries to soften the negative parts of the relationship. For others, the relationship is actively unsafe, and they’re minimizing contact.
There’s clearly some hard stuff behind your version, but the answer isn’t to swing full tilt the other way.
It’s all messy and fraught - but adult children do have agency over their lives and the shape of the relationship with their parents.
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/FAQ-estrange...
The writer seems very confident of their assessment of various people online.
It's a shortcut, not a diagnosis. Layperson English tends to be that way, and getting caught up on the different definitions between medicine and "common" speak is likely a waste of time.
"Narcissism" essentially means "self-love" and it is something that is part of everyone's psyche. Having something wrong with your narcissism is like having something wrong with your heart and there are many things that can go wrong with your heart such as heart disease, heart failure, bad valves, arrhythmia, heart attack, etc. In the middle of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Asuka Langley Soryu makes a passionate defense of self-love ("you are all you've got!")
There is "narcissistic personality disorder" as well as the (widespread) narcissistic disturbance that Kohut talks about which itself is more or less complicated by borderline and other disturbances at more archaic levels.
It is all front of mind for me right now because I was talking to my therapist and volunteered that I was concerned about an incident of "Dark Triad" behavior on my part and she said at one point I was "talking like a Narcissist" (I agreed) yet when I took a
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/SD3/
I found I was midrange on Machiavellianism, below average on "narcissism" and close to the bottom of the range on psychopathy. (Hmmm... I felt remorse about what I did so I guess I'm not psychopathic.)
I read this book cover-to-cover the next week
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171657.Humanizing_the_N...
and marked it up with a highlighter and drew my version of Kohut's horizontal and vertical split on my whiteboard. I oscillate between grandiosity and worthlessness sometimes and definitely can point to merger, twinship, and mirror transferences. (It was twinship transferences on two people that got out of hand...)
I'd point to at least some of this phenomenology being widespread and almost normal... I think almost anytime somebody blows up for what seems like no good reason there is a grandiosity -> worthlessness transition going on.
It just perfectly nails my observations and comes to similar conclusions that were brewing in my mind for the past few years. It's really ... I don't know how to call it - relieving? To read it similar way I would put it in words, but from totally different person.
It also bases many arguments on actual situations that happened on some group - it's not just someone talking about "theory", it's dissecting actually happening discussions and giving insight into what these people might have thought. It helps one to think that this are real people who exist that share similar traits to what one might have experienced, and not just someone making stuff up to make you think that you're right.
Truly the best read I could have.
It needs to stop.
Kids are like AI they learn from the environment around them and prison populations are in part an example of the failed parenting, state and scientific direction, but as usual State officials and scientists never get held to account when they should only the parent.
Add in different belief systems and you have a recipe for disaster which constantly unfurls to one degree or another day in day out. ad nauseum.
And all the while the planet still keeps being more and more over populated. Its like fiddling at the seams whilst Rome burns.
I dont care to a certain extent because it will end with war OR sickness and poverty, if people are not forced to live within their means and make the best of what they are given.
I'd like to see euthanisia become legal so we dont have to be experimented on by scientists who have the audacity to think its acceptable, just like I dont agree with Govt who have the audacity to think they can control our lives through legislation and all that.
In the 70's there was a Eugenicist movement in the West which lost out to the current thinking, but here in the UK the NHS was performing medical operations like tying the tubes of woman after 1/2/3 kids to stop their from having more. Obviously there is the female contraceptive pill which has helped reduce number sizes. This is eye watering! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c...
You could say the Eugenicist movement has become more persuasive today. We have also had to have our health impaired to make us more docile and to reduce our breeding abilities whilst also increasing the risk of cancer, to the point that something like 50% of the UK population will get cancer in their lifetime here in the UK. TF the NHS is free! I bet Josef Mengele is kicking himself for being too obvious!
Inflation is also stalking the planet right now, its getting more expensive to live, now whilst various central banks can print monkey tokens to keep the natives happy, inventing an excuse or two to print more like Quantative Easing helps keep people in the game and Govt's can invent bureaucracy to keep people busier.
I'm also aware that in the West its been cheaper to offshore some jobs to parts of the world with lower labour costs. That last point may or may not also entail poorer working conditions like we see with Foxconn and Apple.
Now its also clear that we have a form of global communism imposed on us by global business giants under the guise of global capitalism only its not a govt but a board doing the communism bit limiting our choices of what we can spend money on. What govt would want to distance themselves from domains previously under their control like telecoms spying?
But in all of this, there is a new entrant, artificial intelligence, chipping away at the middle class jobs and some working class manual labour jobs which has opened up a new angle of attack that previously hadnt existed in human history.
Now its doing three things, its improving quality like we see with robots building German cars and its also forcing Govt to get creative with their bureaucracy which is why the security services "hack" via these global entities with court orders. Muddying the waters to keep us busy. Bread and Circuses been going on since Roman times and all that.
Its also discovering new attack vectors for all sorts of areas of life, but its also undermining the pillars of society authority namely the State and religion.
Dear Americans
Can you please stop calling everything 'Communist'? Now we have articles by BBC 'is the Pope communist', you have posters 'Race mixing is communism', 'climate change is communist'.
What is this, communism of the brain? Do you not have other words?
Chairman Mao didn't invest 'global business', you own this problem lock, stock and barrel.
- Marxism is communist!
- the Nazis we’re communist!
What you are noting is something I find really personally interesting. We like to think otherwise but words are very socially defined.
What you’re describing isn’t people referencing an actual definition of communism. It’s more akin to a pointer for “bad”. Communism has been maligned in the US for so long and the label of communist/m has so long been used to malign other things (labor rights) that it is not used to refer to the economic theory in the general patience. It’s basically just a mother word for “bad” often specific to something someone perceived as related to power and economics but can’t describe. Socialism is the new version. The demands of “keep the government out of my government run healthcare” from a few years back is telling.
For a national broadcaster to compare the pope to communist leaders - I mean thats an outrageous and illiterate comparison.
Nothing exemplifies this better than the cliche
> I gave you life. I can take it away.
One of the best parental tell-offs ever recorded on film:
You listen to me. You say you don't want to tell me how to live my life. So what do you think you've been doing? You tell me what rights I've got or haven't got, and what I owe to you for what you've done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you're supposed to do! Because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don't own me! You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line, or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don't even know what I am, Dad, you don't know who I am. You don't know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back! Dad... Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man. Now, I've got a decision to make, hm? And I've got to make it alone, and I gotta make it in a hurry. So would you go out there and see after my mother?For those interested.
I guess holiday depression is good timing?
Being trans and the family scapegoat, I personally got out town as soon as I could, but that was not the end of the story. My narcissistic, abusive family conjured up a special blend of threats, saccharine and passive-aggressive letters, stalking involving the media, and misgendering/deadnaming/outing me in the will when they did croak.
The boomers represent the biggest social change of any generation in centuries. The pill rock and roll women in the workplace divorce MLK JFK Malcom X etc.
Everything past them is an echo and Im not even sure it's on the right side of history.
Churchill drank 12 ounces a day that was normal before boomers. They are not heavy drinkers historically speaking.
And they did not have access to material goods like we do.
The ME generation is every generation from here on in so long as consumerism expands.
1. p. 6 http://leadsafedemo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/LEAD-PLAY...
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190123112330.h...
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6450277/
4. By way of Takeuchi, H. et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02435-0
Younger people also don't have little living memory of those before them for a basis of comparison.
My Great Grandparents were disowned from their respective families because one was French Catholic the other English Protestant. That wold have been 'normal' for the time. That's not even the tip of the iceberg for 'estranged family'.
My German ancestors would not attend my Irish ancestors wedding reception (they did the ceremony, but not afterwards), because they felt the Irish were brooding alcoholics. Which would itself be a bit of racism, but it was essentially true, I mean, the stories I've been told ...
Some of the casual Boomer bigotry I see on other Social Media and TikTok especially is fairly shocking, it's as though people have no insight into what happened in the last century, especially the later part of it.
Maybe it's possible that lead poisoning had something to do with it, but I wonder if it would have changed things that much.
We no longer have any living memory of the holocaust, the introduction of mass media / TV, life before vaccines, serious adversity, life before plastics (!), birth control, antibiotics, vast infant mortality, real war (Vietnam being the last), or overt and institutional racism (i.e. the bank policy says 'no loans to blacks'), or direct segregation (this fountain is for whites only) or when almost everyone 'went to church' as a cultural event, not so much for overt religiosity, but wherein it was an more or less just a community activity that 'people did'.
In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other. We are collectively like the children of a 'Very Wealthy Family' - some a little better off than others.
Hating on an older generation is a perennial pastime, it's the lack of context that's a bit disturbing.
Finally, I believe that every individual story of social malaise is 'very complicated' where there are generally few true heroes and few true villains.
I remind myself that even the broad use of Acetaminophen and NSAIDs as OTC pain relievers only came about sometime in the last 100 years. While the raw ingredients that go into pain control have been known for hundreds of years if not longer, their formulation and dose was not standardized until very recently, and you certainly couldn't get 100 pills for $10 from the grocery store. As someone who uses these drugs semi-regularly, I cannot imagine having to do without them. OTC analgesics improved QoL and productivity by orders of magnitude. This is something even Churchill's generation did not have.
The truth is most of the older generations right now not only don’t want to understand what the struggles are of the day they live in, they insist on keeping as much power and influence as possible. They’re now learning (or not) the lesson that they taught the generation before them.
> In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other
This isn’t true by practically any metric other than violent crime rates.
It's true by every metric.
My grandparents were born on farms without plumbing or electricity and they were not 'poor' relative to those in the region, they were about equal to others in nearby farms and villages.
In just a few generations we have: cars, electricity, ratio, air travel, safe air travel, plastics (just consider how pervasive that one is), dishwashers, washing machines/dryers (fundamentally changing domestic work), microwaves, 'all season' produce, vast array of selection, home ownership, consumer finance, credit, TV, the internet, access to information instantaneously from around the world, educational access (in 1930 about 4% went to College, now it's 40%), insulin, outpatient heart surgery, antibiotics etc.. Walmart, the Dollar Store, Target, Costco and Amazon have exploded consumerism far even beyond those things: you can buy any little trinket for a few dollars, and have it delivered from China to your door.
We live in an age of unparalleled material abundance, really, it's not even an argument, so it says more about perspective than anything.
You can draw the line probably anywhere from 'Silent Gen to Millenial' but there is no doubt, from here on in, the pluarity of people in Wealthy Nations have completely surpassed any concept of 'material need'.
JFK, MLK, and Malcom X were not Boomers, they were all born during the Greatest and Silent Generation. Most of the Boomers were children when those men died.
Rock and Roll was invented before most of them were born.
The birth control pill first became available to their mothers before half the generation was/wasn’t conceived.
Divorce law changed before many of them could be married so they were more likely the to be the first generation to have divorced parents.
All of the things I've mentioned 'came of age' during the Baby Boomer era - those are cultural epithets of their generation - not previous generations.
It doesn't matter when Malcom X was born - he was a figure of the 1960's 'massive shift in social justice' which is a definitive characteristic of the Baby Boomer generation - the were the one's out on the streets.
'Divorce' did not start happening in a material way until that time. Baby Boomers were the first generation to start to experience it as children - and then - were the first generation to do it themselves at rates never seen in history.
Baby Boomers were the first generation to embrace Birth Control as socially normative. Sex without babies.
Both of those things alone - Divorce and Birth Control - those are enough to make a very unique generation in history, but the Boomers had so much more.
You know the song 'The Age of Aquarius'? Well, they were not wrong, it was the dawn of a new age.
I recently saw some film footage from Manchester, 1907, with what seemed to be all sorts of happy children in the streets, though most of them were literally homeless. Children. All over the streets. Maybe it's a fact we are 'aware of' but seeing it live is visceral and shocking. If Gen X/Y/Z could be exposed to those things that are almost within living memory, I think they would have a different view of themselves. Gen X grandparents could tell them about a lot of that. Fewer Millennials and almost none for Gen Z.
I also feel like in your defense of Baby Boomers you’re taking away from previous generations, especially with regards to the civil rights movement which my grandparents were involved in and experienced first-hand when my parents were too young or weren’t alive yet and my parents are Boomers.
Same with music like Rock and Roll. No doubt Boomers grew up with it but the people at the first shows weren’t Boomers.
The civil rights movement had the most impact on the Boomers, but how could they be on the streets when most of them weren’t born or weren’t old enough to be involved?
Boomers were the primary drivers of the "Satanic panic" as parents in the 80's - they are not counter-culture or friends of Rock, by and large.
Boomers are almost 100% 'Rock' listeners, I don't know a single one who isn't. And of course - they created it.
The 'Satanic Rock' issue was a tiny blip in history, the extreme side of what is frankly an artifact of over conscientiousness and it really wasn't a big deal at all.
It was absurd for parents to be concerned about Swing, Jazz and the Beatles (but they were!), but for 'Satanic Rock' it's not completely outrageous.
It's actually rational for parents to be concerned that all of a sudden, children are listening music, reading about, and dancing around to people that sing about 'Satan' - who is ostensibly a bad character.
That hadn't happened in history, I can imagine it putting some people on edge.
It takes a second order awareness to understand that those things were not inherently destructive. It took some time to process.
Much like hyper realist and violent video games, where you go around mass killing and cutting people's throats - there was (and is) some fuss around that because it's not unreasonable for people to think that that could be really influential, and desensitize people to violent acts.
"they are not counter-culture"
Many of them were counter culture, but that's not really the point though ... being 'counter culture' is not synonymous with being moral, better, enlightened or anything really.
1. the activists who, in their heyday, brought about enormous social change and
2. the reactionary non-activists who later tried to tear that all down
The people who loved disco and the people who hated it were of the same generation.
I agree that people should avoid ascribing characteristics or assigning blame to entire generations like this. It just pisses people off and drives them into camps.
None of those were baby boomers.
I know narcissist is someone who has an excessive interest or admiration for themselves, but how is a 3rd party victim to that?
Edit: psychology today has lots of interesting info e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/articles/200601/field-gui...
The thru-line for the whole series is that participation in these forums is a powerful clue, all on its own, that abusive behavior is involved in the estrangement.
It's fascinating in the US that we've gotten to the point that families can break contact entirely and be successful but due to completely out of date institutions baked in to law, we're stuck with arbitrary reasons to engage with hostile people. As a judge, why would you ever grant rights of a grandparent willing to take their children to court to see their grand children short of an abuse related situation?
> Grandparents' rights groups are one step forward and one step back. One step forward, because the majority of the people who are interested in this cause are the people grandparents' rights were meant to help: grandparents who lost touch with their grandchildren through the parents' divorce, incarceration, or some other rupture in their children's families. However, it also brings out the people who think they have more rights over their grandchildren than the children's own parents do, the people who want to force a family reconciliation through the courts, the people who want to take custody of their grandchildren to punish their children.
Try to to step out of your own skin for a second and look at childrearing like an anthropologist might.
A key insight is that before modern countries and governments, there were essentially no pension plans. Some companies offered them, but in general they were rare.
Your pension plan was literally your children.
When you got too old to work in a field, swing an axe, or chase after animals in the forest, your kids would feed you. When your teeth fell out, they would chew your food for you.
You still see remnants of this in less well-off, or more "primitive" cultures. Families aim for about 10 children, end up with about 2-5 surviving to adulthood. Their culture has a very strong focus on children supporting their parents, far more than in developed, Western nations. You see this with Asian kids that work 12-hour days, 7-days a week to send money back to their parents. As do their siblings. Each might contribute only 20-30% of their income, but between a bunch of kids it adds up to enough to support the parents.
For more than half the planet's population, kids absolutely are raised primarily to support their parents, not the other way around. The kids in turn will eventually get support from their own kids, etc...
An alternative but roughly equivalent model is that in a hunter-gatherer society, a male human maximises their own safety and comfort by having children. Kids take very little calories to raise, but can be a multiplying effect on overall productivity. A lone hunter may be on foot for days, during which he can't take care of his "stuff". But a wife with kids has many little hands to collect berries, dry meat, repair baskets, etc...
(PS: Where this "fails" is that once a country's medical system advanced to the point that not too many of the kids die, everyone ends up with 10+ kids surviving to adulthood, and the population explodes. The older generation doesn't "hold back" on reproducing because this is directly contributing to their own wealth in retirement. The younger generation is screwed, but that wasn't obvious at the time they were born. This is happening right now in the Philippines, as a random example.)
I am coming at it from more of an ethical point of view, largely utilitarian, I guess, although I don't necessarily describe myself as a utilitarian. Nobody chooses to be brought into this world. To be wrenched from the void into consciousness. It's something inflicted on them by others - specifically their parents. It's the heaviest, most serious ethical decision most people will make in their lifetimes.
I think that by having children you are implicitly saying one of two things "I believe that I will be able to provide this new human I've decided to create the resources, skills, and life such that, on the balance, their joy will outweigh their suffering." or "I care little to none for whether their joy will outweigh their suffering. I want to perpetrate my genes and culture and I need another body to help with the work and secure my comfort in my old age."
I think the former, if carefully considered in an honest way, can be an ethical decision. I think the latter is wholly unethical and more or less amounts to a desire for filial slavery.
Every day, you choose to be a part of each other's life, and help each other get through life. How you do that changes through life. Not every child will be successful, self-actualized or achieve anything near their potential. Not every parent will make good choices, be successful, or even be worthy of respect. People mess up. They make mistakes. The way love really works, is you forgive. And keep forgiving. You keep the relationship alive. You celebrate the good, and you sympathize through the bad. The greatest gift a parent can give is loving their child despite it all, and the greatest gift a child can give is loving their parents despite it all.
I believe there are advantages to the Western way. But the claim that any other way is abusive seems quite ethnocentric to me.
This website describes my parents to a T, and myself and my siblings have all had periods of no contact with them. Their cultural values are completely irrelevant, they were simply extremely abusive and refuse to acknowledge it. They tell me that my siblings and we made up our childhood abuse.
My parents cultural values and political leanings are actually extremely liberal (and extremely similar to my own). Everyone in my family of origin are atheists. This is about abuse.
This series of articles makes a very clear case that something more than cultural mismatch is going on here.