Take off your Rose Colored Glasses

[James]

I am inspired to write this post by the ugh thread, the age to live at home thread, how old is too old to date thread, and many others.

I am not going to say that a lot of GC members are Naive. Nor am I going to say that a lot of members grew up really sheltered.

What I am going to say is that a lot of the members of the site don't seem to be able to make the mental leap between intellectually knowing that life is not always a rosy wonderful thing and applying that to their everyday perceptions and judgements.

In the 60's Hippies flocked to communes and went back to nature only to discover to their dismay that Bread didn't grow on trees and that a farm didn't have the choices of a supermarket. Hence they shaved and became our yuppies.

Its important for us to remember that Santa Claus doesn't always come and that life is much more Gray than it ever is Black and White.

If you have managaed to live so far in lockstep with standard social expectations, bully for you. But for the majority of people in the world its not true.

An accident of birth has allowed most of us access to a nation that makes it easy to acquire certain social distinctions that are almost impossible to get in other countries. Things such as a college education. A car as a teen-age. Luxury items such as electronics that even the poverty stricken in this country possess.

But even here in this country many people do not have the opportunity to live out the Shoulds and Woulds that I often see so blithely put forth on GC in such critical fashion.

Many people live with their parents past 22 or go back later for economic reasons, even though they should live on their own.

People take longer than 4 years to graduate. People of wildly diverse ages and races date.

People meet on the internet and marry. And bad things happen to good people.

Its all well and good to understand that there are woulds and shoulds in the world in terms of expectation, but its a limiting and foolish belief to assume that the real world cares about those woulds and shoulds.

And if we never transcend judging the world solely through our own limited outlook, not only will we fall short of understanding other people, we will be caught unpleasantly by surprise when the Universe whacks us upside the head.

So when topics arise on GC, we would do well to remember that just because we don't personally have experiences of adversity, we have never gone hungry, never been truly poor, and/or had the support system we needed to achieve social success, we do have the intellectual capacity to understand that those stories that we read that are so different from our own lives are stories that are true and happening to other living human beings.

We have the capacity to understand that there but for the grace of god go us, or may go us in the future.

In other words we have the ability to think beyond our own small experiences when dealing with the so-called Shoulds and Woulds of Life.

Shouldn't we attempt to justify our sense of entitlement by actually excercising that ability and think outside the box?

Just a late night rambling thought for you. . .