Working in retail, I have a lot of conversations with random people who come into the store. Since the store happens to be near a truck stop, many of our customers (but not the majority), are truck drivers. At first, I think that I should be nice to them, seeing as they probably haven’t spoken to anyone in a while, being on the road most of the time. And it’s true, I can always spot them when they come in, because after I ask how they are doing that day, they begin to divulge the whole of their outlook on that day and sometimes on their whole lives in general. When I ask how someone is doing, I typically want a brief, but positive response. I don’t usually want a long and drawn-out explanation of why each person’s life is miserable. And unfortunately, that is the typical response I get from such customers. It makes me sad, because it seems as though a majority of the world is feeling downtrodden. When I get upset with my own situation, I try to consider that somewhere out there, someone else is having a much harder go at it than myself. And so, I feel selfish for being so dramatic or for focusing too much on my life. I want to give these pessimistic customers a good talking to, not because I feel like I know any more than they do, but because it’s truly disappointing to be so negative and not entirely necessary. Have people always been so negative and whiney, or is this a weakness of modern culture? I wish the rest of the world could read some of the philosophic works that I’ve read, simply because they are the best self-help books you can find, because they tell you how to live life. Aristotle in particular lays it out for a person, and I like to think that human beings are made from a thicker fiber than I see so much today.
It is true that people in modern culture seem to become more and more negative. It may be due to the stresses of the modern world and people can't deal with it. Kant proposes that people have full control of their rationality, but their emotions vary. If people would let their minds/thoughts control their emotions, and not the other way around, our society would be in much better shape.
ReplyDeleteI agree that we humans are made out of a thicker fiber. I think a major contribution to the general negativity of our era is the varying levels of sensitization. I think society has become desensitized to pleasure, in the sense that it is now something that should come freely and easy. Very different from the Aristotelian view of true pleasure being linked with habitual virtues. Conversely, I also think that society has become overly sensitive towards pain. Any time someone experiences a little trouble, it's blown out of proportion and is usually blamed on someone else. In a nutshell, we've created a system which exalts pleasure as a universally available commodity, while simultaneously presenting pain and inconvenience as an unnecessary aspect of human existence. The reality, of course, is that pleasure is anything BUT universally available, and that pain is necessary for the refinement of our being.
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