As a society do you feel that we have lost a sense of strength to our character? I ask this because if you look at some of the trials of previous generations and what they went through as just a matter of normal every day living they seemed way tougher mentally. I mean...if we are largely shaped by our hardships wouldn't it make sense that the easier life gets the worse it is for human growth?

You are clearly in phisolophical mood.
I will mull this, and your other questions.
Klaatu verada nikto..

😁🐮

I would say absolutely yes.  Read about the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Pardon my French but those guys had brass balls.  People like that don't exist anymore.  Of course there are always exceptions but generally speaking technology and easy living has made us soft. No doubt.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this notion and it annoys me to no end.

I know for a fact that the men dying in the mud in Ukraine right now used to be gamers, anime fans, comic book collectors, fashion designers, just average people of these times, men who the older generations thought of as weak. I know because they are exactly the same as I am and as the people around me are. Would you say that these men are of weak character?

I also know that the older generations of every time in history have always thought the same about the younger generations. I bet the veterans of World War 1 thought the exact same about their descendants in 1935, those same descendants who would later drown in the sea off Normandy or freeze to death near Stalingrad. I know that the veterans of World War 2 thought the same of the younger generations when poopy hit the fan in Yugoslavia (where I'm from) in the early nineties, the younger generations who witnessed inhumane atrocities and died in the dirt. I know the veterans of that war think the same of my generation.

I bet the "weak" people who surround you, the gamers, fashion designers, anime fans, comic book collectors of today are all men of immense character who would stab, and kill, and achieve great feats of courage invisible and in silence to defend what's valuable to them.

Do not confuse hard fought for comfort for lack of character. You're just the next older generation making the same mistake every single older generation has made in history.

Really good points Rhonan. There's no doubt that's a recurring theme from one generation to the next.

I think you are tapping into something there even if I'm not necessarily in total agreement.

Speaking from my position as a westerner in a developed country:

You could make an argument that life today is the most comfortable it has ever been. However, rates of depression are very high, and it seems the younger generation are intolerant or unable to handle the mild discomforts of life. This seems really strange, surely you would expect the opposite. So does in some way comfort and ease actually cause depression??

I find it a paradox of human nature that humans don't tend to choose what makes them happy, they will often choose what is easiest or most comfortable even if it causes unhappiness. It seems this overwhelming comfort and ease of the modern world may have hurt people, perhaps disproportionately the young who have not formed habits and ways of living as a bulwark against modern convinience.

The narrative that the young of today are soft or weak is overdone though. Aside from falling into the trap of overgeneralising, I think to use the words "weak character" is very harsh, any generation of people born in the same position would react just as this generation does. We are just humans and are largely products of the environment. If the young of today are suffering it is only because we as a society have created a poisonous environment for them.

To raise some counterpoints to the comfortable life point-

Although comfort and ease is off the scale, in many cases the financial and life outlook for the young in western societies is notably worse than that of their parents and grandparents.
Home ownership, starting a family and having financial security into retirement, things that were fairly achievable over previous generations, are now sliding out of reach for many young people.
I know that a hundred or so years ago it would be worse, but there's something to be said about being on the downslide when it comes to morale. Having netflix at a moments reach is not much consolation when you see no prospect of having a home of your own.

Another one is social media, which I believe has had extremely serious negative effects across the entire of society. Increasingly we are at each others throats and don't know whether we are coming or going. The young have had it throughout their formative years and I expect the effects are strongest there. It's basically an enormous psychological experiment with no ethics considerations whatsoever.

I'd say yes, we are becoming weaker as a society. Not necessarily because of our living conditions, if you ask me it's a lot worse in many ways than it's ever been. We're becoming weaker because we're losing our way. There's so much brainwashing and conditioning these days that people don't know what to believe anymore. So because we're lost, we're weaker.


JudoP wrote on Dec 5^th, 2024 at 2:32pm:

Home ownership, starting a family and having financial security into retirement, things that were fairly achievable over previous generations, are now sliding out of reach for many young people

I'm only 24 so I can speak from personal experience that yes, you're completely correct! Feels like there's no where to go to meet anyone these days. Finding a like minded girl from my culture is a pretty hard task, and I've had no luck so far.


JudoP wrote on Dec 5^th, 2024 at 2:32pm:

Another one is social media, which I believe has had extremely serious negative effects across the entire of society

I also agree with this. That's why I steer clear from social media, barring this forum and an online game if you'd count that.

Judo I read your response and can't find a single thing I disagree with. This especially -

I find it a paradox of human nature that humans don't tend to choose what makes them happy, they will often choose what is easiest or most comfortable even if it causes unhappiness

Is really walking the line of outright spiritual truth.  I've seen this stated less clearly in religious texts. It's so true and a paradox I've dealt with in my own life so perhaps it resonates even more so as true to me.

Morphy wrote on Dec 5^th, 2024 at 11:27pm:

Judo I read your response and can't find a single thing I disagree with. This especially - I find it a paradox of human nature that humans don't tend to choose what makes them happy, they will often choose what is easiest or most comfortable even if it causes unhappiness Is really walking the line of outright spiritual truth.  I've seen this stated less clearly in religious texts. It's so true and a paradox I've dealt with in my own life so perhaps it resonates even more so as true to me.

I feel it too. Its quite something to be conscious of it and still make the poorer choice. In a way it's not so profound. Humans don't have infinite willpower and will reliably fail to do things that aren't psychologically motivated by various emotional pushes and pulls.

I think when you introduce the convience and ease of the modern world you effectively are massively lowering the barriers and effort needed to do certain activities and so these will come to dominate your life more and more. How easy is getting takeaway today? Doomscrolling social media? Watching youtube? It's so easy that they are likely to be chosen even if they aren't a good choice, it requires willpower to not chose them. Activities that might be rewarding but have a higher barrier to entry will get left behind, previously boredom would drive us to them but now that isn't a problem we have to deal with. Taking myself as an example- I find it hard to read books these days, I confess I sometimes even find the barrier of playing a videogame too much sometimes(!) I delay it with too-easy activities and then it's too late.

...And it's worse than just the convenience, social media (present site excluded!) will push up content that triggers your emotions as this is the most effective way to drive engagement and thus ad-revenue. What effect does this have on people when they are being made angry or scared much more often? What effect has this had on society? Most people would not be happy to see how much money is spent in manipulating them to stay on a given platform, the precise study of human psychology and behaviour used to achieve this. It would be less harmful if they reached into your pocket and took your money instead of extracting it like this.

My theory is that these modern conveniences (really, products that are sold to you) can become dominating enough that they are making people miserable by trapping them with a combination of extreme ease/convenience, and straight up manipulation in many cases. The opportunity cost of repeatedly engaging in these easy options is also massive in my opinion.

It would be less harmful if they reached into your pocket and took your money instead of extracting it like this.

They extract your money at the cost of your soul. I'm using spiritual terms to reflect real world stuff here.
They've kidnapped your dopamine system and turned it into an addictive loop and the drug they use to do this is an algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself. There is absolutely no way to know what this will do to society but I suspect it's really negative over the long term.

Morphy wrote on Dec 5^th, 2024 at 11:27pm:

Judo I read your response and can't find a single thing I disagree with. This especially - I find it a paradox of human nature that humans don't tend to choose what makes them happy, they will often choose what is easiest or most comfortable even if it causes unhappiness

I'll add a double agree to that one.


On the question though, there's obviously multiple ways to look at weakness.  Like some other things, I think we're getting more extreme on both ends of the scale.  As an example, modern athletes are (in general) able to out-perform athletes from the past.  I think we're able to push ourselves further than many people would have imagined possible.  But on the other side of the scale we have more people....I'll say it nicely like JudoP did.....who take the "easiest" route through life and basically become a drag on everyone else.  I think (hope) the bulk of us are still somewhere in the middle though.  We're just the quieter ones, so no one hears from us much.



JudoP wrote on Dec 6^th, 2024 at 12:15pm:

My theory is that these modern conveniences (really, products that are sold to you) can become dominating enough that they are making people miserable by trapping them with a combination of extreme ease/convenience, and straight up manipulation in many cases. The opportunity cost of repeatedly engaging in these easy options is also massive in my opinion.

This is a pretty brilliant statement too JP.  I've had similar thoughts.

I think on average physical strength is decreasing
But in terms of mettle I think in our modern society we just have less situations that test it  which is likely a good thing
And not everyone who lived through terrible times handled it like in world War two there were men who cried for their mother's in the mud (quite understandably) and there were those who made it across no man's land or across the beaches on d day

And even those people who did their bravery had its consequences

My great grandfather was a ww2 vet but was also a German immigrant  born in Germany spoke German but went to war for the usa was at anzio in Italy and according to my mom and Grandma was at the Omaha beach landings and got injured multiple times and got several medals (but that's a story for another time)  he stopped speaking German after ww2 except for calling his wife and daughter liebchen every now and then and americanized his last name  and cut ties with family who weren't as opposed to the happenings in Germany

The point is to say that although he was considered a war hero and a man of exceptional bravery the things he saw haunted him till the day he died even when alzheimers took over and he forgot his own wife and children. So I think it's not too bad for us to become weaker as a society.

See JW you managed to find a really positive angle to it and even though this isn't the Hope for the Future thread I just have to bring it back to the negative I guess.  ;)

I think trials are like gravity for the physical body. The less gravity the more your body deteriorates. Same with life's difficulties.

I think it's the frog in the pot scenario. Life has indeed changed very quickly technologically speaking but it's still been over the course of 4-5 generations that the change has occurred so rapidly. So we may think we are mentally tough but we have nothing to compare it to.

It's like taking a photograph of something huge with nothing in frame to reference it to. We just can't understand their degree of mental toughness because we haven't lived it.

Check the history behind the Oregon Trail pioneers. That's like a super human level of mental fortitude. But for them it was just normal life. Or Hannibals famous march on Rome.

Strength of character is so very subjective !!

Lets take mining as a case.

Paleolithic miners had single post ladders into bell pits, an antler pick and a hope that the bell didn't collapse.

Later came the Firedamp man crawling on the tunnel floor, covered in wet sacking holding a pole with a pan of burning coals on the end. If the methane burnt ..... you get the picture.

I abseiled (rapelled) into a 500 foot deep cave. I went along the same length of the coffin levels, so called because they were cut by a kneeling miner swinging a pick over each shoulder giving a characteristic coffin shape.
I then climbed out on electra ladders.
Guess how I felt.

My father was taken on a school trip down Markham main colliery.
He was shown the main tunnel, big enough for a double decker bus.
He went into engineering.

I was taken to my fathers factory and saw the 26ft flat bed lathe he worked.
I went into craft work.

Miners now search for rare earth minerals in huge scraper trucks with the results being mechanically processed.

We can do more with less risk, including killing.

Yes there are the elite athletes but when you analyse it even they are simply a sales product. Nothing that happens on a field of sporting excellence is going to materially or significantly impact my life.

And yes, I get the F1 argument but no change to my bicycle !

So, strength of character is driven by adversity and choice.

I have had my larynx removed.
For most patients a valve is fitted as standard.
I do not have the valve and because I am bloody minded I taught myself to speak again.
As a result I do not need ongoing medical attention and am in less danger of infection or death by inhaling a displaced valve.

I claim no more strength of character than my neighbour, or you !

Weakness of character is, I believe, choosing not to use your thinking skills to help decide what is best for you, hence the high suicide rates driven by people choosing not to help themselves avoid the excrement fed to them through their screens.

I told you I needed mull time.

My apologies if I have offended anybodys sensibilities.

😁👍

xud9a - call me zud 👍 wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2024 at 6:59am:

I have had my larynx removed. For most patients a valve is fitted as standard. I do not have the valve and because I am bloody minded I taught myself to speak again. As a result I do not need ongoing medical attention and am in less danger of infection or death by inhaling a displaced valve.

That's great you did without the valve and can still talk! I also hate the idea of anything foreign in my body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu3oZ88tFmw

Happened upon this today, some crossover with this discussion.