A Quiet Life, by TEHO TEARDO & BLIXA BARGELD:
Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
121–130 of 311 posts
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't really that different in that regard before social media, you know.
The uptick in teenage self-harm and suicides says otherwise. Of course it was different, people in 1940 and 1950 were not doomscrolling endlessly throughout the day while algorithms enmeshed them in self-contained bubbles and bombard them with personalized ads, no, they were listening to radio, read newspapers, talked in person more. Social media is a new and never seen before phenomenon, with its own advantages and…
Nobody is saying that social media hasn't had any effect on the world, just that the human desire for more worldly things wasn't caused by it. The expression "keeping up with the Joneses" far, far predates social media.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#123Beautiful writing. It comes at an interesting time for me. I'm in a full blown mid-life crisis where my state of mind fluctuates between full contentment and wishing I was doing more with life. This article made me think. On the one hand, I'm content because I come from an unprivileged background. My family was abusive. Me and my brothers struggled with mental health. We ran away from home as soon as we could. Where…
Check out the movie "Perfect Days"
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don’t do this, there are many people and stories that speak to this. Now it looks like you’re claiming this for one particular religion, when it’s completely unrelated to religion.
Your comment is downright petty and silly. Wisdom/Insight/Life Advice wherever it comes from is always valuable. It is up to you to tease out the kernel of knowledge from the chaff of religiosity. I am no Christian, but i found Robert Alter's The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes quite interesting and would advice you to a study of the same.
> Your comment is downright petty and silly.
And contains some irony.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then, he also had to serve in war. Medical care was not that advanced, you couldn't read about any niche topic you want online. Easy to see things through rose tinted glasses.
I wonder how many people would happily trade access to the web for a world where a laundry truck driver can afford a house. I imagine it's quite a lot.
I think the more interesting question would be, who is willing to trade peace for that? I think that it would be far harder to accept being shot at on the warfront than a world with no Internet.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's so much personal development you can do without participating in the materialistic rat race. That takes money, although in a different form: time. I can only enjoy those experiences if I have time for them (and I’m not talking about enjoying them after working 8h during the day, because I end up exhausted and cannot enjoy anything at all). So, in order to enjoy things I need to work less, which means less m…
This is true for almost all of us though? Nearly everyone has to work at least 5x 8 hour days a week - some much more. Some have complex family needs that must be attended to before any personal time can even be considered. There is always some time though, it just needs to be made and scheduled and worked on. We can choose to veg out in front of Netflix, or doom scroll, or peruse hacker news, but we can also choose…
Staring at screens all day is weirdly taxing.
My wife used to have a much harder job than mine. Social, active, moving around, thinking on her feet, lots of prep, high stakes sometimes, somewhat abusive environment. She left it for WFH and a non-programming computer-heavy office job.
After a couple weeks, one day she said to me, “Now I understand why you’re so worn-out after work hours”
I’ve felt a lot more refreshed and ready to do stuff after working physical jobs or (especially) lightly-physical jobs that involve little or no computer use, than after a day of cushy office work.
It’s not the sitting. Standing desks and walking breaks don’t help much. Computer work is just bizarrely draining.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is sharing a quote from a religious book, it makes sense to cite it, no? If they quoted the Qur'an, a Buddhist Sutra, a piece by Kahlil Gibran, or a quote by Adam Smith, I would all expect a citation to be honest. A few comments around we see a quote by Rick Roderick, and one by the Beatles. I don't see why this is fundamentally different and deserves critique.
Quoting a religious/ideologist book is inherently different to quoting an individual author or a non-religious/spiritual text, because the act of quoting itself is part of a tradition of (in this case evangelical) propagation of the religion/ideology. We can pretend to see contemporary bible-quoting as a secular thing, but in these cases history matters. For instance, in the above quote in the part "It is through thi…
> as you would probably take offense to me quoting WWII dictators even if the quote makes sense for the topic in isolation.
Of course I wouldn't take offense to that. I will accept wisdom wherever it is to be found, even if it's from Hitler himself. I care about the merit of ideas, not the merits of their sources.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it would help me pay off my $50,000 in college loans If you have teenagers who want to go to university, consider encouraging them to learn German and then study in Germany. In 2021, the average monthly spendings of a student at a German public university were between 783 - 1.896 €, depending on the location.[1] (University fees are included in this number and range between 14 and 136 € per month. Sometimes there a…
German schools also ruthlessly cull students beginning in grade 4 or 5. Only a small number ever get the opportunity to go to university at all, let alone at those fees. German universities are relatively cheap because they keep the eligibility pool small. That reduces the cost to the state.
> Only a small number ever get the opportunity to go to university at all
In 2022, 56.4% of people living in Germany of a yearly cohort started university (including universities of higher education/Fachhochschule). 51.7% of males, 61.5% of females. 473,665 people (this number includes some foreign students, though) out of a population of aprox. 84 million. All in all, 2,915,700 people studied in Germany. I would not call that number "small".
The student quotient for the US is somewhat higher, but German and foreign systems are often not well comparable, because there are a lot of advanced vocational training programs in Germany outside of university that are equivalent or even better than many university programs in other countries.
[1] Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#129He is not wrong. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same” - R. Kipling Media riles up those who have been limited or deprived by circumstances. It waves flags and triggers emotions and creates envy and conjures social ladders to political influence, or financial gains, or popularity and public attention, or peaks of history. The reality though is that those apply to the…
I don’t know, try to explain your point of view to people like Trump or Musk.
The world has many more people like them than you think. The reason for that is the media’s propensity to raise people on pedestal over the smallest things and crash and burn that made-up image. Some people find new tools in that kind of experience. Some people have learned how to raise anyone by crafting a narrative for them with money. And some people become addicted to it and the attention they never got as a child.
Re: Obituary for a quiet life (2023)
#130A Quiet Life, by TEHO TEARDO & BLIXA BARGELD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiPVgAhRE6E
If you liked this, you may appreciate much of Einsturzende Neubauten's newer work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einst%C3%BCrzende_Neubauten
(The older stuff involves mutilating shopping carts with power equipment and is more of an acquired taste.)