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Nine things I learned in ninety years

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Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#361

Post by fuzzfactor »

carlosjobim wrote: post #354
flanked-evergl wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them. > The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient. The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries.

I'm religious, but I don't see it that way. When a man and a woman are faithful to each other and having a family together, then that is it: they are married. Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.

>the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.

Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.

When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.

Not even close, zero is still a very small number.

Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.

IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.

Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.

And it's been a while . . .

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#363

Post by fuzzfactor »

thegrimmest wrote: post #335
CM30 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around. The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, mus…

Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made. Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether…

Keep in mind that there's forms of success other than economic, that actually do require more grit than that.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#365

Post by damethos »

ropable wrote: post #36

> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.

I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-...

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#366

Post by fuzzfactor »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #204
james_marks wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is suggesting marriage means "all relations between two human beings". Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.

> Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them. > The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient. The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries.

>I'm advocating here for the Christian institution of marriage, not for a merge contract with government.

How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.

If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.

Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?

Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?

It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.

If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#367

Post by fuzzfactor »

carlosjobim wrote: post #356
jacquesm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please stop flaunting your ignorant and limited worldview all over this thread? You've insulted a good 30% of humanity by now and are on track to insult the remainder, it's getting a little hard on the eyes and there are only so many links of yours that I'm prepared to flag.

I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows, but here you are out in the open. Would you please reconsider your actions? You're doing great damage to a very nice message board, and it is to no benefit for yourself. Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not…

>I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows,

That's only the wimps that have nothing worthwhile to add.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#368

Post by fuzzfactor »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #273
grugagag wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birth control is not to not have children but to control when you have children.

Sort of... Many people do not want to hear this. Many would point to economic factors as the main problem. But I think that when people are educated about the risks and responsibilities of parenthood and given the choice of doing so (birth control, abortion, etc.) - the simple fact is that they CHOOSE not have enough kids to meet the replacement rate. The reason you can see this is because the lowering birth rates ar…

Good observation. Those could very well be the only considerations for some people.

Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.

What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?

Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.

It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.

If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.

Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.

The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.

It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.

So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#369

Post by fuzzfactor »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #144
darkwater wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you need to run any experiment. Being married or not is just signing a paper. What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony. You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common. That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children…

"Nowadays things are different" but is the modern way better??? or people just don't want to be held accountable if things go south in traditional way????

Not my downvote but I do usually see things going south in a traditional way more as a consequence of tradition itself of some kind, overcoming the better judgement it would have required to avoid such a fate.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#370

Post by fuzzfactor »

BarryMilo wrote: post #362
coldtea wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not their existance, their utility

Do you believe the same thing about psychiatrists? How are we to deal with mental illness?

>How are we to deal with mental illness?

Ineffectively, if the current state-of-the-art is any indication :(

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