shunun
Member
Monk said:shunun said:
The thing is... if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck... you might as well call it a duck. People aren't judging you - they're evaluating your behaviour and responding to/commenting on it. Every one of your posts in this thread conforms to a stereotype. Every single one conforms to the "I'm young and I know SO much better than all of you lot, who are idiot adults" stereotype. Every. Single. Post. Especially the ones that refute that stereotype. We know. You want to know why? Because we've said all those things too. Years ago, and for longer than you have (so far).
I'm pleased that, like me, you're actually DOING something about the world, as you see it (volunteer work feeding homeless people, in your case. Teaching children that need the help in mine). It's dissapointing that you're wearing blinkers, but - well, that's something you'll die young and never miss or grow out of as you take in the complexity of the world around you. Chaos theory. The butterfly effect. Nothing is as simple as it seems at first.
Please notice that you've accused "adults" of being ignorant and saying nothing to prove otherwise - while you've behaved like an ignorant youth and said nothing to disprove it. You're labelling US as "ignorant adults" who label you without knowing you... just like you don't know "us". There's a certain delicous irony there... you are doing EXACTLY what you seem to say makes us ignorant.
We don't know half the things you do? I bet we don't. I hope we don't. I bet you don't know half of what I know either. That's just one way in which we're individuals
But in a broader sense.... you've never been us. You've never been an adult, with the experience of decades walking the planet or the way the world opens up, like a flower, revealing its complexities only over time. We haven't been YOU, but many of us have matched the same broad stereotype that you are currently exhibiting - we HAVE "been there, done that" so we know how it feels. And we know how pompous adults sounded when we were young. We know how foolish, how weak, how... impotent they seemed. Living their boring lives going to work and coming home and going to sleep and going to work... how pointless! We remember that they didn't even seem to notice how little they understood the world! We can remember how we felt when we were similar to you - and how we changed when we learnt what we hadn't noticed, over the years and decades that followed. Now we can look back on people who were our age when we were young, and think "Ah! So you weren't so stupid after all!". But we still think that people older than us are fuddy-duddies (after all, WE have reached the AGE OF INTELLIGENCE) and we KNOW that people younger than us know less than we do, because we know the kind of things they know PLUS everything we've learnt since.
Put it another way - you're currently 18. I imagine you think you know more than you did when you were 9. If I am right, then when you are 36 you will know even more than you do now, and since you have a strong moral center you will be doing good things, right? They probably won't be the same good things you are doing now, because you will have lived YOUR WHOLE LIFE'S duration over again. There's a lot you can learn in that time. 18 years worth of knowledge. imagine if you could be a whole YOU more informed than you already are. How amazing would that be? If I am wrong, then how can you imagine you know any better than a 9 year old? WHY do you know more than a 9 year old? You don't stop learning at 18. You have not reached your peak yet - you can get more knowledgeable, you can be EVEN MORE. So can we.
I read everything you have said and I must say thank you. You have a great way of explaining things and I can see that's why you would make a great teacher.
I know I don't know everything, nor does anyone. Older doesn't always mean wiser, It just depends on how ignorant an individual intends to be. Ignorance isn't always bad either, you'd really have to define what you mean by ignorant, that is, what is being ignored. It's confusing in itself because as we have just discovered people, including myself, cannot see past their own ignorance and therefore find others to be ignorant. It becomes a cycle. I'm trying to be more open minded, and this little session has helped. The more ignorant one is the less they will learn from others. But I do see an awful lot of ignorant people out there and I know that this is part of the whole problem. You are probably more knowledgeable than I, and I now see that this is because you were not ignorant. We can both learn things from each other I would like to talk to you more about this but I don't want to piss anyone off
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