https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB_ehhV3amk

I don’t always agree with him (Ex Quaker, Homo, and pro-immigration, so that’s unsurprising) but his description of what went wrong in the UK in the past year is incisive and to the point.

More scary than anything are some of the utterly missing the point and fatuous questions asked by his audience at the end. Jaysus wept!

It’s always about your neighbours. The movie to watch is Jean de Florette 😀

(As an aside, the most viciously jealous of others with even a mite more stuff person I know comes of good very current Piedmontese peasant stock.)

Now imagine what social media ‘Influencers’ are doing to the happiness of the younger generations today.

Having had my racial rant for today in another thread, I’m going to skip the obligatory Rene Girard Rant 😀 But it’s relevant.

Thanks for the follow up. Interesting take with the childless women angle. I’d hesitate to ascribe my friends’ attitudes and behavior to the fact that they are childless women in their late twenties. However, they are rather scathing of women their age who have children and they certainly despise the nuclear family.

I’ll take a look at that documentary. Luckily, I’m a generally happy individual who grew up within a happy and supportive extended family. For many of my friends, that was not the case and dealing with past family trauma is a real issue that continues to affect them.

It’s how our income matches those around us.

This I very much agree with. I’ll give example. I grew up in a refinery town. In fact the whole area depended on the refineries. Your father either worked for a refinery or a business that was dependent on the refineries. The income of the whole area varied very little from family to family. Most people seemed to be happy. I was and I think most was also.

My wife and I are from fairly meager circumstances and grew up in blue collar environments but she and I were good students and studied and credentialed our ways into the white collar world. When we got to middle-age it astounded me how miserable everyone was (except us). Every party we’d go to the men would cluster and complain about their jobs and/or investments and the women would cluster and complain about how unhappy they were. Most all the women openly talked about taking prescription medication for mood.

I really recommend this documentary, “Happy.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613092

neo is the family psychology expert here, and she’s likely to swoop in and correct all the ways I am about to completely botch this description, but the documentary tries to determine why some people (primarily family groups) are happy and others are not. One of the premises backed up by evidence is that we humans tend to judge our situation based on our surroundings. It’s not specific, quantifiable things. It’s not a specific income. It’s how our income matches those around us. It’s not a certain square foot home, or apartment, or yurt, it’s how our housing compares with those around us.

About two years ago I saw a comedian do a routine on crazy, childless, middle-aged women. His premise was they had missed the step in life where they were supposed to have children and so all that maternal instinct has to go somewhere and the environment, or feminism, or veganism or all of the above becomes their children. Instead of annoying moms boring you with stories about how brilliant their children are they are annoying non-moms boring you with stories about climate change.

It’s pretty much a wash.