Society Today.

It started long before fortnite with world of war craft. There is even a group in China known as cyber homeless who live in internet shops that have showers and laundry rooms making money from playing games online
The way I see it if they cant lift they eyes up from their fone/computer they will not see the S.H.T.F so they will not last long then less for the rest of us to deal with
Maybe ignorant is bliss don't think they want to live in a world with out the internet best for them not to panic now and not know what will kill them

 

Keith it is funny that you posted this. I had started this essay a couple of days ago and it goes in a very similar direction.

What has happened to people? If you look at the people in most western cultures today you can't help but notice that they are rather disconnected from the realities of life. What is important to most people these days didn't even EXIST just a few decades ago. Things have changed so fast in less than a generation that there is a disconnect. The “culture” we have today didn't exist less than 50 years ago. The culture that it replaced had been mostly consistent for hundreds of years.

My Dad rode a horse to and from school. He lived to see people walk on the moon. His father and grandfather before him had lived in a world that was very similar. Most personal transportation was animal powered. Light was from fire as was cooking and heating. 50 miles was a long trip. Many people lived their entire life and never traveled more than 50 miles from the place of their birth.

Basically all the things that made the culture of our parents or grandparents work and the way people related to each other has been lost and we live in a time when people are sort of adrift. People used to relate to other people. Your neighbors, your family and your friends played a huge part in your life.

We went to church on Sunday but the people there were a part of our lives all week. People used to get together and play cards or other games on the week ends. Friends used to just drop by and were always welcome. When you don't have television, computers, pads, or telephones that you can carry around you go and do things with people in PERSON.

Phones, and Computers have replaced friends and neighbor and saddest of all family in the lives of many people. THINGS that people can possess are actually possessing the people. Homes have become little more than flop houses where you come to sleep or sit while you worship your favorite mechanical god. Parents don't raise their kids anymore because they are too busy. Busy watching TV, Texting or posting on the computer. This isn't a real life. It can be part of a real life but there have to be ties between real people or it is all a fantasy.

The rules that or forefathers had lived with for thousands of years that were formed based on the realities that were consistent for those thousands of years have been tossed out because in 50 years the entire western world changed.

Before WW2 most Americans lived in a rural or semi-rural place and had a lifestyle that was in part based on agriculture. Every 10 or 15 miles there was a little town that provided for the needs of the people that lived in that area. These little towns were a tight knit group of usually 500 to 700 people. Everybody knew everybody and they were often mostly related to each other one way or another through marriages.

When farming is done with animal power and travel is also mostly animal powered this is just what has to be done. After WW2 several things happened almost all at the same short time period. At the end of the war there were thousands of very specialized factories that suddenly needed to find new markets for the things they made. Tractors suddenly became affordable to smaller farmers. This in turn meant that a farmer could work a lot more land and it required a lot fewer people to get it all done.

A lot of people that had never considered any other sort of life than the farm that they had been raised on were exposed to vastly different world views and like my Dad were educated far beyond what they would have been normally.

At the same time there were huge advances in medical things that changed the life of everyone. Antibiotics followed by dependable birth control a few decades later meant that most of the stringent rules having to so with sexual things were no longer based on necessity. Before antibiotics Syphilis was a just HUGE killer. There was no cure, no vaccine and only one way to be truly safe from it. When I got married over 40 years ago it was still LAW that in otder to get a marriage license you had to had the results of a recent blood test that made sure that if you had syphilis that your partner would know it before hand.

The human mating rituals were based on protecting women from men that might get them pregnant and not marry them. The rules for young ladies were taught to them by their mothers AND society in general. The idea was to make men work hard for their “favors” and you mostly were expected to buy the cow if you wanted the milk. By a woman not being real encouraging it rapidly eliminated the men that were just looking for some fast action. Parents went to extreme measures to teach and help their girls avoid getting pregnant out of wedlock. Between penicillin and the pill the necessity for all of that went out the window.

I don't bemoan that change but I also see that with nothing to replace it relationships have now become shallow. Divorce is more common than marriages and there are as many kids born into one parent families these days as there are kids with stable two parent families. Kids these days don't have the support system that they used to have and we are seeing more and more of them going horribly wrong.

When/If the collapse ever comes these people with 500 Friends on facebook are going to look up and find themselves ALONE!! The current electronic culture is FRAGILE and totally dependent on a lot of things that can disappear suddenly. The idea that knowing how to look things up on the internet is the same as actually KNOWING something is tragically false.

When these eclectically dependent things fail a lot of people are going to find that their entire world has vanished! They will be surrounded by strangers. Used to be that when you ran up on hard times your family and friends helped you out. Now people do a go fund me page. Strangers take less work than friends.

I personally try to have balance. My TELEPHONE is an old school flip phone. I have and carry a smart phone but never turn it on unless I want to use it specifically for something other than communicating. I don't text, twitter or do Facebook. I have more flesh and blood friends than I have online friends and we actually do get together and do things.

I think that those of us that are here and post often are of a different sort than most people. We have an interest in actually knowing and learning things and aren't especially bound by the so called current normal ways of living or doing things.

This is the one thing that I have to say that the internet is wonderful for. Most of my life I have been a bit of an oddball and not usually felt like most of the people around me saw the world as I do. Most of the people that I know will not survive any even mild disruption of things. I learned a long time ago that most people find that thinking about things bad happening find it depressing and do not want to talk about it much. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. If you persist and try to force him to he will get pissed off and kick you. Trying to get people to make a few preperations in case of something happening is much the same.

 

The biggest problem that gambling addicts have is two fold. They are greedy and they are not very good at gambling. I have had several fairly heavy gamblers in my family. When we get together poker can be a multigenerational thing. None are addicted. I think that it is because we all look at it as an intellectual exercise and don't get too excited about it.

I had an Uncle that went to Las Vegas twice a year and brought home about $20,000.00 every time. He had a near photographic memory and always won at blackjack. He was a flawless card counter and they pretty much knew it and always welcomed him at the casinos. He was usually comped his room and meals. They liked him because he spread his winning around and they saw him as great advertising. He looked like he was a hundred years old, farmer, drank like a fish and steadily won. People would see him winning and think that if that old fool can win so can I. He wasn't greedy and never hit any one casino very hard and looked at that 40 grand a year as a sort of bonus.

I can beat a video poker game consistently and usually finance my wifes losses to the one armed bandits. LOL, If I work hard at it I can usually make about twice minimum wage playing it but it gets deadly boring pretty fast. Video poker and Blackjack are the only two casino games that can be consistently beat if you can manage the methods. Both can only be beaten by minimizing the losses so that the certain wins will more than cover those necessary losses.

For most of us poker is just a matter of bleeding the optimists. We are seldom the big winners and almost never losers. We take a little from each person and move on. The thing about this sort of thing is that without the excitement of taking a chance it can get pretty boring. It is the excitement that is addictive. The fear of losing and the glory of winning. We tend to be more of the accountant mentalities and don't have the highs and lows.

I gamble very little. That means that I usually don't play much if I can't win and when I bet on something there is usually a story behind it. If you KNOW how things are going to work out is it really gambling?

The "lottery" would be a sucker tax even if they ran it honestly but the way it is run it is basically just this side of legal theft.

 

I have a NO MEDIA rule at the dinner table in my house. No phones, no facetweet...none of it. I also limit the non-school internet usage in the house for my daughter.

Every once in a while she will come home to find SEE DAD FOR WiFi PASSWORD on the fridge if she has fallen behind on her chores.

 

I saw a program about your people with their cell phones. most of them said that they would rather give up an arm or leg before giving up their cell phone, very additive those thing , I have a flip phone but no smartphone.

 

I carry both a flip phone and a smartphone. The flip phone is my telephone and I answer it. The smart phone is not usually on unless I am using it specifically as a small tablet. Because of my business I used to have to have a lot of telephone numbers because where I live every little town was long distance from every other little town. I wanted to be a local call for all of them so I had several telephone numbers. I also provided phones for all my family so if I needed them for something I could call them. (Like they ever answer their phones HaHa!) The smartphone is my GPS, parts list and traffic monitor. I almost never use it as a phone. Now that I'm retired I am going to have to decide if I want to keep paying for 7 telephone numbers.

 

My dad ran gambling machines. They would break. He would fix them (when in grammar school, I'd fix the electric motors that ran the drums / relay ladder logic). Then it was up to me to test the things.

Can you imagine how tired I got of games?!!!! Here's the deal, I couldn't even play Pong when it came out. First programming for me began around 1974. I am utterly burned of games or testing. I do this for pay and for pay only.

An iPhone for me? Yeah sure! I have a flip phone.

At age 11, Dad began teaching me all manner of gambling, stud poker, blackjack, dice/craps, billiards, ... . "You're gonna need to know these things, kid."

I may play 15 scratch-off cards in a year's time, ... maybe, probably less.

So, let's say I'm riding a bus or train. Nobody looks at anybody. Nobody talks to anybody. They don't look out the windows -- they got no idea of where they are. They got their faces in their iPhones.

I look people in the eye. I know where I am. I espy my environs. God's Creation beats anything humankind will ever create. And I have an imagination. Bugger these electronic distractions!

 

I find those phones annoying and don't really understand the attraction people have to them. You can't hardly sit and talk to those phone addicted people. Even if you can get them off the danm things they constantly are ringing and beeping notifying them that someone commented on facebook, or tweeted or texed or farted someplace and they have been notified and have to grab the danm thing and see what it is!!

Now days even if you don't have all the idiot notifications turned on you have to deal with the endless spam phone calls from computers that want to sell you something. WHAT kind of idiot ever buys something from one of those computer generated calls??? I turned on my idiot smart phone the other day and it had 11 missed calls and all but one were computer generated sales. They are destroying our phone systems. Most people are getting so they don't answer their phone and let it go to voicemail and then they call you back. I've blocked over a hundred of these numbers and am on the do not call list but none of that matters. It is like trying to get the spam off your email accounts.

Our so called society today is being eaten up by machines. People are worried about the creation of artificial intelligences that might become problems and decide to eliminate mankind. The fact is the Terminator won't look like a big metal robot. It will be a little box that you can hold in your hand that will steal your life away and you will be a willing participant in your dissolution.