Quote:
1. Not enough annoying strangers in our lives.
snip~ Get stuck in the waiting room at the doctor? No way I'm striking up a conversation with the smelly old man sitting next to me. Plug the iPod into my ears and have a text conversation with a friend, or play my D'S. Filter that annoyance right out of my world.
And that would be awesome, if it were actually possible to keep all of the irritating shit out of your life. But it's not. It never will be. As long as you have needs, you'll have to deal with people you can't stand from time to time. But that skill, the one that lets us deal with strangers and tolerate their shrill voices and clunky senses of humor and body odor and squeaky shoes, is being burned right out of us.~snip
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The meat of his first point rings true for me. Of the half dozen good friends I had, four are dead, and one is dying. The remaining one I don't see often enough.
Probably when I lived in Boston, riding the subway/trolley line, I was immersed in people the most. Of all the annoying things people do rated on a scale of 1 to 10, being bombarded with it every day, I wouldn't notice anything less than 5, half the time.
Then, I could press my weight and dead lift double, too.
Now I find going out in the world, most everything they do is 8 or higher. I know it's not them getting worse, although there may be more of them, because they're a % of the population. Everything changes, including us.
It's my tolerance has eroded....and I probably couldn't dead lift my weight.
You could say, so what, in this electronic world I can live in my virtual reality. Yes some, maybe even most of the time. But unless you're Howard Hughes, not completely. Even if you do, it's not healthy.
I'm sure some of you, considering all the technical expertise here, have created yourselves what could be electronic retreats. I wonder how much you use it to keep people at arms length?