heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking.
My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.
When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.
A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.
Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.
children from families flying Concorde grow up to be doctors and lawyers, news at 11
That's not really the news.
Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament.
This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors.
I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul.
The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing.
With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.
sob stories of your gramps life have nothing to do with you
Not the person you are replying to, but I was greatly influenced by my grandparents who were themselves greatly influenced by how they were raised and their life experience.
That seems very common and normal. Of you weren't influenced by your grandparents that is a reflection of something too.
Of course everyone is influenced by their parents and grandparents. That does not mean their achievement is yours.
The person I was replying to started the comment chain from an abhorrent position of Social Darwinism. Failing to see their privilege, and failing to distinguish their lives from their grandparents' is very common for people holding those opinions.
Having great parents who overcame a lot and taught you how is the privilege
What an ignorant and childish response. Why would you assume his life has nothing to do with mine, or that there was no influence on me as a result of what I outlined above? You completely blew any credibility you tried to establish in your other posts by showing what a small and miserable little bully you'd like to be. Any person even attempting to make a fair analysis would admit this was pure trolling, and apologize for your lack of understanding and the ill-natured way in which you phrased it
I was raised since before I could speak listening to my grandfather tell the stories of his experiences, in intricate detail, daily, along with the conclusions he drew from them, and his honest analysis of the decisions he had made from their outcomes. This was not some remote family legend. I recorded hundreds of hours of him speaking about his life on audio cassette and wrote a novelized version of it after he passed away. He was fluent in 7 languages and read newspapers in 3 of them daily. Up until the day he died, he had a unique perspective on life and world events which deeply influenced mine.
For someone like you who pretends to read hidden psychological motivations, the trollish response you gave displays a total lack of understanding of basic interpersonal dynamics and how ideas are transmitted through families. For example, you omit the possibility that what happened to my grandfather influenced my father in some direction to become a lawyer, and that the combined pressure of that might drive me to reject law school and be a taxi driver and start a company, which I felt was more in tune with my grandfather's ethos. Which is, after all, what this thread is entirely about. But your pitiful response does help illuminate the nasty, bullying, pseudo-intellectual and twatish nature of your other responses to me. (Including saying I "sound like a cunt").
I don't wanna give a troll a win by giving you any more attention than you deserve. I'm fairly sure at this point that your words are all in bad faith anyway, so this is for the posterity of anyone who'll read this, not for you. But if you have an honest and human bone in your body, or care to atone for your disgusting comments, you should evaluate where, exactly, your tendency to bully, condescend and intentionally misunderstand people stems from, and why it's important to you to demonstrate some sort of mastery of understanding over something you clearly don't understand. Because this one-sentence post is a gem that would belong in the mouth of a nazi or any other sort of weak, desperate pathetic authoritarian sort. It surely must be somewhere in your psychological training or in your hot takes relating to dog collars, that you should keep your pathologies to yourself rather than plaster them up by accusing others of them.