Biscuitman wrote:
Anyone else feel they are just wasting their years away?
I have spent the past 15 years hiding away indoors obsessively reading books. Every now and again I daydream about having adventures - cycling LE to JOG, walking up Ben Nevin, canoeing and camping out, Inter railing, running across the width of the country etc and I fear I will live to regret just hiding myself away.
If I look at my 52 years of life from a traditional or neurotypical perspective it would certainly look like I have wasted my life doing nothing. That is because the traditional way of judging accomplishment is focused on the physical, practical, quantitative outcome/result of
doing.
As human beings we tend to measure worth by how useful something is; how much something or someone contributes to the Common Project, be it Society as a whole, The Workplace, The Group, The Family, etc. We focus on Hard Values.
We tend to forget the Soft Values. The worth we bring by simply being who we are.
In Judaism it is considered an act of good to teach as well as to learn. The teacher cannot teach without students, and the student cannot learn without a teacher.
Studies have been done on how reading impacts us. It was found that people who read (especially fairy tales, fantasy and science fiction) have greater capacity for empathy and empathic action, than those who do not read.
We never know who or how we impact people we interact with f.i on the Internet, and that is equally true in RL.
I personally know of 1 person whose life I saved by simply being the conduit into an organization that turned out to be the exact match for that person's need for purpose. I had absolutely no clue at the time.
In another context I was instrumental in giving a person the tools to pursue their spiritual path and find a community in which to thrive and find purpose.
I have no idea who else or how I have impacted during my life of basically doing nothing but reading books, focusing on my own interests and communicating on the Internet.
"Doing stuff", like "Growing Up" and "Pull your weight" are highly overrated as concepts of how to live productive lives.
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Looking or asking for a cure for Autism is like looking or asking for a cure for being Black.
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there, their, they're - learn the difference goddammit!
25 Sep 2016, 7:59 pm
