The Weekly Bric-a-Brac is a round up of short hits for paid subscribers, taken from the cutting room floor of my brain. I’ll give a generous preview in hopes you’ll want to support Disaffected with a paid subscription!
Basic living skills
The young have lost the most basic skills, including the ability to make a mental map of their own actual neighborhoods. All because of phones.
I was a pizza boy before GPS. People had been delivering packages for 100 years before I came along.
OMG HOW? Um, by driving around my city and developing memory? Like human brains do?
This is not weird or hard. This is the normal, everyday course of human experience for all of our existence until the last 20 years. Plainly and literally.
OMG HOW DID CABS EXIST WITHOUT GPS?
If you're seriously asking this question, then think about it. How do YOU think people did it?
Remember that maps are a thing too. I drove the first 20 years of my adult life with no Waze or GPS, and to states I'd never been to before. For goodness' sake, you think that's hard? Seafarers from the Renaissance onward navigated the goddamned globe with a sextant and a clock.
And you think driving without GPS is "hard"?
Come. On.
"OMG. How did you ever manage to get anywhere and not be lost before there were cell phones? Kids must have been in danger!"
Easy. The way humans have done it forever before 20 years ago, and with the tech of the time.
1. Everyone had memorized everyone's phone number. Yes. So can you if you had to. We all had at least 20 numbers in our working memory.
2. You kept a quarter on you for a pay phone if you got stuck at a school event and needed to call mom. If there was none, you knocked on someone's door or went to a store and asked to use their phone.
3. Most people, families with kids and others, had agreed on routines, too. If you get separated, you met up at the appointed hour at such and such corner store, or the library, etc.
4. Every time a group went anywhere together, like a mall, or a trip to the city, you agreed on a meeting place and a time. If you got held up, you called the store or restaurant and said, "Is my mom there?" Almost every time, the proprietor would get your mom and put her on the phone with you.
This was all normal.
For us to stop handicapping kids with tech and coddling, mothers have to be, well, confronted in some way. Mothers are the vector for this excessive protection of brood chicks, and they're highly susceptible to peer pressure and trends in child rearing. It's a modern exaggeration of the natural and normal maternal instinct.
But it's out of control, and it needs masculine pushback. Husbands who help their wives keep this in check. That's what a marriage is supposed to be. She reminds him about the need for emotion, diplomacy, and warmth, and he reminds her of the need to stop kissing every boo boo.
I don't know how this can best be done, but it must be a cooperative effort between mothers and fathers.
I am afraid though, that men? You need to toughen up. Too many of you have been, well, pussified. Telling a mother who goes too far and protects too much is not "abuse" or "misogyny." It's what husbands are for.
Men are in trouble. We are not living up to our duties. I look around at married men in public with their families and I respond with pity and embarrassment at best, and contempt at worst.
They are gelded, they're meek, and they're ineffective.
We have to find a solution to this.
I'm aware of the irony a gay guy like me talking about heterosexual masculinity and family relationships. Given my more-female-typical-than-usual emotional profile, I understand if you're rolling your eyes.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Disaffected Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.