Ask Lemmy

Control of your attention. Because it is the axis of reality.

First Aid, since you never know when this might be helpful on either yourself or others!

Understanding nuance and then applying said understanding in communication with others.

Bate

Computers.

We have them around us every day. We carry them in our pockets every day. Our lives and all of society relies on them. People have been growing up with them, and can't imagine a life without them.

So imagine my distress at how everyone is so incredibly tech illiterate.

How to use a lathe, compliment someone without expecting anything in return, and blend in on a city street.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

--Robert A. Heinlein

Yeah I don't agree 100% with this author or anyone, really, but I always return to this quote when I watch the world attempting to corral the magnificent potential wonder-beings that are humans, into hyper-specialized hive-pod roles.

All the jobs out there that actually pay seem to want people who were bred and raised their entire lives for that stupidly specific role to the exclusion of all else. Humanity's versatility is our strength, and once again, the rich want to covet it while making the rest of us into specialized parts for their machines.

So my answer is "learning." A lot of people don't know how to learn new things, and stop trying, probably because their schooling failed them.

They are then frustrated easily by inconvenience, and incapable of solving problems or finding help. This is a brain gone to waste.

A lot of people pick one specialization and decide to just not learn anything else and that's the most depressing thing in the world to witness. (I met a lot of older people who just stopped learning things after what must've been highschool. Huge yikes...)

Fix things. Make things. Fail a lot. Troubleshoot. PLAY.

Try whistling. Can you snap your fingers yet? How about training your way up to a handstand, maybe? Hey, yo-yos are fun.

Don't like guns? Go learn how to safely use one anyway just for perspective. Cars? Try learning your own (simple!) repairs. Never learned to ride a bike? Best time is now!

Try planning a hangout. Join a meetup that sounds vaguely interesting. Learn how to tie knots. Learn how to stop trauma bleeding. Sew a cloak or something maybe. Teach somebody else things you know!

Don't limit yourself by your first impressions of things you've never experienced. So many people look at something and just say "I can't. I'm not that person. I won't like it probably."

Our modernization led by ruling classes has stripped us of so many experiences and then sold them back to us with admission fees. So much human potential and knowledge has been siloed away and sold back to us as "goods and services", while we're relegated to being "consumers."

Human beings were made to do a multitude of tasks, and use their strengths to cooperate to the betterment of all, not to be alienated and separated by specific specializations they aren't allowed to stray from.

Seriously, enjoy how much absolute potential you have instead of doing one thing you felt good at and being scared to try anything else.

Being able to swim.

Was recently driving a bunch of other girls to our university maintenance class after it had poured and we came to a part of the road where it descends into a depression before fully rising back up. That day the depression was flooded, making a lagoon. The back-up road would take us an extra 30 kilometers around, so after briefly stopping, I decided to rush forward and go through the water. Every last passenger started silently panicking (silently enough I didn't notice) and one threw up out of fear, and thinking it was car sickness, I stopped the vehicle, which made everyone panic more and try to "abandon ship" because they thought the vehicle was going down and need help because it was the areas beside the road which were actually deep. And here I am thinking "this place is as wet and flood-prone as Hurricane Harbor, what have you been doing all your life that you can't swim". If someone can't, why?