Which is your personal preference, Ren. And that's cool. I honestly don't care about other people having their preference satisfied, only that there seems to be a notion that my own preference is just outmoded and goddamn why don't I just get with the times. That shit, quite frankly, can get shoved right up the ass of anyone that spouts it. I'm not "old". I'm not even 30. You can't call this a pure expression of age. It's an expression of value and of the relationship of money to goods, and IMO, most people have no concept of this anymore.
I think it's safe to say that a ridiculously large number of people in the US have no concept of the value of money, of saving, of financial responsibility. I think that I'm absolutely horrible when it comes to a lot of that stuff, frankly, and yet even after having lost a lot of money through a painful marriage with a single income, divorce, and now unemployment, I still have no debt and a year and a half's income (roughly) saved from my former job. Some of that was luck, as my grandfather left some money which helped cushion me against the considerable losses of the divorce, but for fuck's sake, most young people are living paycheck to paycheck, blowing money on games and books and movies when they don't even have anything saved and may even be in debt from loans or just poor use of credit. And yet even with all that, they still have no desire to protect something they considered worth spending their paycheck on. I don't fucking get it. At all.
But as much as shit may change, it only changes because people enable it. Just because it changes doesn't mean it's good. The world has been changing in a lot of ways for several decades. Do we have a lot of hope that those changes were for the better now that people are teetering on the edge of social and economic collapse all over the globe? A lot of people have the guts to look back and realize how much stupidity was allowed to go on, how many destructive forces weren't shut down when they should have been. But true to human form, many others just continue to think everything's going to be fine, and it's going to be interesting to see how they react when faced with the realization that the systems they relied upon no longer exist.
I heard somewhere that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Sounds pretty accurate to me. Give up freedom, give up control, let someone else hold all the fucking keys to your life, expect to be taken care of. It's never happened that way and never will.
People throw "Jesus, it's just videogames!" at me all the time, but the arts and entertainment industries do huge things for the economy and drive so much. No one seems to realize that these things start movements. change modes of thought. It's not just fucking videogames. It's the potential for government and corporate control of everything you do, of the way you're allowed to own property. If we throw ownership out the window here, what's next? What will we be leasing twenty years from now? What will our kids be deemed unfit to own and control of their own volition, instead renting it from some governing body that profits from it? Call it an overreaction if you like, tell me I'm blowing smoke up your ass, but remember that you can't get a different result from allowing the same thing to happen. If you give up your control because you're too fucking lazy to accept the privilege, rest assured that no one who takes control for you is going to care when you start complaining that you're being mistreated.
EDIT - Sorry, kept adding stuff. I'm on a roll. And pissed off.
