Hello, didn't see you there. | Squat the Planet

Hello, didn't see you there.

Addie Smith

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Hiya, name's Addie. I'm still a kid, I know. 15. Don't judge me by my age. If you don't like me, hate me for who I am. Not how old I am. I skipped freshman year but I'm definitely more street-smart than book smart. My brother's dad says that when I grow up I should be a professional bulllshitter. He says it would be perfect for me and that I wouldn't even need a degree. My favorite bands are La Dispute, Touche Amore, Merchant Ships, Queen, Bruce Springsteen, and scattered bits and pieces of anything post-hardcore, emo-core, melodic hardcore, alternative (old alternative, not anything that's popular but not pop), spoken word, the works.
I'm not gonna tell you how terrible my home life is because it's really not that bad. I don't complain much, and if there's one thing that really bothers me, it's people (mainly suburban middle class girls) who complain about how awful their life is: (my parents wont let me see sleeping with sirens omg fml I better go kill myself).
My reasons for checking out this website? A few friends of mine left town a couple years back. Granted, it was only a 3 week trip, but they said that they learned more in those 3 weeks than they learned in their entire high school careers. They told me that they learned so much about themselves, and how to be independent. They said that their parents (who were once tre psychotic) calmed down once they got back and started treating them like intelligent beings, rather than pawns which is pretty much how I am treated now.
I've gotten my fair share of the "your life is fine now, don't fuck it up. you're just a kid, don't go screwing things up for yourself. you don't understand". I want to understand. If there is really something all that bad to liberation, please tell me. Don't give me the dumbed-down child talk. I get enough of that. From human being to human being, tell me the problem with experience. And who knows, maybe we'll both learn something.
Thanks for your time. Have a brilliant day.
 

ped

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School has always been specifically a means to train youth (and baby sit them) for the mundane, totalitarian fascism of the industrial-corporate mechanism. Your grades are not based on what information you retain, it's based on how well you follow orders from authority. It's meant as training to take orders from management. Those who are more willing to take those orders will be rewarded with more in their adult work life. No one ever cared whether what you learn is relevent or if you even remember it for longer than a month. This is something that still seems to bewilder many in this country as to why we keep pumping out essentially idiots with little critical thinking skills......because that's precisely the goal. When you're older you'll hear much talk from the bourgeois about how our schools are failing and more money always needs to be thrown at them. They're not. They're the envy of the world for keeping youth dull, uncritical and addicted to consumption of everything from manufactored pseudo counter-culture to sugary piss water. The same way the bill of rights and the New Deal liberalism was a means to pacify revolution and retain socio-economic hierarchy. Our prussian based education system was merely a cog in that will. It's also no coincidence that propaganda techniques such as the pledge of allegiance was invented right at the same time the modern state based school system was invented. And all of it took place right exactly at the same time of the industrial revolution. The plutoratic state was faced with a dilema of how to get people off their farms and into the factories to work for the elite, cosmopolitan industrialists. The state run school system was the perfect solution. Your parents are dullard yokals of this deliberate system.

So what's wrong with experience? Well it's romantic. It's never as pleasant as it seems. You have no frame of reference for how "well" you have it. That's a microcosm of the western world. But it says volumes about this notion we have been sold about consumption. All these things are never enough to fill us up. What they're not telling you is that all this they have is still not really enough for them either. But they've lived enough to learn how to cope with it. And that's what they want you to choose too. Cope with it, not solve it. And here you are making them face something they've spent their lives trying to ignore something they were never really courageous enough to examine anyway. They see that as naive on your part I'm sure. But that's because they're afraid of it. And you have to understand that people like your parents are ruled by fear.

So what they're telling you is to play the games they play. Do not bite the hand that feeds you. Trade safety and security for liberty. If you continue down that path you will have a steady income, a decent place to call home that is temperature controlled, friends, that smarmy sense of comfort and you can afford all sorts of toys to temporarily distract that gnawing, festering sub-conscious "something" inside you. There is a reason the vast majority of the world now and through history going back to the dawn of primitive agrarian origins have chosen to give up their liberty for the security of civilization. Freud wrote much about it in Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur.

But the bottom line is that your time on this planet is fleeting. It's hard to grasp at such a nubile age as experience is limited, but you will be dead one day. Realize this fact. I mean really, truly appreciate your own inevitable demise. Once you can embrace the hollow, nihilistic reality you face you can then make truly rational choices of what to spend your time here doing. But you'll never fully escape the dichotomy between what you want and what everyone else expects of you that you're dealing with now. The anarchist movement attempts to mitigate it, but it still becomes an issue of severity whether we want to admit it or not. On a deeper level a play on the pattern of death and renewal, winter and summer, revolution and conservatism. As the Buddhists say the wheel of ignorance.
 

soapybum

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Good job on saying you arent going to complain about your home life, then continue to do so. If you do go traveling and your underage then realize the consequences that will have on anyone you travel with, theres some threads on here about underage traveling, read those. The education system sucks, you can teach yourself more in a few weeks than what you will learn in a lifetime of going to school, but you dont have to travel to do that. I'm not saying dont go travel and have that experience, just realize the consequences it might bring. Just a suggestion but you could always try to find a middle ground, whatever that might be for you.
 
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finn

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I'd also say go for the middle ground, that way you'll react faster and better to the real thing. When you're on your own, you are responsible for your own food, shelter and safety, and for a lot of young'uns it's a bit much to figure out all at the same time, especially if they're cold, hungry and tired. Not exactly conducive to a learning environment. Some of those people will then rely on the wrong people to help them out who will then take advantage of them. It's the basic afterschool show type thing, but it does happen a lot and not with only teens either. The way around this is to learn to take care of yourself as much as possible like hands on first aid, cooking, shelter-making, self defense, etc- and to work hard at it.

For some reason there are a lot of people who don't understand that there is no substitute for hard work, and being self reliant is a lot of hard work. Sure some parts will be a lot of fun, but you need to work to get there.
 

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