Just a little (link) love: Herman the Worm edition
June 26, 2019
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I have adored Sir Terry Pratchett‘s books since high school, and I’m sad I never got a chance to meet him at a convention.
A Gracie Allen / George Burns anecdote from Nicole Cliffe.
Tenacious J’s contemplating a midlife crisis. I’m pretty ragey these days too but it’s a combination of professional stress, personal exhaustion, and what our country is doing. It makes sense.
I did not know that Murderinos were a thing and it’s a creepy thing to be forced to hear at work if you’re not into it.
This quote made me click through to read the article I assumed I’d disagree with: “Poverty is not much of a teacher. There’s not much to learn; it’s all necessity. And at the rich end, it’s hard to create the kind of artificial scarcity that you need to make decisions seem as though they mean anything.”
In my experience, dealing with necessity was a learning experience and some people never learn because they never have to. The stakes were never high enough that they needed to make the right choice every single time, so they never learned to analyze the choices in front of them. They always had a safety net so it was not just ok to flounder and make mistakes but to never really get your feet under you. Sometimes that’s totally fine. Sometimes, they reach a tough point of their lives later on and don’t know if they have the strength to make it through because they’ve never been tested. Heck, my sibling sure never learned any of those lessons but it mattered in his case because we had no safety net. Poverty isn’t THE way to learn it but I don’t know how to teach the lessons I learned without inflicting the trauma of impoverishment and living in brokenness, worrying about every penny, on JB.
But as to the article itself, I do agree that it’s gotta be tough to grow up at either end of the spectrum. People scoff when I say I pity the Royal Kids or even Beyonce’s kids a bit – they’re growing up uber wealthy sure, but that’s not wealth they earned and they’re growing up in the limelight they didn’t ask for or choose, and under expectations of either Royal composure or Massive Talent and Drive and that has got to be tough. The money’s nice but I would never ever trade my chosen existence for that kind of life where privacy isn’t the default.
Herman the Worm
This came up on random shuffle when we were listening to kids songs on YouTube, we were bemused to discover that JB knew all the hand movements.
I had to unlearn a lot of my “poverty thinking” once I started making more money, largely around being willing to spend on my physical health whereas in my childhood I basically never went to see a doctor, dentist, etc. unless I was extremely ill. I also have a hard time still convincing myself I can make the responsible decisions if I don’t self-apply the anxiety of artificial scarcity. Though, I am getting better at it. It’s hard to say how I’ll handle passing down money lessons to my kids. They certainly won’t have the same motivations as I did, and similar to you I wouldn’t want to pass that trauma down.
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