ignorant – Observations and Misunderstandings

I must begin with a retraction. I suggested I was hooted, or claxoned, at by two cars yesterday and that I thought not only were the two people being arseholes, that they must surely have been locals too. I was aware that I may have been jumping to conclusions but I was in the mood to do it anyway. It turns out then that I was wrong. One of the guys in the bakery today asked me if I realised it was him hooting at me and it turns out the second incident, the one I enjoyed, not the one which involved the road rage, was not as it first seemed. Probably not as I interpreted it would me more fitting. It’s amazing how often two people can experience the same situation in completely different ways, or people take offence to someones manner when the other person is oblivious to what they were doing. In this incident I jumped to the conclusion it was some ignorant local being an idiot but really there was only one idiot there, the guy from the bakery obviously. Let’s hope I learnt something from yesterday or the only conclusion can be that there is but one arsehole.

I’m trying to think what if anything else I can retract from previous pieces. Surely in over two hundred and fifty pieces I’ve talked a lot of shit, but how much of it was inaccurate and ignorant. The title of this whole blog suggests I misunderstand many things so not only am I likely to have talked a lot of shit over these months but the hooting incident above suggests I’m simply living up to the expectations of the name. I make observations – locals are idiots – I make misunderstandings – it turns out they’re not.

I was listening to something on woke people and anti-woke people today. I would rather eat my own toes than class myself as either of those two things but what they were discussing was the absolutist stances both sides take and while their targets may change their methods and understanding, for example good guys and bad guys, was very similar. Almost dogmatic like religion. I could criticise them but judging by yesterdays incident I’m no different. To generalise a whole group of people, who have done me no actual harm that I know of, and blame this whole group for the actions of one person is just utterly ridiculous. Why do we do it. Why do I do it. To make sense of the world? Am I that simplistic? Are such crude boxes required for my mind to be comfortable. People are ridiculous. I am ridiculous. But I’m human. And fallible. As is life.

There was an article on the BBC today which I found very interesting in how it allowed for different perspectives of how we view society. The article discussed how the hopes and dreams of youths are at odds with the type of jobs that will be available to them. Apparently “five times as many seventeen and eighteen year olds in the UK want to work in art, culture, entertainment and sport as there are jobs available” and that equated to over half of those surveyed only wanting to work in this sector. Seemingly the industry that requires people the most is accommodation and catering, unfortunately for them they require seven times the number of students who expressed an interest, wholesale and retail appears to suffering from similar disinterest. According to this article, the report believes “young people’s career aspirations need to be constructively challenged”. The article then moves on to how certain young people potentially feel they cannot achieve career goals because of their gender, ethnicity or social-economic background.

Now this article can be viewed two ways I would suggest. On the one hand it can be seen that the youth of today need to embrace a little reality, that they won’t always be able to do the jobs they want, must stop being fixated with being either Instagram models or footballers – terrible gender stereotyping I know but humour me – but also not allow the barriers of their own existence to hold them back from a more serious career. On the other hand it appears that the majority of young people want an interesting, creative career in the arts and entertainment world, and not to be working as waiters or hotel cleaners. To completely dismiss the first idea would most likely expose a glaring ignorance about the realities of life for many people, “destined for disappointment” as the article put it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in it. However what the article seems to not take into consideration, and this is understandable given the angle it is written from, is that if the young peoples desires “do not meet the demands of the economy” then perhaps the economy should not be the factor that dictates what work people do, perhaps society has it’s priorities wrong.

I would love to see the numbers of people wanting to be artists and musicians, over Instagram models and footballers, because that could change my perspective slightly. That is though my take on value in the creative arts world and I would be an ignorant man to not see the folly in that. There are many reasons young people will not get the jobs they want in life, but they don’t mention that perhaps these jobs just don’t satisfy people, maybe if people could choose they would not endure jobs that exist for no other reason than for the sake of existing, bring no real benefit to society or the earth, and are nothing more than ways to pay tax and kill time as we wait to die. Surely it needn’t be this way. Money, economics and business are not fundamentally bad things in their own right but misused and corrupted they lead to the real needs of people being either ignored or dismissed as childish dreams. We all dreamt of something when we were young though, why is we can never seem to remember our dreams?

Tag: ignorant

Being Human

Prioritise Dreams