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Originally Posted by Serpentine Leaf
What you describe here is not at all unique to your area. I work at a university and the kids there do that too. A lot cross the street with their faces glued to their phones and laugh when they almost get hit by a car. They walk down the steps like that. They ride bicycles or skateboards like that. And these are middle-class kids, not the rich ones in your area. Lots of social media addicts there too.
So you're in the sprawl area of Silicon Valley, that sure explains a lot. Almost all IT people, even the low-level ones who fix computers in schools and universities, have a real nastiness about them, along with a Social Darwinist outlook. My sister is one, and a cold-blooded narcissist to boot.
I don't think that there is a such a thing as a safe city, but that cultural climate breeds the very worst in humanity from the haves and have-nots alike. The haves might have material abundance, but their behavior clearly shows that they're every bit as emotionally and spiritually impoverished as the people living on the streets. People who are forced to live in such appalling conditions like those slums absorb the messages that they belong there, no one welcomes them, what they have inside is reflected by what's outside, and so on. I've lived in some crappy and dangerous areas and it had a huge impact on my self-esteem, and that was in an apartment, not on the street. I know what it is to live without hope, and to think with a survival brain. The problem is that very few of our leaders have any clue, and worse, don't care to know. That's a major reason I support the candidate I do: his own husband has had rough times in his life, survived repeated abuse, and spent time homeless.
Modern paths to success demand pretty extreme levels of narcissism to get anywhere. I've noticed that a lack of narcissism is so often misinterpreted as a lack of confidence or even a lack of worthiness, while leaders are chosen based on their own overinflated view of themselves and their competence. And we wonder who we got to where we are now? Without a major seismic shift to our culture, the same problems will keep on happening over and over again, and get worse each time.
Thanks for the info about the UK system, it's a valuable model worthy of emulation.
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That is disturbing. I cannot fathom how university students could find it funny to have barely survived crossing the street due to their faces being stuck to their phone screens. If that ever happened to me, I would not be laughing, I would most likely have a panic attack, as well as promise myself to never do something like that ever again. I guess that this type of prophylaxis is due to my anxiety that I always had. A lot of those outgoing types seem to not have anxiety, but rather are the opposite--more reckless than anything. On my last date in August 2019, she asked if I could take photos of her food and portraits of her at the dinner table. I thought that that was kind of odd, but then I realised that she never asked to take a picture with her and me together, just her alone. Maybe that was something that I had missed. When I thought about it recently, maybe it was a sign that she was more interested in her Instagram and her food than in me. But yes, social media is big here, really big. My meetups are actually just a few blocks away from the headquarters of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox and other multinational tech companies. You see people just decked out in tech--Google glasses, not one, but two mobile phones, a tablet, an Amazon wristwatch, a Facebook T-shirt, etc. It really is excessive.
Essentially, yes San Francisco are in the sprawl of Silicon Valley. This city has more tech than probably all of Europe combined. It is supersaturated with tech to the point that every single block of Downtown is basically something with tech. Startup here, startup there, IT centre there, data research there, data analysis centre here, you have it all. True, the Social Darwinism is very, very popular here. It is the libertarian capitalist idealism. I have heard people subscribe to the idea of buying their own island, with the utopia of paying 0% in taxes and hiring people whom they can pay basically nothing due to their obsession with having a lack of a minimum wage, whilst they live in their grand mansions with butlers and servants, outfitted with helipads and private jets. Then they say how they deserve that lifestyle because they are basically of a higher species--they "evolved" more than simple humans like me. I think that your sister might be similar to this description.
Yes, self-esteem can be tied with one's living quarters. I am not sure if you had seen my other thread about my OCD about HIV/AIDS. But here there are regular warnings about watching out where one walks. Not only is there rubbish and human faeces (!) on the streets, but there are numerous used syringes lying all over San Francisco. A lot of them are by AIDS-infected drug users. Some people have caught HIV from stepping on these syringes by mistake, the needle puncturing their shoes or sandals and then pricking their feet. Of course, this increases my OCD to the maximum, since it is not really OCD now as there really are increasing numbers of people who catch HIV by stepping on syringes in the city. So when I walk around, I often have my eyes on the pavement, watching out for both faeces and syringes. I always wear shoes with thick soles. As if San Francisco did not already suffer enough from being the AIDS capital of the entire Western World in the 1980s. Living in filth and tepid squalor like this must be hell on earth for the poor and homeless who have to deal with it. I can imagine how low their self-esteem must be. They think, well they got evicted, not only now are they homeless, they are living in third-world slum conditions where street crime, drug use and all sorts of vice afflict the area on a daily basis. Sorry that you had to live in such areas. I cannot imagine how the day-to-day dealing with that must have been.
I do realise that nowadays to succeed, narcissism is close to a prerequisite. One has to not care about others to get ahead in life. Of course, this is usually what happens in this country, and sometimes in some other third-world countries. This does not usually happen in very egalitarian societies--Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden come to mind--due to the very low gap between rich and poor. I do hope for this country to be like Finland, or Norway, or Iceland or any one of those. That would be a very big shift, but one that would only be beneficial, especially in a very divided city like this one.
One thing that I miss about the UK is the NHS. It is Britain's national treasure. Regular prescriptions made by a doctor outside of hospital are around £9 each. Prescriptions within any hospital setting are totally free. This included simple bottles of pills, but also extensive medication such as chemotherapy, dialysis, blood tests, everything. Not to mention that surgery as well is completely free. It was created in 1948, right when the UK were close to bankrupt plus in rubble due to having survived the Second World War and bombardments by Nazi Germany. Even in such a state, they passed the national healthcare act, since more than half the country were in dire situations due to being unable to afford healthcare. Not to mention those that not only could not afford healthcare, a lot had their houses destroyed by Luftwaffe aerial bombers from Hitler's Germany.