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Not the weirdest, but I didn’t realize this until it was pointed out.
The fascination with work, and how one’s employment or career is tied to personal identity. It’s a basic conversation starter, “What do you do for work?” Not “What do you enjoy doing?” or “Do you have any hobbies?” or “Where do you go to relax?” Nope.
What to you do for work.
It’s a weird question that is tied up in judgement and classism. And it’s so normal here
Trevor Noah has a section about this in a recent standup. Something likei if you ask a European what they do they answer with hobbies, americans answer with their job title.
Just my experience from germany but when people ask what you do, you usually say what Job you have and where the Company is.
Germany might be more like america then Europe in that case.
Why are you typing comments when you should be earning money for your boss?
My boss is a real asshole. I can’t stand him and he doesn’t pay me enough.
I’m self-employed
Have you tried sleeping with him for a raise?
Thought about giving him a handjob, but his weiner is shaped weird
Well then forget that promotion.
May I please be promoted to customer? They’re treated much better
I’ve found this only to be true in white collar professions. Hanging out with blue collar people, your job rarely comes up, but it’s one of the first questions with white collar people.
It’s definitely true with blue collar workers in Alberta, or at least it was when I still socialized (guess when I stopped)
I grew up blue collar and am still a tradesman. I technically live in the Midwest, but lots of Appalachian people. Of course my social circles include a vast swathe of socio-economic levels so you might still be right.
I’ll have to watch closer to see if there’s a pattern
I’d say your definitely correct when it comes to people with “low skill” or high turnover type jobs. If they work at dollar general or McDicks they don’t talk about work much. Also, there’s no such thing as a low skill job, and we all know who was essential and who could stay home for a few months
Good god, yes. This is something I had to break myself from. It is so insidious and pervasive in our culture that I don’t think most of us realize it’s even a thing.
I’ve been to a lot of outdoor birthday parties this summer, and there are so many boring dads who I will hear strike up a conversation about what’s going on at work. I usually make sure to wander in the opposite direction.
And I like my job! But the “talk about work” is usually less about interesting projects or creations and more about what has been going on with that individual’s status. Like yeah Kevin I want you to do well at work and enjoy it, but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to go get chased by kids with squirt guns instead of pretending I care about how your manager is impressed by your team’s metrics.
but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to go get chased by kids with squirt guns instead of pretending I care about how your manager is impressed by your team’s metrics.
kids sure know how to have fun. we have a lot to learn from them
More true than most realize.
After getting through a lot of shit over the past several years, and having a very good & healthy summer, I am convinced that so many of our ills (metal especially) are from this mistaken assumption that more virtual and more high tech and more consumption are positives for our health rather than negatives.
Like I said, I like my job. I have no problem explaining it to anybody who asks. But the funny thing is, nobody asks, lol. A lot times per year I get the “what do you do” question, but then they’re satisfied with that answer. Many people just volunteer their stories because they think they’re supposed (just learned behavior) to or they’re conditioned to brag about work to feel good & valid.
But despite my decent job (software for embedded linux systems — totally on brand for Lemmy!) the absolute best time I’ve spent this summer has been getting wet and muddy in the back yard. Literally.
By turning my hyperfocus and my time and some of my budget towards a big hobby project (upgrading my koi pond) I have set myself up with an activity that gives me:
- Something good to look forward to
- Results to enjoy
- Fresh air
- Physical exercise, a lot, including lots of lifting
- Lots of meditative time, even though I physically look very busy
- Exercising my instinct/desire/need to create things
- Learning new interesting things that are relevant to the real world but outside my normal area of study/work. In high school I took a hard turn away from chemistry and towards physics. Now I am all about the nitrogen cycle, organic chemistry, oxidation/reduction potential, microorganisms, and so on, in my own way.
- Opportunity to hang out with my kid and a bunch of our pets with room to run.
It is so insidious and pervasive in our culture
AmErIcAnS DoN’t hAvE A CuLtUrE
lol j/k
Yeah pervasive is right. I’d rather talk about the campaign I’m running and what my players did in our last game, but it’s taken a lot of retraining my brain to allow myself to talk about what is fun instead of what I’m “supposed” to do.
‘allow myself to [do things good for me] instead of what I’m “supposed” to do’ is like a full half of what it took to figure out how to try to enjoy life.
The apparent obsession with money. Some people claim to be religious but it’s clear the Almighty Dollar is their God. I know we make jokes about needing a “profit motive”, but there is a grounding in reality. It’s truly bizarre, from an outside perspective, just what lengths and depths people will sink to in order to increase profit. I’m not saying this is an American Only thing, but it’s VERY apparent in the USA just how far people will go.
I stopped talking politics with my FIL when I realized money was his singular driving force. He really believes, and IDK where he got this, that capitalism is itself a perfect system, and that any regulation on it breaks the system. Basically laissez faire libertarianism, wrapped in a flag and wearing a cross. Considering it’s a well understood concept, in the rest of the world (and US history) that capitalism requires regulation to work safely, it’s maddening to argue anything when we can’t agree on basics.
All people with money = inherently good. All brown people = inherently bad. This is the driving socioeconomic philosophy among conservatives.
I started listening to AM radio and Fox News (their stream) to understand them. These people arent even the worst strain of propaganda consumer. But they get it from one of the two schools of austrian economics.
But even morally bankrupt people still believe in the truth. Like no matter how capitalist someone is, the Epstein connection to Trump is not going away. The money itself is not proof that someone doesn’t diddle children
Maybe, but to them the money makes it okay that Trump diddled children.
Morally bankrupt people will believe in whatever “truth” best serves their interests.
It depends on whether they hear about the abuse from their in-person social networks. the propaganda networks will never cover what trump has been doing to children
While there are right wing cults that will accept pedophiles as their leaders, for the majority of those who watch propaganda channels, child rape is the only crime they won’t abide. It goes back to their foundational beliefs on abortion.
Milton Friedman is where he got it and it’s pretty common piece of propaganda pushed by wealthy interests.
Flags. Americans are obsessed with the American flag.
I was asked this while traveling in another country. I didn’t have a good answer. FWIW, I don’t own any clothing with any flags on them.
Wearing depictions if the flag is against flag code anyway. Not a legal standard, but if someone actually cared for real, they wouldn’t use it as decoration.
Code is for the government. The people should be free to celebrate the freedom it’s meant to represent.
Sure, but if they really had the respect for it they pretend to have, they wouldn’t be wearing it.
A piece of fabric is not worthy of respect, the values it’s meant to represent are. Disrespecting the flag against it’s own code is one of the greatest statements of that freedom
Yes, but the people that wear the flag are generally the same ones that want to make burning it in protest illegal. The hypocrisy of wanting to force respect for the flag yet not respecting it yourself is what I am against.
I’m firmly in the camp of both burning and wearing it, so
Where I live almost everyone assumes you are a right wing Christian. They don’t even take into consideration that you’re not and if they figure out you aren’t they stop talking to you in most cases. I’ve never had anyone straight up call me an idiot but I’ve had good friends freeze up when they found out and then start avoiding me afterwards. You get looked at like a lizard in human skin.
To add to this, I’ve heard the talk that gets passed around before they found out that I wasnt. If you are a woman they will straught up call you a witch
I’m a passing trans guy, and where I live is like this.
It’s just fucked walking around and know that if they knew, I would essentially lose all humanity to them. It happened with my divorce lawyer, it happens with doctors. I’m like an alien hiding in the place I was born.
I’m like an alien hiding in the place I was born.
That’s so messed up. As a southerner: sorry. I would not, and I have a lot of family that wouldn’t either, though TBH they left Mississippi…
You’re not a southerner, quit lying. You’re from the northern hemisphere. Poser.
I’m from the south-north-north-eastern USA!
Hey we out here even in WV. Nobody needs to feel alone.
Christianity (and all religions imo) are a fucking stain on humanity, they bring so much more harm than good upon us.
…christians are so overwhelmingly evil that i constantly have to stop and remind myself that some tiny minority of all the crosses and flags i see brandished about may actually be fostered in good faith, lest i judge too soon…
That is so strange. Where i live if someone under the age of 70 tells you that they are actual christian, the reaction is usually: "wait what? Really now?
You live in a more honest place. It really is like this outside cities in large parts of USA.
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TN
…You think Appalachia isn’t right-wing christian?
It’s called Pennsyltucky for a reason.
World Champions in sports that only the US participates in. I am not a fan of football, both the “footy” version or the “NFL” but it’s always been odd to me that winners of the Super Bowl, or equivalent event, are often declared “World Champions” of their own league in an event exclusively hosted in the US.
Mine is that every 20 years or so, America picks a country or region to decimate, colonize, pillage and take over. They treat the people in that country like refuse. Then 20 years later they move on to the next country. Throughout all this they moralize to you and police the world and try to tell other countries to stop their wars, while they enjoy the benefits of their own invasions.
We have a quota in america for weapons manufacturing. If noone needs weapons then make a new conflict. Its not super complicated but it is absurdly morally bankrupt.
That we dont want to be trailer trash, but a good 95 percent of us are.
Excuse you
I’m a double-wide recyclable
American exceptionalism, especially lately.
And then get weirdly surprised and entitled about it when someone does do something about it.
For me, it’s the American belief that their laws apply in other sovereign countries. Calling Julian Assange a traitor when he’s Australian and never held American citizenship for example. Demanding his extradition and strong-arming other countries when he’s not beholden to American laws nor constitution as a non-citizen, and believing that it’s their right to do so.
And that’s from speaking with countless American who believe that this is totally justified and above-board.
Flag heilling
We’re weird about foreskins for one
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That’s bcs you’re all very gullible to marketing/disease mongering in your hyper-consumerist ‘society’.
I really don’t see how hyper-consumerism has anything to do with our cultural bias against foreskin that comes from our history of sexual prudishness.
It’s an astroturfed topic, sold as desirable for esthetic reasons or as a BS health issue.
Only a hyper-consumerist society would promote unnecessary medical procedures.
And only gullible consumers would buy that.
Sexual prudishness is definitely there in your backward country but that can exist with or whitout foreskins.
Not the reason.That’s obviously you working backwards from your opinions on America. Nobody advertises it here nor have they in a generation or two. It’s an assumed default to the point that anti circumcision activists often have to argue with partners and sometimes circumcision is done without parental consent.
Here’s Wikipedia on the history of the practice
But fundamentally, this comes from the late 19th and early 20th century where it was seen as an attempt to reduce masturbation and disease. There’s no reason to believe that the doctors recommending it at the time didn’t sincerely believe it to be for the best, it was just a time in which medical science was a bit bonkers.
So you believe that they are more influenced by some 18th century bonkers doctors than present day perceived beauty standards, peer pressure and commercialised medicine?
And Wikipedia is not a reference BTWWhere do you think the peer pressure and beauty standards came from? It was those wacko doctors. To the point where it became “what you do”. Modern commercialization of medicine is unrelated. It became what Americans do when their infant has a dick. Most Americans just did it. Speaking as an American who had a foreskin and who has dated multiple anti circumcision activists, I seriously can’t emphasize enough how much it’s just autopilot for everyone. There’s no marketing cabal of the medical establishment to push circumcision to make money, its just that very few of the doctors that have dicks have foreskins, very few of the patients’ fathers have them either, and if given a flat question, very few of the patients are going to leave with one. And that culture of circumcision came from an era where the main goal was to stop masturbation because it was seen as leading to mental illness.
And Wikipedia isn’t an academic source, it’s one of the absolute best “here’s what seems to be known” sources for casual understanding because it’s curated and shows it’s sources. No encyclopedia is an acceptable source in academics. And I’m also aware that my personal experiences don’t count as a rigorous source.
very few of the doctors that have dicks have foreskins, very few of the patients’ fathers have them either,
35.5% to 41.7% from 1979 through 2010 can in no reasonable way be called ‘very few’.
That is from the CDC (a real source)And the concept of Wikipedia sounded good at the time but reality is different.
It is highly manipulable, as often happened and even their own ‘curation’ is on the highest level not transparent. And what is stated in articles is not necessarily true since they indeed show sources but they can also be shit depending on who edits the article.
But most people won’t even look at them, “wiki says it’s so” and that’s that. You can use it if you need to look something up about a flower but any controversial topic and certainly political stuff most certainly not.Anyway, enough about this.
I notice American’s habitually cannot mind their own business.
that they have no culture
They do have culture: it’s poor taste.
As opposed to the rest of the world, where we simply never release a thing, at all.
