Philosophical Musing #8
I have never sweated so much in my entire life until these past few days. I don't know if I was just lazy the previous times I came to China and just didn't move around much, or if the temperature here has risen like crazy, but I am sticky with sweat almost all day everday! Yesterday, the rain fooled everyone. When it rains, it usually decreses the temperature and brings some lovely wind, but yesterday's rain brough moisture and heat, which resulted in entirely sweated through T-shirts.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was how easy our lives are compared to our parents' or our grandparents' and previous generations'. My mum and grandma were chatting, and I can't remember how they got into the topic, but my grandma started reminiscing about the hardships in her life. Her mother died when she was still a kid, and she and her siblings were so poor that they had to beg for food in order to survive. She started working as a teacher for small children when she was 14 years old to earn some money, which was not enough for most things. During winter she only had one shirt and one thin jacket, and she got wounds due to the bitter cold and wind, which ultimately resulted in scars that are still visible. When she was nine months pregnant, she had to ground wheat into flour with that mill thingy. I don't know what the verb is, but she had to push this lever around to ground flour, a job usually assigned to donkeys. The same afternoon she went into labour. Can you imagine what that must have been like? She had no choice, they needed to eat.
What about our lives? We have a surplus of food and clothes and money. We hardly need to do any household work unless we've moved out (well, even in that scenario, we can escape housework if we can survive in our own mess). For most children, their parents live a longer life. Recent technological advancements have made certain aspects of our lives easier. We have so many more choices, we can choose what to study in university, and we certainly have much more opportunities in life. For instance, I had the opportunity to take a gap year, well, two actually, and experience another country and meet new people.
It's so not fair to my parents or my grandparents that they had such hard lives, and I can't even describe how guilty I feel when I look at my life and compare it to what they had at my age. It really makes me cringe with embarrassment when I look back in retrospect at my teenage years complaining and arguing like it's the end of the world about the fact that I wasn't allowed to use the computer when I wanted to or not allowed to go somewhere with my friends.
Today, almost everything is served to us or very easily attainable, and we don't need to fight half as hard as our previous generations did to survive. Is our generation becoming too spoiled?
P.S. I still haven't taken any photos, so I will stick some photos I took in Sweden of the lovely summer weather, because my blog looks too boring without any photos on my latest posts.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was how easy our lives are compared to our parents' or our grandparents' and previous generations'. My mum and grandma were chatting, and I can't remember how they got into the topic, but my grandma started reminiscing about the hardships in her life. Her mother died when she was still a kid, and she and her siblings were so poor that they had to beg for food in order to survive. She started working as a teacher for small children when she was 14 years old to earn some money, which was not enough for most things. During winter she only had one shirt and one thin jacket, and she got wounds due to the bitter cold and wind, which ultimately resulted in scars that are still visible. When she was nine months pregnant, she had to ground wheat into flour with that mill thingy. I don't know what the verb is, but she had to push this lever around to ground flour, a job usually assigned to donkeys. The same afternoon she went into labour. Can you imagine what that must have been like? She had no choice, they needed to eat.
What about our lives? We have a surplus of food and clothes and money. We hardly need to do any household work unless we've moved out (well, even in that scenario, we can escape housework if we can survive in our own mess). For most children, their parents live a longer life. Recent technological advancements have made certain aspects of our lives easier. We have so many more choices, we can choose what to study in university, and we certainly have much more opportunities in life. For instance, I had the opportunity to take a gap year, well, two actually, and experience another country and meet new people.
It's so not fair to my parents or my grandparents that they had such hard lives, and I can't even describe how guilty I feel when I look at my life and compare it to what they had at my age. It really makes me cringe with embarrassment when I look back in retrospect at my teenage years complaining and arguing like it's the end of the world about the fact that I wasn't allowed to use the computer when I wanted to or not allowed to go somewhere with my friends.
Today, almost everything is served to us or very easily attainable, and we don't need to fight half as hard as our previous generations did to survive. Is our generation becoming too spoiled?
P.S. I still haven't taken any photos, so I will stick some photos I took in Sweden of the lovely summer weather, because my blog looks too boring without any photos on my latest posts.
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