He would be in the top 10% of the graduating class with letters in 2 varsity sports and a letter in music (he is ranked nationally on the tenor saxophone) and he pulls a 3.7 weighted GPA that includes honors and college credit classes. He is known at and popular with the local high school kids, many of whom he attended Catholic elementary school with and whom he played community sports with over the years. His high school sweetheart attends the local public high school. As I said he's doing well.
Guys who go straight into the military after public high school are going in as enlisted. That is what my ex BF did (and made a career of it) however...
That is very different than an officer training program, which is what my son is going to pursue. From his high school experience he has friends from around the world, and those friends come from wealthy influential families that have businesses or in some cases are diplomats or high ranking military or political figures.
So he is an exceptional young man in many ways. He also works locally and the business owner who he works for raves about his work ethic and his manners and ability to deal well with the public.
I do not mince words with him. I have explained to him that the world does NOT care about him. That it is up to him to accomplish things for his own life, and that he must make grades at university if he expects me to continue to pay for whatever his scholarships do not pay.
Furthermore I have explained to him that the lifestyle I provide is an expensive lifestyle but that he cannot expect to live off me. He will be an adult and is expected to handle his own business. I will guide him and advise him. I do not, have not, and will not coddle or enable him.
I do love him and encourage him, and part of that is discipline, which teaches him self discipline. I help him understand the nuance of interpersonal interactions (which he has a natural affinity for) where necessary.
I have explained to him (and this has been true since his freshman year) that from now on his life is RESULTS based. And that HE is responsible for his results. He would have a higher GPA but for the fact that he got a "C" for semester in math his freshman year. Prior to that he wanted to go to MIT. After he got that grade I sat his 14 year old rear end down and explained to him that he had just DQ'd himself from MIT. Period. MIT takes only the BEST. White men who go to MIT have to be straight A students AND have an impressive resume. He has never made another "C" through his entire high school career and his marks have been vast majority "A's".
He is young. As young people will do he will make mistakes along the way. But the goal is not to make a mistake from which he cannot recover. We discuss the perils of drinking, smoking anything, drugs, and the hook up/party culture in a transparent way. Coming from years in the nightlife industry my ex husband and I have seen a great deal. So my son is well informed.
But he has to make his own decisions and face the natural consequences of those decisions.
I impart to him the wisdom that my father imparted to me about how to exist in the world. My father was wise and his advice was as salient for a young man as it was for a young woman. Perhaps more so.
Well be sure to also tell him that the university you graduate from doesn’t mean jack **** as long as your GPA is solid. That’s all that matters really. You’re just as likely getting into a law school with a 3.5 GPA from Yale as you are University of Iowa lol. The name helps, but it’s really just to pat yourself on the back to make yourself feel like you’re worth more than you are haha. That’s why half the time people say Ivy League students are pretentious (even though they’re really just pseudointellectuals who aren’t COMPLETE idiots like some others). What matters is the grade, not what you learn. Especially because msot of what you learn is meaningless trivia anyway. There’s a lot more guys out there like Will from Good Will Hunting who opt out because they don’t think it’s worth it to deal with the system at its current state anymore. Can’t blame them. College is stupidly expensive anyway even though most major universities have billions of dollars in their budget lol.
All experience is objective fact. Period. If you went to the store today, that is an experience and an objective fact. The things that occur in your life are objective fact. The things that occur in my life are also objective fact.
But the meanings attributed to those experiences are NOT.
Here is the problem the group who chose to adopt something that others' experienced first hand ran into. They were unable to remove the bias that the non first hand experience inherently includes. All things that are NOT your own first hand experience have come through a filter. It therefore is no longer objective fact.
Or perhaps they aren’t biased by the pervasiveness of the experience itself and are able to think more clearly because of it. Because they are looking at it with an outside perspective, the experience isn’t affecting their judgement since there is no stress/urgency. That’s why in science, naturalistic observations exist.
What you’re saying is too solipsistic. That would be like me saying that because you have never had the experience of actually being turn son, you can never truly know whether he is actually real or not, and that your son’s existence is a subjective experience because you’ve never existed as him before.
Like, what?
I speak as a woman who men objectively find attractive and have for decades. It is a perspective a man CANNOT have for men are not attractive women.
You see, this is where the problem lies. Firstly, objective would imply a consensus. I highly doubt that every single man who has ever seen you in your entire life has approached you and asked you out lol. And I don’t mean that in an offensive way, but just realistically-speaking, there’s women who are much better looking who wouldn’t make that claim lol. So therein is problem #1.
Problem #2? Empathy. What’s the neurological basis for it? Humans have what’s called mirror neurons. It’s why we even have a society to begin with. We can all understand wach other to a degree. When you view everyone else’s understanding of a particular person/thing/event, you can gain a much more holistic and accurate whatever that thing is. Or you can relay information from one person who understand another, to the next (e.g. Person A understands Person B, but doesn’t understand Person C. Person B understands both of them, at least in the way that is important to the specific situation at hand. Person A says something, but Person C doesn’t understand, so Person B explains it in a way that Person C does understand. Person A approves of the explanation because it is an accurate representation of what they were trying to say.).
What you think, percieve or believe about the things that occur in your life are NOT objective fact. But the things themselves that happen stand on their own merit as fact. 100%.
So then why do you attribute the meanings of your experiences to be the same as everyone else’s? And why do you attribute the meanings of your experiences to be the meaning of someone else’s just because their experience is the same as yours?
This is where you yourself aren’t taking into consideration the gray area that is variation between people. To put it succinctly, I am different from you, and because of that, what may work for me may not work for you, and vice versa.
There goes any and all objective fact.
What IS objective is the happening itself. The conclusions drawn from said happening is NOT. You’re blurring the lines when the should not be.
Part of living a life that is grounded in truth involves minimizing the distortions that perception and interpretation naturally imbue. In other words you must seek to take objective fact at face value and calibrate yourself to the best of your ability. Some people do a better job of this than others.
So you cannot minimize my experience. The truth can't be minimized. It simply exists.
There are so many problems with this. No one argues the
what, people just argue the
why and the
how. You’re grouping them all together as one. That’s the first problem. Secondly, you do NOT just take things at face value because then you are not accounting for confounding variables, as mentioned before. Context is everything, and that cannot be ignored.
And I do not minimize your experiences at all, rather, I expand upon them. I disregard your conclusions because they’re drawn from faulty premises.
This is an opinion statement.
BE, I can logically break down the grammatical prose of your writings word-for-word and show you that what I said is not an opinion. I’ve done it with bigneil before when I called him doofus lol and provided citations from the Oxford English Dictionary hahaha
I can do the same with you.
