My View Of The World
This post is about the old saying that when you think you are facing imminent death, your life flashes before your eyes! I don’t know if that is true or not, but I would kinda like a longer review of my life than that. That is what this post is all about.
Read more
One of my regular blog reads is Satisfying Retirement from Bob Lowry. Bob’s blog is much more popular than mine and as a result of him mentioning RJsCorner in his blog list, I get quite a few referrals from it. Some of his readers who visit RJsCorner might be interested in how very different people can become friends.
Over the years we have become pretty good blog buddies. At this point in our lives we share many of the same beliefs and feelings, but from his post of yesterday entitled If Life Had a Do-Over Option, Would I ? and previous discussions we had very different paths to get to where we are. I didn’t want to hog the comments section on his post, so decided to write a post here comparing his earlier life to mine in order to show how opposite they were.
Bob: My life has been rather ordinary in most respects. I was raised in a typical 1950’s-60’s American suburban environment by two parents who loved each other and their three sons… I went to college, got married in my late 20’s, had two daughters,
RJ: I am a couple of years older than Bob but I too was raised in just about the same period. But since my mother was an extreme narcissist, she abandoned her family for greener pastures when I was about ten years old. Dad just wasn’t much of a communicator so I had very little guidance in my formative years. I didn’t get married until the age of forty and have no children.
Bob: I wasted my time at college…College, for me, was not a time when I allowed myself to be intellectually challenged. I took the courses I needed to but was never fired up by most of them… I was the president of my fraternity…
RJ: I was just a skinny naive farm boy then but college years were some of the most enlightening years of my life. Since there was simply no family money available to fund my college years I ended up working 40+ hours per week for a five-year pay-as-you-go college trip. Being I worked so hard to get there I was anxious to learn as much as possible. I had little time, inclination, or funds to even consider a fraternity let alone being its president.
Bob: ..built a successful career in an industry I had fallen in love with at age 12… At the peak of my consultancy, I was serving over 30 radio stations single-handedly and had worked for over 200 other stations at one time.
RJ: I re-invented myself several times during my thirty-year career. It took twenty years to finally discover where I should have been in the first place. Since I had undiscovered Asperger’s traits even during these years, one-on-one associations were at best very difficult.
There are several other basic differences between Bob and me as far as our pre-retirement years are concerned but I think you get the point, our lives were just about the exact opposite. So, how could two people with very different life experiences end up at pretty much the same point years later, let alone friends? I think our common beliefs of empathy and celebrating diversity has something to do with it.
I will admit up front here that I have no idea of why the so-called social media is addictive to so many people, especially our younger generations. But then again due to my Asperger’s characteristics I am not really attuned to much of any form of social interactions. 🙂 But that doesn’t keep me for chiming in on this issue.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s I was never aware of much social pressure in my life. I tended to live inside my own bubble and was just not that affected by what others thought of me. I did have trouble making friends, especially the female type but I took that as being just the way it was for me. Like most teenager males in the 1960s I was into cars even if I could not afford one of them. Even today, show me a picture of a car made in the 1960s and I can likely identify its make, model, and year.
Getting back to the subject at hand, from what I understand social media plays a very big part of a teenager’s status now days. If they don’t have high enough “friend” counts they are evidently scorned by their peers. I know that even as a seventy year old I frequently get “friend” requests from very young people who I don’t know. Some will do anything to get their friend count up. From my limited research I have found that Facebook is by far has the largest membership but others are catching up. Here are the top five:
I do check in with Facebook almost daily but until now I have not done much with the other four sites. YouTube occasionally pops up on my radar screen when I want to learn how to do a particular thing. Because of our political times I won’t get within a mile of Twitter. That leaves Instagram as next on my “conquer” list.
From what I understand Instagram was bought out by Facebook in 2012 and when that happened it catapulted to 150 million monthly users. Now I will admit that I really don’t understand its purpose? So many claim to be so overstressed by all the things they have to do in a day but still millions find the time to take, upload, and publish Instagram photos that supposedly their friends and neighbors will want to immediately see.
Maybe that overstressed population is just us old people, that is people over 30 or so. 🙂 Getting back on subject I have decided to make my presence know on Instagram. I don’t want to be accused of being behind the times. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but I am currently just not convinced that a picture without some explaining text is of much value. It just seems too frivolous to me right now. But I am willing to learn.
I have had an Instagram account for at least a couple of years now but until recently it has laid dormant. I recently polished it off and even published (or whatever you call it) a few pictures for practice. I know you are supposed to take and immediately publish a picture but I kind of like the idea of going into my Lightroom albums and publishing from there so that will likely be my modus operandi. If I put a comment on a picture about getting the full story from my blog maybe I will get more views there. Maybe that is my purpose for Instagram.
Instagram here I come..
https://www.instagram.com/rjscorner_myviewoftheworld/
