Bored of cycling?

Use this board for general non-cycling-related chat, or to introduce yourself to the forum.
User avatar
Cugel
Posts: 7130
Joined: 13 Nov 2017, 11:14am

Re: Bored of cycling?

Post by Cugel »

pwa wrote: 31 Mar 2026, 4:58am Be your own person.
Ha! Easy to say and hard to do, not least because the definition or even the very notion of "person" is by no means clear, universal or otherwise a clear entity to serve as some sort of benchmark against our thoughts and doings.

But suppose we can latch on to some coherent notion of "person" ...... what is it likely to be? In this day and age, especially in our highly-mediated cultural creek, a person is most likely to be defined as essentially a consumer-come-exploitable resource, as far as the major architects of our lifestyles are concerned at least.

Many these days also apply some sort of potted-identity label to themselves, obtainable from that same mass media that applies the consumer-human resource harness to us all. But how real are these potted identities? When closely examined, analysed or subject to a forensic investigation, they often turn out to be chimerical illusions and delusions.

A mental experiment. Considering the various and numerous possibilities of diverging life-paths we might have taken (rather than those we did take) who would we be "personally" instead of the person we now feel we have become? And as a side-experiment, how many of those divergent paths did we ourselves decide to take in any truly considerative way and how many saw us propelled down the path we took by the various cultural forces at that moment directing or canalising us?

Personally (ha ha) I suspect that I could have been one of a vast range of potential personalities today if I'd gone one way rather than another at several thousand divergent possible routes on my lifetime's highway. Whatever "person" I may be now (probably a hodge-podge of all sorts of cultural fragments) it could have been so different if only I'd slid this way or that at various junctures.

All of them would still probably be within the "consumer/exploitable resource" category. We are mostly made, not makers.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
User avatar
Cowsham
Posts: 7458
Joined: 4 Nov 2019, 1:33pm

Re: Bored of cycling?

Post by Cowsham »

Cugel wrote: 31 Mar 2026, 8:47am
pwa wrote: 31 Mar 2026, 4:58am Be your own person.
Ha! Easy to say and hard to do, not least because the definition or even the very notion of "person" is by no means clear, universal or otherwise a clear entity to serve as some sort of benchmark against our thoughts and doings.

But suppose we can latch on to some coherent notion of "person" ...... what is it likely to be? In this day and age, especially in our highly-mediated cultural creek, a person is most likely to be defined as essentially a consumer-come-exploitable resource, as far as the major architects of our lifestyles are concerned at least.

Many these days also apply some sort of potted-identity label to themselves, obtainable from that same mass media that applies the consumer-human resource harness to us all. But how real are these potted identities? When closely examined, analysed or subject to a forensic investigation, they often turn out to be chimerical illusions and delusions.

A mental experiment. Considering the various and numerous possibilities of diverging life-paths we might have taken (rather than those we did take) who would we be "personally" instead of the person we now feel we have become? And as a side-experiment, how many of those divergent paths did we ourselves decide to take in any truly considerative way and how many saw us propelled down the path we took by the various cultural forces at that moment directing or canalising us?

Personally (ha ha) I suspect that I could have been one of a vast range of potential personalities today if I'd gone one way rather than another at several thousand divergent possible routes on my lifetime's highway. Whatever "person" I may be now (probably a hodge-podge of all sorts of cultural fragments) it could have been so different if only I'd slid this way or that at various junctures.

All of them would still probably be within the "consumer/exploitable resource" category. We are mostly made, not makers.
It's all here. Tommy Tiernan explains how Ireland dealt with lunatics and his diagnosis of borderline personality disorder :wink:
https://youtu.be/FYSolW3beKk?si=45mRXQzzvg-0Gc2G
"Lifted like a kite from the ground both wind and string we need."
Post Reply