The Things I Do And Don't Care About

I’ve been thinking lately about the things I do, and do not, care about. I’ll start with the latter first, because they have especially been on my mind. 

I don’t care what others think of me. For much of my life, I was a classic people-pleaser, riddled with anxiety about what others thought of me, trying to live up to social expectations and ‘earn’ approval. Eventually I realised this was a battle I was doomed to lose. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t mask well enough, pretend well enough, be good enough to be truly acceptable. So I gave up. Not all at once, but gradually and definitely, and the older I get the more I simply don’t give a rodent’s posterior what people think of me. It’s very liberating.

I don’t care what people want if they don’t say it. I used to fret obsessively over this too, trying to figure out what people wanted. Now, if people don’t say what they’re thinking, I can’t be bothered trying to read their minds. Why should I? If they can’t be bothered being upfront and honest, I can’t be bothered engaging. Say it or stay silent, I don’t care.

I don’t care what people think about my appearance. This is another thing I spent a good deal of my earlier years fretting over, trying to ‘fit in’, whether it was with ‘normal femininity’ or ‘right-on lesbian feminist’ rules or ‘hippy left’ style or whatever. Nowadays? I’m a t-shirt and jeans person, rarely wear makeup, have short hair, and sometimes get mistaken for a man, at least until I turn around or speak. But I do love bright colours and jewellery (though I don’t wear it much for sensory reasons), have even worn a skirt on occasion (okay, for funerals, but still). If anyone doesn’t like the ‘look’ of me, however, my answer is simple – don’t look! I don’t care what others wear either. There are far more important things.

I don’t care what people think about how I live my life. People have long been trying to tell me how I should live my life, from my parenting (often from those with no kids or experience with them), to how, when and how much I should ‘socialise’ (regardless of me trying to tell them I can’t do it like that). But possibly the biggest criticism has been around how I manage my disabilities, especially my CFS. I’ve been criticised for taking vitamins - ‘they’re just expensive pee!’ - even though they have literally saved my life, told I should ‘just go for a run round the block!’ at a time when I couldn’t have crawled around it on my hands and knees, and had an actual naturopath I’d formerly visited tell someone else that it was ‘a pity’ I’d gotten a diagnosis of CFS, as I would ‘just use it as an excuse’ to not try to get better. I kid you not.

So what DO I really care about?

 I care about one Big Thing…

The state of the world.

Last month, our former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, told the 2025 Yale graduating class that the world has turned into “an all-out dumpster fire”. She is so right. Now, the world never has been a wonderful place (newsflash : there never really were any ‘good old days’). That’s why my generation fought so hard to change things (yes, those boomers people love to criticise, even as they enjoy the benefits we gained them). But more recently, it’s become just… awful.

There is no other way to describe it. Fascism on the rise, so many of the advances we fought for now being either eroded or outright destroyed, and not just in America either, though that is definitely the worst conflagration (and it is literally turning into an actual conflagration in parts, eg ICE agents tear-gassing protesters, Marines brought in, actual goddam MARINES), entire groups living literally in fear of their lives, the rich hoarding more and more wealth while the rest of the world struggles ever harder, too many fools trusting other fools rather than proven and verifiable science, disbelief of the media even when they’re reporting live on actual horrific events (I don’t have any special love for the media, but come ON folks, use your brains), Certain Nations sitting back smirking behind their hands at the havoc they had a hand in creating, genocidal wars where children and other vulnerable are dying by the dozen every day for the benefit of the greedy and the power-hungry, incipient environmental collapse while our politicians quibble about who has to give up the least, yet other nations attempting to position themselves to be Dominant Powers when the dust settles… on and on it goes, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the horribleness of it all.

Or my sense of helplessness and horror in the face of it all.

And people think I should worry about what I or others wear, or what others think of me, or what some dipstick who doesn’t even know anything about CFS - or any other condition I have – thinks about how I should be handling my health or my life? When there’s so much awful crap going down? Are you kidding me?

Get outa here.

Things I Don't Understand - Number Seven

I don't understand greed.

I don't mean being greedy for food, I do sometimes want to gorge myself on food that tastes really good, eg Christmas dinner, though I've learnt to restrain myself, as the results are not good! No, what I mean by greed is financial greed, the urge to accumulate more and more money, gather more and more of it into one's hands, or bank accounts.

I'm thinking here of how, when a reporter once asked an extremely wealthy man what he wanted, he replied "more money". He already had more than most of us could spend in a lifetime, yet he wanted more. And I suspect there are many out there like him.

Greedy people have always been amongst us, and there have always been disparities of wealth, though till the Industrial Revolution only royalty and the most powerful nobles could hope to live truly extravagantly. The resources and the material goodies just weren't there. And there have also always been those opposed to anyone having such a lion's share of the world's wealth, especially if it's at the expense of others (and it usually is). And during the middle decades of the twentieth century, it truly did seem that the world's wealth was becoming more evenly distributed, at least in the Western part of the world.

Now, however, it seems the wealthy are gaining the upper hand again. I read somewhere recently that in the 1960s, the USA's richest men had about thirty times the income of the poorest. These days, the richest are worth around three hundred times the poorest. (I don't have the reference handy, but it was something like that.) With this sort of concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, is it really so surprising that even the middle class are struggling, while the truly poor increasingly go to the wall? I think not.

Even in New Zealand, a country traditionally without this kind of financial obscenity, we are beginning to see such differences. In the same week that Campbell Live, a NZ current affairs programme, campaigned to raise money for Kids Can, a charity that feeds kids in poor schools, one of the wealthiest men in NZ launched his new yacht in Norway - worth around $NZ 78 million. The Campbell Live campaign raised around $NZ 800,000. This means that for less than one seventy-eighth of the value of his yacht (and he already has two others), this wealthy man could have provided breakfast and lunch for hundreds of hungry kids from poor families.

There are of course plenty of other obscenities of wealth out there. The movie stars who think nothing of spending thousands on a handbag or scarf, or tens of thousands on 'therapy', while just a few miles away homeless people are rummaging in bins to feed themselves. The huge houses of the rich, while down the road kids go barefoot and hungry to school. And no, I'm not talking about third world countries, but countries like New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA. 'First World Poverty' is very, very real, and becoming more so.

Don't get me wrong - though I would be deemed at least 'left-leaning' by most standards, I'm not any kind of communist, in fact I dislike communism as a system. And life's luxuries are very nice, I wouldn't deny that. I like decent cars and a nice house and smart clothes as much as the next person. I also know that many of the richest do give substantial amounts to charities. Though perhaps not all - a recent magazine article here in New Zealand asked if being rich made you nasty and selfish - and it seemed that sometimes, yes, it does. A typical example they quoted was how street charity collectors often get a better response in poorer neighbourhoods than they do in rich ones, that in fact the rich often ignore such collectors. The phenomenon of the rich attitude that the poor are 'just lazy', and should 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' is also very real too, according to that article - which of course totally ignores the fact that a) not everyone has the entrepreneurial ability to become rich, and b) they've left a lot of us without any metaphorical 'boots'.

I don't know if my lack of understanding on this is due to my being an aspie or not - I have noticed many aspies do seem to be on the 'left' side of the political spectrum, probably because of our passion for justice, which extends to social justice. Others seem to be totally neutral, either undecided or so turned off by humanity that they don't give a damn, while a few express rabidly right-wing opinions - though I've noticed they also seem to be the ones who have jaundiced, misanthropic views in general, due usually to years of ill-treatment from the world.

I wonder too if my attitude is at least partly due to the family values I was brought up with. These values weren't made explicit, were never lectured to us or pushed on us, but rather simply demonstrated. I grew up seeing my parents get involved with groups such as Plunket committees, school lunch committees, and Lions Clubs. In more recent years, groups like the Child Cancer Foundation, Hospice, Save the Children and others have received the benefits of my family's energies. Moreover, we've all tended to gravitate towards careers and jobs that help, educate or take care of people - nursing, education, social work, etc. Community involvement is almost taken for granted in my family.

This philanthropy goes further back than just this generation - family history research has turned up evidence my ancestors were on church or sports committees, organised fundraising events, or were members of such groups as the Rebekah Lodge, the Hibernian Society and the Druids Lodge.

I've also had more than one discussion with various family members about "what we'd do if we won Lotto". The general consensus was that, after we'd satisfied our own needs, we'd distribute our wealth. 'Paying off our younger generation's student loans' and 'buying everyone in the family houses' featured prominently on that list, and there was a general feeling that beyond taking care of your own needs, it was best to 'spread the wealth' and help as many as possible.

Or perhaps my attitude is because of my own personal experience of all too often having to go without - I've survived, at times, thankfully never for too long, without things that most Westerners consider 'basic amenities', such as fridges, electricity or hot and cold running water; I've also lived (for a few weeks or months each) in a tent, caravan, housetruck and converted cowshed. I've gone without fancy clothes and many material goodies that others take for granted, and had to trim my budget or shopping bill to eliminate anything not absolutely essential to keeping body and soul together. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'd very much like to not have to do that, but it has taught me you can live without many of the things most Westerners consider necessary to existence. Luxuries are very nice, but they're not essential. Other life-experiences have also contributed to what I can only describe as a feeling that "all things are best in moderation".

And that includes wealth. So I just don't understand greed.