Showing posts with label Individualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Individualism. Show all posts

Friday, June 11, 2021

Too Hot to Handle: Not Going Back

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

If you’ve been watching the numbers over the last few months, it should be evident to even the most Negative Nancy that the COVID-19 rates of infection and death are finally decreasing steadily. We may reasonably discount the weekly cries of the media alarmists about the latest terrifying variant; that’s just what they do when they’re all out of stories about dying polar bears.

Tom: And so we are beginning to hear tentative musings about reopening businesses and getting back to something approaching our pre-March 2020 way of living. As someone who worked in the office throughout the entire song and dance, I was more than a little surprised to read that I am not necessarily in the majority in my desire to see society normalize. Tim Kreider of The Atlantic has decided he’d rather stay in bed, along with untold numbers of others who would rather work from home forever ... or preferably not work at all.

IC, didn’t one of the ‘seven deadlies’ use to be the sin of sloth?

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Doing It My Way

“For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way.”
— Paul Anka

Individualism is the spirit of this present age. And actually, that is not an unmitigated evil.

I used to think it was. When I was young Christian and more inclined to overreact, I found Anka’s lyrics, popularized by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, more than a little cringe-worthy. I can’t take credit for the impulse since it almost surely came by osmosis from a church environment that tended to read the worst possible motives into every pronouncement of popular culture. Looking back on it, it seems to me the reaction of older Christians to the observations of the pop philosophers of my teen years was generally spot-on, if ever-so-slightly paranoid at times.

But not always.