Question of the day.

What is one thing that your parents taught you, that later turned to be totally wrong?

My answer:

For me it’s generally so that it’s my Mum who is more of an authority for me than my Dad, and our views on a lot of things are generallyy very similar, which is extremely fortunate since we live together and do a lot of things together so it would be tricky if we were clashing a lot more, and it’s not as smooth for a lot of other families I know, but also when I want to talk to her about something that I don’t agree with her on or confront her about something she’ll be able to have an open-minded discussion, and she’s also not the type of person who would insist on always being right and never was, she is capable of saying things like “I’m sorry, I really thought it was like this but now I know it’s not”, or we’ll simply accept that we’re on totally different pages about something and move on. My Dad, meanwhile, is more of an authoritarian type, rather than authoritative, he has generally a problem with admitting anything wrong on his part in any relationship, so he always insists on being right, but because like I said I’ve always seen my Mum as more of an authority, and Dad wasn’t involved so much in our upbringing and was more the breadwinner, even if he did tell me things that I was supposed to somehow learn or believe in, I would usually take it with a wee grain of salt from quite early on, because Mum was always more right, and sometimes what they were saying was right down contradictory. 😀 It’s not that I didn’t take my Dad seriously, I do for example consider him my go-to expert in geography or the history of WWII, he was just simply a bit less of a role model for me. I remember that my Dad would often say very generalised, stereotypical things about people, from a very narrow point of view. For example, I can vaguely recall asking him about what does a philosopher do exactly, and he said something like that nothing really, philosophers just think all the time, about things that don’t need that much thinking anyway. I think I found it interesting that someone would do nothing but think all the time and about meaningless things and consider it a valid job, so I guess I must have been asking some more questions or something, anyway what I can recall very clearly is that at some point he said that a philosopher is someone with whom it’s really difficult to communicate. I don’t think I know any philosophers, but whenever I think about it now as an adult I find it funny, where did he even get that from? I’m pretty sure it can’t be the case or even if it often might be, it certainly isn’t the fact that someone is a philosopher that makes them difficult to communicate with, or maybe it’s just difficult for the other side to communicate with them because they have a different way of thinking. Anyway, things like these, my Dad has a lot of such assumptions. Often, when you’ll talk to him calmly without trying to impose your point of view, and try to get him to think on his own, he can see beyond them, but some are really deeply ingrained, and yes, that has a harmful potential, because stereotypes can be very harmful, but usually the main reason why I think it’s such a pity is because it makes his thinking quite inflexible, and his view of people must be rather uninteresting, while I think that people, as much as they are a pain to socialise with and totally regardless whether I like them or not, are interesting as such in their diversity and complexity.

How about you? 🙂

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