Youth

Agatha Christie was born in 1890. Her “The Mysterious Mr. Quin” was published in 1930, so she was certainly not “of an age” when she observed of her 62 year old character at one of those large house parties:

“Mr. Satterthwaite was glad that the young people had gone to bed. He was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting and crude. They lacked subtlety and as life went [on,]he had become increasingly fond of subtleties.”

I’d say Christie was particularly well placed to observe that and yet I, in reading it around the same age, felt a bit resentful of Mr. Satterthwaite, felt that he’d forgotten his youth … I felt his attitude should have been more to smile at a distance and remember how we’d been ourselves.

Today, having just come off X, having s/shot a few more polit-snippets, I was starting to agree with Mr. S far more. Obviously, my initial inclination, having been with young people much of my working life, was to defend the young to Mr. S but the things I’ve noticed of late, maybe since returning to these shores, have been not so good.

We’ve been through all the specifics online here … the Wokery, viciousness, the blockheadedness, the gaucheness, esp. of the female these days (boys always have been), the increasing uselessness, the brittleness, emptiness … and we know why … the upbringing steadily worse from the war generation onwards … the godlessness, the disrespect, the lower moral compass …

Then again, you’re hardly like to get reality on X, except in some reportage. There are some things constantly intruding on my timeline now:

One has almost killed off the Ladies at Lunchtime segment on Mondays and Fridays … let me tell you about it.* First was a daughter with her olds nearby, the caption saying she was native American. Uh huh. Perfect pic for LatL … modest, nice person. But there was just something “nye tak”, which is Russian for “not so”, literally, but more often meaning red flag, sommit slightly off about it.

A few polit items further down … another native American, so it claimed. Not AI, a real person, but still. Pattern continued, then came some girl, mournful puppy look … it was her birthday, could we not wish her well, no one else seemed to care.

A few items further down … another one needing sympathy, help, for this reason or that. Then further down … another. And another wanting birthday wishes. I’d been suspicious since the first. Now by this time, there were enough pictures for weeks of L@L … all around 20 or so, all gorgeous, modest, dutiful daughter or young wife types.

Did more blogging to inflict on you, checked the inbox, Gab, blogs e.g. AKH, Vox … came back to X and it had changed tone … now it was half-unclad specimens, then a picture of Karoline Leavitt, taken by Kai Trump, quite clad.

So while the polit items were as you see right now … mothers, grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, MAGA type guys, often with short beards … there’d then be these painted, unnatural nubiles punctuating X, which I did not need of a Sunday, then a report on this Lily Phillips who seems to have been at it again.

Clearly, analytics were putting these in, so how to train analytics to leave me free from such content? Then I realised that a few of the ladies, plus guys, were repostings of my own repostings … yikes … and many of those were young ladies … you see how it goes.

Way to break free was to go off and do chores, have brek, look at the Moors, Lake District, seaside villages etc., which did have the effect of removing that type of thing but now there was another type appearing … memes or clips and once again, so many of these young people doing something stoopid or other, in herds … and it struck me again what Satterthwaite had said … it was as if the young people speaking were not natural … they were exchanging lines they’d learnt, posturing, posing or if males with coiffed hair, pulling some stunt meant to wow the girl. Some daredevil stunt or other. No real communication about anything, about life. It was all playacting. What a way to live.

Er … were we like that back then? Christie had also written somewhere … young people “always concerned with externals”, never deep, never just enjoying the subtleties of life.

But if we were that shallow back then … late teens to maybe late thirties … how could we have stood living like that?

Give you an example … I was invited to a party of a guy I knew maybe five years younger, had to think of some stunt, so wore three watches on the wrist, not one. Tell you what … girl after girl coming up: “Oh wow.” All because of the stunt. Don’t like parties anyway, left after half an hour, nicely, nothing nasty.

Where on earth am I going with this? Not a clue … maybe that we’re better off around our own kind. Maybe. …/END.

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*Oops … just discovered that they were all by the same two people … graphic designers … using AI? Or enhanced? That now explains a lot but it’s still probably killed off LatL.