Thursday, December 02, 2021

Worlds (Sort of But Not Really) Colliding

One of the theses in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers is how some people benefit by the sheer luck of their being born during a certain time of the year, whether it means you're more mature/intellectually developed than your classmates in school or more physically developed than your fellow Pee-Wee hockey players. Just by being born at a certain time, you're at an increased advantage over others.

Meanwhile, one of the (several) reasons I walked out on the movie Dunkirk was how depressed I got looking at those thousands of teenage soldiers and the reason they were in the harrowing spot they were in. They weren't there because of their patriotic duty to defeat Hitler, or some other noble reason; they were there because they happened to be born within a small grouping of years. Humans have been on Earth for a coupla hundred thousand years, but because you just so happened to be born in the year 1920 the odds were high that you'd be slaughtered by Germans at age 20. Watching the screen, I could only be grateful I just happened to be born in a year that guaranteed I would never have to face such a thing.

"Wait...so we're NOT going to Arby's??!!"


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