Living the life

Subject: Living the life

I'm not sure if I'm an oddball but I'm amazed at the way people these days fret at not being able to go out and mix. Fret at the slightest inconvenience to their so called rights. Luckily I don't have to go out to work and provide the bread for the table. Luckily I'm not yearning to be with someone else, afraid that my lack of presence will diminish the connection. I'm more like a passenger on a large ship watching the other passengers leave to spend their money ashore in some seedy port, knowing that my needs are met onboard and already paid for. Perhaps it's that parsimony in my nature, that Yorkshire reluctance to part with money which makes my time locked up at home, bearable. 
People talk of the psychological damage done in keeping people cooped up, no longer free to do what they want, it's as if they were in  Guantanamo Jail rather than surrounded by the things they know and use each day. The circumstances of being locked under some persecutory system such as an occupying army with its harsh rules or the imposition of food rationing and massive shortages of virtually everything. These are the memories of grandparents and the parents before them. There was no Tesco delivery truck, full to the gunnels with goodies delivered to your door, no Netflix 24/7, in fact no television at all to escape into. People of that era had fond memories of simple things, close relations with the neighbours in their street and a simple proclivity to count their chickens. They were self sufficient, well able to get on with their lives no matter what constrains came their way.

As I look across the street I don't see the bombed out buildings or the pain of losing a friend after a bombing raid, I see ship-shape houses, neatly cut hedge rows, tidy homes for tidy people. There no rattling of cans for coppers, the bank transfer copes with that. There no need to fear the Bailiffs except under extreme cases and there's always a charity to seek out to easy you by, so why do we hear of so much stress in a society which never had it so good. Have we invented fear for fears sake as if an ailment was a badge of honour, a measure that we counted or were counted.
Do the long list of psychological afflictions we are prone to these days make us feel exceptional, living as we are in a world where we have become simply a statistic. Mothers can recite long almost unpronounceable descriptions of a child's condition, a condition which years ago was not only unrecognised but unnoticed, if in fact it existed at all.
Have we created a fantasy world, a world where we demand our right to be what ever we want to be without knowing what that is.