This from downunder:

Children as young as five are being taken to “life coaches” by concerned parents pushing their youngsters to get their little lives on track. Schoolchildren are being booked in by their parents to help them get friends, achieve more and work toward positive outcomes in their life.

One company, Be Happy in Life, writes on its website about coaching children:

“Why wait until they are 40 and miserable? Isn’t it better to give them a head start in life? Why let them develop ineffective habits? Isn’t it better to help them develop powerful ones instead?”

Am I the only one who finds that disturbing that parents are happy to abrogate their own responsibilities either through lack of confidence, because the child’s got beyond them or through a disconnect with their children for reasons which might include time, e.g. working two jobs to keep the credit card debt down?

Has anyone other than fellow bloggers stopped and really looked where we’re headed?

Changing tack, Hollywood, always a whore for trends, has swung right into the macabre:

These films, 2012 and The Twilight Saga: New Moon, may well represent the utterly vacuous end of the mass market for culture in the US and across Europe; but commercial lightweights they have not been.

The trouble with these films is the deep pessimism and as the article says:

Armageddon movies from Hollywood … have inevitably focused on the arrival of an external agent … heroism in the face of adversity or redemption through actions above and beyond the call of mundane duty.  All that though appears to have changed … for this is an end-of-the-world scenario where humans are completely helpless against a ground that shifts quite literally from under their feet.

This is only the latest in a long line and one of the worst was The Golden Compass whose values were deeply suspect, especially as a kid’s film.  It’s dark, the enemy is straight out of melodrama and the supposed hero turns out to be essentially evil.  This is the world turned on its head which powerful forces behind society wish to see become the norm.

Such scenarios can only lead to doom and gloom and that’s fine with Them – the juggernaut is too far gone to oppose, too powerful, resistance is useless so they say and they might as well tack on the end: “Abandon hope”.

This is the dystopic state written of in literature – the zombyized, unhappy but compliant  entities in human bodies, awaiting the inevitable and too weary to oppose – a semi-catatonic state.

In the absence of our traditional code of values, what has emerged to take its place?  A libertarian paradise where all are free to do as they please?

Not a bit of it – drugged out children doing sex, with nothing else to aspire to except becoming vampires or anorexic or both, a deep lethargy and apathy across society and a dog-eat-dog, look after N1 outlook in the face of economic oblivion.

It’s a 1984 scenario of lies and spin, where everyone who seems a hero lets you down and all values are both negotiable and tending to the dark and bizarre.

Does our society look bustling and vibrant, happy and kind?  Does it heck as like – it looks sick.

How are people reacting?  Trolls go round the blogs and say no, all is fine, we’re coming out of the recession, employment is coming back.  People, desperate for any sort of good news, swallow this.

No, employment is not coming back and let me give you an example.   There is a library job going but you don’t even get to first base without a qualification in that specific area, irrespective of decades in literature and library experience.  There is a tutoring job but that is not for anyone in education – it’s only for someone with the SVA or the NGQ or whatever they now call it.

How do you get one of these?  With money and by waiting in a queue with seven dozen others for the eighteen course places.  Experience counts for nothing, ability counts for nothing.  Only the newly created bit of paper.  This is what’s going to keep people unemployed so it doesn’t matter how many new IT jobs are going – if you haven’t that latest bit of paper, there could be thousands of them going but you’re not going to get near an interview.

Plus there is an economic crash coming.  The figures don’t add up.  The FT tries to make out we’re over the crisis but then concedes:

From global output on a persistently lower path than expected before the crisis, to severely weakened public finances, to the evils of long-term unemployment, to rising inequality and to a permanently altered balance of global economic power, the effects of the 2008-09 financial crisis and recession are akin to those of a war.

It also speaks, in the same article, about double dip and yes, this is what is on the radar.  While the Bank of England squandered £62bn to lenders on the point of collapse, none of that trickled down into the community.  Though the Big Finance has turned around and this is what the FT is crowing about, none of that means diddly squat to any of us.

We can start by getting out of the clutches of the EU and it’s bizarre and often sick values and practices, then it becomes a case of rebuilding from the foundations up but even here there is the enemy within – people who really think that everything’s basically fine as it is.  Heaven help these people but they are going to put a spanner in the works of any recovery worth living for.

Despair?  Slash our collective wrists?  Nope – just plug away stay artificially cheerful and never let the bu—rs wear us down.

Filed under: Life issues & people