text: Better better yourself. | Robert Kyriakides's Weblog
  Better better yourself.
  Posted on January 17, 2015 by Robert Kyriakides
  People want to "better" themselves; this is a significant human desire. They generally believe that self betterment involves living in a more spacious more luxurious house, taking more luxurious holidays, eating more unusual rare food and drinking better wines and beers. Having children is part of self betterment; children are an asset as well as a liability and humans frequently desire to reflect in the glory of their children and reflect that their children may have better lives than those they have had.
  For my generation we are better off (within the definition I have given above) than our parents. We might potentionall and rarely suffer a few encounters or heard of them with bombs and incidents from terrorists, but we have not fought a major war, been locked up as a prisoner of war, had bombs dropped on our heads by aircraft and we have not starved, rather the opposite; we have bettered ourselves to excess.
  The present generation are afflicted with neuroses, obesity, self obsessively announcing their private lives public as a means of showing off, boasting, and introversion in an extrovert way. Older generations were too busy merely surviving, avoiding death and starvation and bring up their children to have much time for self obsession. We complain when the ambulance takes too long to arrive and someone suffers or dies, forgetting that at least there is an ambulance and at least there is a hospital.