For a while it was also popular to be "outraged" about stuff but that seems to have calmed down quite a bit.
My daughter decided to stop playing Spring basketball, which entailed two 1.5 hour practices during the week and four games a weekend with travel involved. She made the very mature decision that she didn't want to sacrifice free time and friends to play a game. At first I was skeptical about her having so much downtime, but she's happier, doing better in school, and has a tight-knit group of friends. I'm enjoying it quite a bit too since I don't have to rush from work to drive her around and have every weekend tied up for months.
I have a feeling a counter-cultural movement is going to start. Maybe not yet, but soon.
There was a time in which people would be outraged at other people not wearing a hat, times change, yet the ability to be upset and project that upon others soldiers on regardless. Just today's outrage culture has a more accessible platform to artificially embellish their outrage and societies ability to see 1% vocaly upset with outrage and presume the other 99% agree is a path that sadly still plays out from time to time.
But let's not confuse outraged issues with real issues that don't need to be blown up out of proportions to gain attention. That is the worrying issue today, that so many times a small event gets recontextualized to fulfil a narrative of outrage and promoted as such. Downing out real issues that fester without vocal champions.
Sure has...just look at the Bible and the story of a mob chasing down Mary trying to stone her, until Jesus intervened and ask he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Of course society couldn’t handle such self-reflection - much less some radical preaching about love - and given the first chance, the mob took out their outrage on him and had him strung up on a cross Roman style.
Leaving out any religious context, those are perfect stories encompassing human nature.
I do miss the amazing Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Markets) in Germany. There are various incarnations of it in North America but none compare to theirs.
Wait for it. The presidential election cycle is just starting up. Pandering to every possible demographic is just around the corner. (And they're all victims!)
Outrage culture, which I don’t think has gone away, appears to be new.
The puritans are part of the founding myth of America. Ask any school child who founded the colonies and they’ll tell you the pilgrims. That kind of impact lingers. Nobody ever mentions Dutch settlers in what’s now New York or the Spanish in what’s now Florida. That doesn’t mean we’re literally puritans (which wasn’t my claim anyways), but that does mean that the echoes of their culture still have an impact on us today.
And, as others have kindly pointed out, “Protestant work ethic” is considered a valid term for the same historical/social trends by academics.
> The concept is often credited with helping to define the societies of Northern, Central and Western Europe. Even though some of these countries were more affected by Lutheranism or Anglicanism than Calvinism, local Protestants nevertheless were influenced by these ideas to a varying degree. As penal law was enacted to uphold the uniform teachings of the Church of England in England, only various English dissenters held to those values. Among them were the Puritans who emigrated to New England, bringing the work ethic with them and helping define the culture of what would become the United States of America.
> Hard work and frugality were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect. Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
All of the dissent I see on that page is about whether or not capitalism is inherently protestant, and whether protestant work ethic explains the relative riches of northern protestant nations over southern catholic ones. While that's interesting economic ground to argue over, it's completely irrelevant to the social phenomena I'm trying to pin down.
> The Puritans never conceived of work apart from a spiritual and moral context of service to God and man. Richard Nixon's much-quoted Labor Day message of 1971 probably summed up the popular conception of the "Puritan work ethic," but if so, it is an inaccurate picture:
>"The 'work ethic' holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working. America's competitive spirit, the 'work ethic' of this people... the value of achievement, the morality of self-reliance-- none of these is going out of style. (Nixon)"
>I trust that I have shown that the Puritans would not have been content with such a theory of work. Their ideals were obedience to God, service to humanity, and reliance on God's grace. In the Puritan ethic, the virtue of work depended almost wholly on the motives with which people performed it.
Here's a quote from John Wesley, the father of Methodism and Weslayan protestantism (both of which are highly impactful in the US from the great awakening revival periods):
"it is every Christian’s duty to observe this first rule: ‘Gain all you can’. Gain all you can by honest work with all diligence. Lose no time in silly diversions and do not put off until tomorrow what may be done today. Do nothing by halves; use all the common sense that God has given you and study continually that you may improve on those who have gone before you. "
Sermon - The "Use of Money" - https://www.eaforchristians.org/john-wesley-the-use-of-money...