Our culture's seperation anxiety

I absolutely agree. There's nothing wrong with depending upon your friends and family, but some people just take it way too far. It gets ridiculous when a friend gets angry with you because you won't walk across the street with her at a tennis match so she can use the bathroom...

And that's comin' at ya' from yer local redneck hippie.
--
The Story of Myself

So on topic for my current unimportant dilemma.

I really want to go to Red Lobster because were I live the closet one is over an hour away. Plus, my husband does like sea food and I am not going to waste money on the food the kids do not eat (at 5 and almost 2 'leftovers' is a lot). I respectfully do not beg to go because of these facts. Were I am at now has one down the street but I have no body to go with. I am very sad because I leave here on satyrday and probably with out having cured my annual craving of lobster.

It just seems like a lonely boring way to eat...with others wondering were the rest of the 'party' is.

Arg! the love and dislike of people
~T
All truths are easy to understand once discovered; The point is to discover them ~Galileo

I use to think in the terms of "herd." I use to not want to go anywhere unless someone was with me such as shopping. For me it was more of what other people were thinking. When you're young you tend to care what others are thinking of you.
Nowadays, I will go just about anywhere by myself, except a restaurant since for me it's the group that I go with that makes my money spent worthwhile.

"Far and away the best prize life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." - Theodore Roosevelt

I can understand not wanting to eat by yourself at a restaurant. I spend more money than normal at a restaurant, and the reason I do it is to spend time with my friends. Socializing at a restaurant is different than the school cafeteriea, and it is more relaxing. However, when I eat breakfast, I have made a habbit of reading the paper so I really just want to be alone.

http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tricia0711

I thought of another addition to this: people tend to not want to cut contact with others. We talk on the phone to people we see nearly every day, always have our cell phones so people can get in contact, and abuse the internet so we can get constant updates on what people are up to. This brings another theory to mind: Maybe we worry about others when they are not with us. In this society, that would make sense. We see violence all the time. Perhaps subconciously, we want to make sure those we care about are ok.

Sorry I comment so much on my own blog, but I really want to know what people think about this.

http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tricia0711

I am a very independent person and have always been something of a loner. However, while I am proud of my independence, I don't think it's the best way to live. On the contrary, I think our culture promotes too much independence. We are all about individuality and expressing yourself and individual rights and pulling your own weight. While initially these sound like great ideas, I think that it has led our thinking down the wrong path. Now, we are so individualistic that we can't understand why we need to pay taxes that go to other people on welfare or who are on social security disability. Anyone who is unemployed almost immediately has the stigma of being 'lazy' and is mooching off of others and the government. The word dependency has a very strong negative connotation. But why? We are humans, therefore we are social creatures. Personally I think that having friends and family that you depend on and depend on you and creating those relationships is what makes life worth living.

Obviously some people take this too far, like insisting on going to the bathroom in groups, but the main idea is good. Otherwise, we might start just thinking in terms of only ourselves, like "how does this benefit me? why do I have to do this?" Comming from someone who has watched a lot of movies alone, and eaten in a lot of restaraunts by themself, I think having people eat my popcorn and talking during the movie would be a very annoying, but very desirable thing.

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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

I believe the reason most people find it odd to goto the movies by themselves nowadays is because it seems to have become a social norm. I mean, honestly, how many other people did you see there by themselves? I'm not frowning upon what you did, I actually applaud you for it. Way to break down the walls of whats socially accepted.