Disappointment

 

Disappointment Island

Just because we need a picture

Stolen entire from retiredmustang:

Disappointment can be a killer. Let me see if I can explain.

There is currently a bit of kerfuffle taking place on FB. It involves Larry Correia and David Brin as the two “antagonists,” if you will. The specifics aren’t all that important and I won’t link to it here. You can travel to the book of face and a quick search will allow you to read all the unpleasantness, should you so choose. What I want to suggest is that one of the two, David Brin, seems to exhibit what I’ve seen from other people when faced with profound disappointment when society consistently fails to change to meet up with their expectations. If this goes on long enough, some people don’t seem inclined to accept that and move on (or re-evaluate their expectations). Instead, something else happens. They begin to become bitter. With each successive year or realization that what they want or what they predicted hasn’t occurred and isn’t likely to, that bitterness increases. I have seen it happen to people in all walks of life more than once. In the end, they tend to become not just bitter, but angry, old and used up. It’s sad, really, because quite often they are people who held such promise and who were so optimistic about the future. To see them reduced to increasingly shrill sniping at those who dare disagree with them is almost embarrassing.

I don’t have a guaranteed recipe for how to avoid this. I just know I don’t want to wind up a tired, angry, bitter old man.