Less Stress

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In thinking about getting together with family and friends, we might idealize perfect harmony.

Thinking back to family holidays or summer vacation gatherings as a child, it seemed like we always did.

At least at the kids' table.

Some kid's mom had laid out the master plan for a Thanksgiving meal, for example, and everyone would fill their plates and upon the first bite and intermittently thereafter add their own compliments to the celebratory din reverberating all around.  What a beautiful noise!

Some kid's dad would turn on a football game on TV, and the cousins would play Tripoly in the den.

Okay, in my mind, "some kid" was me, although we would also, for example, spend New Year's Day at Pete and Pat's and in summer we might meet at Granddaddy's farm after church.

Possibly because we have so much more information available as a result of the internet, however, our society has become increasingly fractured.  Everyone seems to believe themselves infallible on whatever their own hotbutton issues might be, if indeed we can find enough mutual agreement on vaccinations and masks to get together at all.

The fact that some families have become increasingly affluent as a result of being brought up right --- and by saying that, I know I become subject to a great many attacks for some kind of privilege, which I acknowledge as the privilege of being born in America, the land of the free and the brave, which of course leads to even more criticism, and blah blah blah...as I said, an increasingly fractured society --- and as a result individuals increasingly have lost all inclination to do anything other than what they personally prefer to do in exactly the way they prefer.

Rather than just going along with the flow for the day, we are more likely to ask, "Why should I compromise?"

Trying to cater to everyone's specific needs turns out to be not only difficult but often impossible, with the best efforts to reach reasonable compromise or outright submission being snubbed as insufficient.

That becomes particularly frustrating for anyone who wants to be generous by picking up the tab.

What's the solution?

It seems to me that what made being a kid at family gatherings so great was that there were parents to make the meals and enforce the rules, whereas now it seems that even inmates would be given full carte blanche to run the asylum.

A cruise is the perfect solution for affluent families and friends who want to have a reunion.

Everyone can go off and do their own thing.  If any people share common interests, they can take that excursion or attend that show together.

When they meet back together at the dinner table, everyone can order what they want, fixed the way they want it, at any meal.  

And nobody in the family has to do the dishes or clean the house before and after the party.

Less stress.  That's the name of the game.

Wes