wordsmithic - Tumblr blog

[wordsmithic]

you have no idea how much i actually love all the insane pieces of... human intellectual creativity regarding history or linguistics or religion or society. all these tales about every language deriving from the one language of author's choice ancient peoples coming from distant stars and settling earth billions of years ago secret writing systems where every symbol has some enegry streams and hundreds of meanings forgoten civilizations fucking aliens. not to mention less cosmic beliefs people have about the past. this is like the water of life. the essence of human condition. endless epic lore someone just fucking came up with. when i hear shit like this i feel omniscient and omnipotent in the ways god does not

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Ayman Baalbaki

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not gonna check it but looks fun

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slavic word for heaven is

👍

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Not me getting excited at the sight of a public sector position in the Acheron (Αχέροντας Γλυκής) region. For a few seconds I imagined my life next to the Acheron river, in the picturesque Glyke village (where small part of my book takes place , help 😭)

Then I saw that the ASEP contest was closed. Hurrayy.....

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Mémoire d’Afghanistan, Roland and Sabrina Michaud (1980)

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@melaniin.goddess on IG

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Dionysus and Ariadne in the Hades game art style (a failed attempt 🥲)

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They're talking about horse riding

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Dune landscape in Athens

Every year Greece gets sandstorms from the Sahara desert. Their intensity depends on the area and season.

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My Greek grandparents starved, lost family during the wars, got beaten as kids, got tortured by invaders. However they were legitimately scared about their grandkids. The "what are they doing to you??" question we often got from their generation in a horrified tone says a lot. They were worried about how much we had to learn, the 562 extracurriculars + extra tutoring for school, the pressure to get a degree (if not more) to be accepted in the most basic jobs, and if you want a job that pays normally you have to be daily bombarded with information in addition to the storm of more knowledge that you constantly need to be updated on to survive your day-to-day life.

We don't even get to build and own a house like they did, because things shift fast and our job skills can be compared to a global standard. Low wages aside, hometown market is often saturated, so to find work you need to rent some place elsewhere. This means that if you're living paycheck to paycheck, you lose your house as soon as you get fired. Because someone else owns the place, it's not your ancestral house.

Not to mention...apartments worse than my starving grandma's house cost half the average salary in urban areas where 70% of Greece is concentrated. Due to the hyperspecialisation of our society we have to pay for many services and prices have skyrocketed. Ofc you can avoid all this by living like a post-war Greek who didn't even step foot inside their local cinema and never drunk a gazoza. No one's stopping you.

Financial difficulties aside (cause you can live... mo(l)destly as we established), the other factors remain the same. Grandparents had it rough and worked hard to survive, and were still shocked by our isolated hyper-fast reality and the stress we quite literally can't afford to let go.

I get where you're going with this but they very much did have extreme stress back then. Usually about if they were going to have enough to eat

(summary of my ramblings at the bottom!) I apologise in advance for the essay, I might be in the wrong here, i'm not an anthropologist or a historian but I do have strong feelings about how all humans around me are stressed out of their damn minds to the point of being empty husks so here goes. i'm also posting this in case anyone has a different opinion/more knowledge. My grandmother was raised in the german occupation. Famously a period when people here starved to death. But it was mostly the people in Athens who did. My grandma didn't have proper food as a kid, but she ate weeds and slugs and fruit. And when the occupation ended, they were still dirt-poor, but there were legumes and chickens and bread to eat, even though our agriculture was obliterated by the war. I'm sure this differs from place to place, but for people in rural areas, living off of the land if they know how to grow a few crops is very much possible.

My parents are working all day at jobs that demand them to be mentally there at all times and behave a certain way, they often work during their free time at home, and they're still stressed about how to afford groceries and rent and bills, and they owe thousands to the bank. My great-grandmother had time to weave, take care of her garden and animals, go to church as much as she wanted, get a full night's sleep and have friends. She couldn't read or write but she didn't have debts to anyone nor any bills to pay (because that village got electricity only in the 80s). the pace of life and the amount of responsibilties we have to keep track of now is a constant source of stress that never ever stops. Not to mention the constant influx of information about everything, which we are not made to handle. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that we're always aware of what's going on in the entire world, I think it will bring about necessary social changes one way or another, but it has to get evened out and reduced at some point. There is always, constantly, many things to worry about. How many people have the luxury of letting their mind wander during their work hours? how many people have the luxury of saying, I am not feeling well today and it's raining, I'll just nibble on some bread and veggies and stay inside and not work? I absolutely wouldn't want to live back then because I do like running water and toothpaste and modern medicine and electricity, but specifically for the stress and anxiety, I believe we're at a very bad place right now.

This is why I mentioned other animals. They might struggle to find food and go hungry often in the wild, but if you put them in a limited space with constant interaction not on their own terms or crowded conditions or lack of peace and quiet or disrupt their natural day-to-day cycle they will 100% be miserable and die faster than they would in the wild, especially "smarter" animals.

TLDR: occasionally going hungry isn't the same as living your every day full of comparatively milder stress without breaks ever. our lives are way too full of responsibilities and keeping track of things now.

[wordsmithic]

this is APPARENTLY a HOT FUCKING TAKE but

i would rather someone live out the rest of their life dependent on or addicted to a pain medication that helps with their pain, than suffer in pain that could be helped for the rest of their life just so self-righteous dicks can say "thank god they're not an addict"

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it’s funny, someone said I was “based” for calling the United States a foreign country, but…..that’s just what it is to the rest of the world! like it’s not a radical or provocative word choice, that’s literally just how the majority of people on earth view it

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Interior of an Egyptian Temple by Albert Holz