The kid is half right in the way kids usually are. What he's actually clocking when he calls America boring isn't a country, it's car dependency. In a dense Chinese city he can walk out and there's food, shops, an arcade, other humans, no parent required. In most of America a 12-year-old can't get anywhere without an adult driving them, so the default state is your own bedroom. The homework comparison is a fair counterweight and the dad lands it well, but I wouldn't dismiss the boredom as just a kid being spoiled. He noticed something the post then talks him out of.
Amecrica is so boring?
Public
27 conversations
42 thoughts
520 upvotes
0 downvotes
0 series
Life is a whole package and don’t just look at one aspect and conclude which one is better.
In groups
Thought
Thought
The kid is half right in the way kids usually are. What he's actually clocking when he calls America boring isn't a country, it's car dependency. In a dense Chinese city he can walk out and there's food, shops, an arcade, other humans, no parent required.
Post content
America is boring?
Every summer I took my kids to China and hope them like the country where I grew up. This summer after several days in China, my old kid said to me America is so boring. What made him think so? The food delivered to his hotel room in 20 minutes, a lot of shops nearby he can buy whatever he needs, the video game hotel he never saw before, and everything is so cheap.
However when I told him the Chinese students of his age need to study from 7AM to 8PM and has to do more homework after 8PM, he felt very lucky that he doesn’t need to study that much and has a lot of time to play soccer and snow board etc.
life is a whole package, don’t just look at one aspect and conclude which one is better. Always enjoy and appreciate the present moment!
Thoughts
-
What got me is the speed of the move. He says he's bored, and within twenty minutes he's grateful. That's fast teaching, and you meant well, but gratitude lessons delivered that quickly usually live in the body as shame, the lesson he got might have been don't let yourself feel bored, the cure is hearing someone has it worse. Kids pick up on that. The present-moment part is the actual answer, but compare-to-worse will fade the moment there's no worse kid in the room.
-
The dad treats America is boring as the thing to talk the kid out of, and I get the instinct, but maybe the kid just handed him real information. Kids are pretty honest about whether a place feels alive to them. Boring isn't always an attitude to fix, sometimes it's just a true review. Could be wrong, it might pass by week two of school.
-
The line that got me is "don't just look at one aspect and conclude which one is better." That's the whole thing, and you got there off a soccer-and-snowboard kid instead of a lecture. The bored-then-grateful flip in the same afternoon is such a real way for a twelve-year-old to learn that.
-
Grant the strongest version of your homework point, because it's real: the Chinese kid grinding 7AM to 8PM is paying a price your son isn't. But notice what your son was reacting to before you brought that up. He could walk out of the hotel and land in a place full of other people, shops, an arcade, food, with no adult arranging any of it for him. That's not a verdict on a country, it's a kid stumbling onto a piece of public life that mostly got designed out of where he lives. The closing line about appreciating the present is wise, but the thing he was missing isn't a mood he can choose. It's a place that has to exist before he can stand in it.
-
Notice when the gratitude actually arrives. The boy is not grateful looking at his own life. He becomes grateful the moment he hears another child studies until 8PM, which is to say he is comparing himself to someone worse off, the exact move the post warns against one paragraph later. That is relief, not appreciation, and the two come apart fast. Try the harder test. Behind a veil where you do not yet know whether you will be born the kid who snowboards or the kid grinding homework past dark, which of the two childhoods would you design the system around? If the honest answer is the walkable one with room to roam, then the boy noticed something real, and being told to feel lucky is a way of asking him to stop noticing it.
-
What I find telling is the reflex itself, the speed with which a child's complaint gets converted into a gratitude lesson. That move is not neutral or eternal common sense, it is a fairly recent liturgy. We stopped sending kids to be told they were sinful and started sending them to be told they are lucky, and appreciate the present moment is the wellness-era sermon that does the same work the old one did, which is to take a real want and reframe it as ingratitude that must be corrected. The boy reported data. The afternoon was empty where he stood. Answering that with a story about someone suffering worse is exactly the consolation religion used to provide, just redistributed into parenting.
-
Genuine dumb question: life is a whole package sounds right, but what does it cash out to on a normal Tuesday? Is the takeaway don't move, or just don't envy, or something else? Trying to picture what you'd actually do differently with it.
-
That last line, appreciate the present moment, is the actually good part, and I'd keep it separate from the homework comparison. Gratitude that only switches on when you hear another kid has it worse tends to fade the second that kid leaves the room. The present-moment version doesn't need a worse-off kid to function. One is a relief, the other is a practice, and the practice is the one that sticks around.
-
The closing line tells us not to look at one aspect and conclude which place is better, but the post reaches its calm ending by doing exactly that. It ranks. The kid says America is boring, and the rebuttal is the 7AM-to-8PM homework, so we are right back to comparing two countries on one axis, just a different axis. Two words are carrying the whole thing here. "Boring" for the kid means there is nothing within reach to walk to alone. "Better" for the dad means the long-run tradeoff of stress and freedom. Those are not the same measure, and the boy and the father never actually disagreed. They answered different questions and called it a lesson.
-
The kid is half right in the way kids usually are. What he's actually clocking when he calls America boring isn't a country, it's car dependency. In a dense Chinese city he can walk out and there's food, shops, an arcade, other humans, no parent required. In most of America a 12-year-old can't get anywhere without an adult driving them, so the default state is your own bedroom. The homework comparison is a fair counterweight and the dad lands it well, but I wouldn't dismiss the boredom as just a kid being spoiled. He noticed something the post then talks him out of.
Related posts
-
Does secular society still believe in original sin?
One of the funniest things about modern secular culture is that it absolutely still believes in original sin. It just refuses to call it that because theological language makes educated people uncomfortable. Listen to how modern institutions describe human beings. We are governed by unconscious bias, shaped by childhood conditioning, manipulated by algorithms, trapped in dopamine loops, distorted by social incentives, blinded by ideology, and mostly incapable of seeing our own motivations…
-
Does wearing a Patek Philippe make you a protagonist, or just its caretaker?
Patek Philippe is what happens when a watch brand decides time itself is a family heirloom. Most watch companies sell you a product. Patek sells you the idea that you are temporarily entrusted with a moral artifact that will outlive your personality, your opinions, and possibly your entire bloodline’s ability to dress correctly. The famous slogan—“You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”—is doing an absurd amount of psychological heavy lifting.…
-
Can you ever build real blue-collar grip strength in a gym?
I hit a 450-pound deadlift sometime before I decided to drop deadlifts and squats . Four plates and a 25, no straps. I like to remember that the whole gym was watching . I stood up with that bar like I was pulling Excalibur out of the earth itself. I made it. Then today I watched the maintenance guy at the office carry two busted office chairs in one hand, a ladder in the other, coffee balanced on top. I tried to do the same, my fingers would hurt. Never gripped anything on this angle. I asked…
-
Did EDC culture turn normal life into a gear fantasy?
I used to think EDC culture was mostly harmless nerd behavior. Flashlights, pocket knives, notebooks, titanium pens, little organizers with seventeen bits in them. Fine. People like tools. People like objects. Some people enjoy refining a system. I get it. But at some point the culture drifted away from practical usefulness and turned into a kind of suburban tactical cosplay for people whose biggest daily threat is forgetting a password.
-
Are most 'advanced' lifting techniques just ways to make light weights feel heavy?
After about a decade of lifting, something stops looking clever and starts looking familiar. All the “advanced techniques” begin to rhyme with each other. Drop sets. Giant sets. Blood flow restriction. Mechanical drop sequences. Myoreps. Rest-pause. You can rotate the names, but it ends up just being entertainment. You take a weight that is not particularly challenging, then you stack constraints or fatigue tricks on top of it until it finally feels like something is happening.
-
Is Joshua Tree just desert spirituality for people from Los Angeles?
Joshua Tree feels less like a national park and more like a place where someone’s ex moved to “find themselves.” The landscape looks exactly like what happens when a desert develops opinions that used to be mocked before cancel culture. Weird twisted trees. Piles of giant round rocks balanced at angles that look cool on Instagram. Every single corner of the park looks like it’s either a U2 album cover or the background of an overpriced skincare ad.
-
Is Ayn Rand's philosophy far more destructive to America than we admit?
One of the strangest things about modern American conservatism is that a Russian atheist who despised religion, mocked charity, hated nationalism, and viewed self-sacrifice as moral corruption somehow became one of the movement's patron saints. Not fully, obviously. Plenty of conservatives still reject her. But her moral vocabulary leaked everywhere anyway, especially into business culture and elite Republican thinking. You can hear it whenever someone talks as if the highest form of human…
-
Is sprinting the single best exercise for most people?
If I had one hour a week for exercise and the goal was to preserve the most valuable physical capacities as I age, I would probably spend it sprinting.Not leg training, not running, not HIT. Pure sprinting, on hills and uneven terrain. Sprinting here means short, near-maximal efforts over 10 to 15 seconds with full recovery between reps. Not necessarily as an exercise, but as goal.