Huh. I mean, I am an American man, and I like documentaries. I'd really like your honest opinion: Do you think documentaries like this one made by a seemingly British guy at the "History Time" channel are boring? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dXYBGm-_zE) I can see how for a lot of people they are boring, but do you think they're boring? What would you consider to be a documentary that isn't boring and is worth watching?
I think the deeper message you're getting at here is that we can waste away our lives. The question is: What is a wasted life, versus a meaningful life? Passively doing anything, even watching non-boring documentaries, is in the end a rather wasted life. To my mind, a meaningful life means one or both of the following: (1) building strong communities that strengthen democracy and free society, or (2) individually making new things, or producing new scholarship/art. Ideally both, but just one alone is sufficient.
When it comes to building communities, whether as one's paid profession or as a volunteer, I think that one key ingredient our modern societies lack is awareness that non-governmental democratic governance is the only path towards healthy communities and organizations/businesses. I say this as a libertarian conservative who considers myself rightwing, but this is one leftwing issue (basically, worker/employee ownership & control) that I fundamentally agree with and wish the left would stop ignoring and go back to advocating strongly for worker/employee ownership & control. Here's an article of mine about that. (https://medium.com/non-violence/stakeholder-control-fighting-over-employee-status-calculating-worker-shares-1c8c76ec8962) I really believe that worker/employee ownership & control would fix the walking on eggshells dynamics that you bemoan. Our modern societies are defined by governments controlled by women (who are the majority of voters and of government bureaucrats) and the mostly male police/military forces that carry out the women's orders. If we men focus on building non-governmental organizations (businesses & volunteer orgs) and communities that build camaraderie and fix society's problems bottom-up without the systems of bureaucrats/police forcing the views of women who are the majority of voters & bureaucrats on us all, then we men can establish a healthy balance to our lives & societies.
(I just checked my claim about most bureaucrats being women. Overall I think it’s true when you count county-level and city-level bureaucracies, which seem to tend to be mostly women. At the state level it’s maybe slightly more male, and the national/federal level is slightly male in the USA but slightly majority female in the UK. But counting county/city bureaucracies might put it slightly overall at majority female even in the USA. And then consider that at all those levels of government, women tend to hold mid-level management and administrative positions from which they can influence how policy is implemented more than the men who tend to hold front-line-level physical/manual labor jobs like maintenance. True, men dominate the upper-levels, but again, those men in particular are beholden to women who are the majority of voters. So, overall, counting county/city government employees, the fact that women are the majority of voters, and that women bureaucrats tend to concentrate in mid-level management/administrative positions that do influence how policy is implemented, I think it is true to claim that our governments are controlled more by women than by men.)
