Jim Henderson wrote:
> It sounds like this article was full of pop-psychology nonsense to me.  
> Dismissing past experiences is denying the things that make you who you 
> are and prevent you from learning from past mistakes.  It is human nature 
> to want to avoid things that remind us of painful times and events.  It's 
> a self-preservation mechanism.
> 
> Jim

Well, a lot of that is my interpretation. But, even I am not saying, 
"Deny your past.", just, "Be aware of why you have the reaction." In 
point of fact, I am not even specifically talking about the contents of 
the original article the post was made to. I don't remember what it was, 
but I think it was some tirade being made by some wacko about how chat 
rooms where all evil, because it wasn't a church social. The comment I 
referred to was someone else mentioning the statement made in someone's 
book, that in the authors opinion, most of anything made in any given 
time period isn't worth much, and that history shows a tendency for 
people to filter out most of the bad things, except when they 
can't/don't, and then they tend to, instead, filter out the good things. 
This means, in a practical sense, that, for example, Mozart may have 
written some brilliant unknown composition, only it got lost in 
someone's attic, while some piece of total junk written in the same 
period survived, purely do to having been included in someone's play. 
History loses some things it shouldn't, and keeps some it shouldn't. 
People tend to help this, by mis-associating things. For example, this 
hypothetical lost work of Mozart may have landed in the attic due to 
some big event that just "happened" to cast a negative light on music 
for the only person that had an intact copy.

Its possible that you may be missing out on something because you are 
allowing a real issue you had to prevent you enjoying something that had 
nothing at all to do with it. And its hardly pop-psychology. Fact is, 
its key to some techniques used to rid people of phobias as well, since, 
if you think about it, this is a form of phobia and/or obsession. And in 
such cases, "getting past it", requires disassociating the original 
event from the unconnected trigger. This is harder to manage with 
"positive" associations, but.. I don't think you would disagree that 
some such things can be unhealthy too, if they detract from ones ability 
to deal objectively with something new. You certainly wouldn't likely 
disagree if I was talking about someone insisting on wearing their 
"lucky jock strap" in a ball game, because they formed some irrational 
association between wearing it and winning, but this is hardly different 
than calling 100% of everything on TV "bad", because its not a 1960s 
western, or an old war movie.

The point is, not to deny your experience, just... don't let it turn you 
into the grumpy old man that hates everything new, because that "new 
thing" reminds you of The Beatles, instead of some other band you 
actually liked. ;)

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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