I typed some keywords into Google and found the full quotation here: https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184, but I'm not sure if he expands on it further in any of his books.
For context, I was implying that calling your teenager an inebriated sloth would surely not help the relationship.
I believe you when you say it's a term of endearment.
I guess I'm just finding some of my own teenage relationship with my father in the original post. My father didn't particularly approve or value how I spent my time and authority was a conflictual subject between us. Our relationship is still somewhat fifteen years later.
It's sad though. In a way, being sheltered from adversity has severely undermined his future potential. For what it's worth my father made me do things, and always reminded me that unless I get proper education I'll be shoveling shit on a farm for the rest of my life. I grew up in rural Russia, so this was the default state, which several of my high school friends entered, permanently.
I, on the other hand, gave my kid everything and sheltered him from everything, and undermined his future by doing so.
No problem re deletion - sometimes the uninteresting things are more interesting than the interesting ones!
As often happen Scott Alexander has written a nice article on the topic; in this case it is a review of a Chinese-American mother that lives the Chinese education system through a western lens and comes to like some of the differences.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...
In addition, one should keep in mind that there are ways to instill some discipline and self-control into one's children that don't turn them into mindless little automatons (as the Chinese school in the reviewed book tries to do).
Sure it's not anyone's "life's calling". What it is is a _baseline requirement_ without fulfilling which you can't really pursue higher calling of any kind in a meaningful way.
It is only the worker ants that can't comprehend that there can be other ways to meaningfully live this life.
Have you not heard of monks? Have you not heard of travelling musicians? Maybe not, maybe you don't get it, but I can assure you, a higher calling has nothing to do with resources and many of those who do find meaning in working, will be happy to break bread with a travelling monk or hear a musician's tune and tale of adventure.
It's the many colors of the rainbow that make it beautiful. How awful it'd be if we all wanted to work, so that our children could work, so that their children could work, until we've populated this planet and sucked it dry, with our boring diligence.
It may shock you, but if you don't put food on your table, you're going to starve and die. Sure, you might rely on the charity of others to provide for you. But if you're mentally and physically able to contribute and be productive, but choose not to, then you're a parasite.
I won't comment on the rest of your post, since it's full of personal attacks, insults, and pure speculation about the another poster's character and motivations. Ironically, the opinions you articulate in your post have a somewhat postmodernist vibe to them.
― Socrates
One day, fewer people will freely have children and maybe then this multi-thousand year cycle of brilliant parents complaining about their children's inadequacies will cease.
"Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.