Quote from @JD Martin:
Dealing with a lot of people today seems to be getting more difficult than I remember. Everyone walking around is made out of glass. If you say anything to them about anything they shatter.
The part that is discouraging to me (at least as pertains to BP) is that we've had some big hitters drop off our boards the last few years and I wonder how much of it is just exasperation with some of these people. I get it that people's interests change over time, but I also know for a fact that some people just say the hell with it, I don't have to listen to someone's whining that I'm a big bully because I gave it to them straight, I can do other things with my time.
It's late enough in the thread so I can trot this out.
One of the best books I've read in the last ten years is
On Killing. The author documents how startlingly difficult it was in WWI and WWII to get conscripts to willingly shoot straight at the enemy, the process it took to dehumanize the bad guy enough to get a new soldier to reliably take a straight shot down a rifle barrel at him. But the military found ways to do it, implemented new training techniques, and whole generations of new soldiers have responded to them. This has worked to change our culture.
In another book from a completely different perspective, Alvin Toffler in
Future Shock said in 1970 that he expected that people would generally become more and more high-touch, more disconnected in their social relationships, less willing to listen carefully. He was not wrong, either.
I think the entire process of dehumanizing and demonizing others has become a lot quicker than it used to be with most Americans as we've become more and more high-touch over the years.
This terrifies me sometimes. If you've seen Jesse Piemons take over the whole film in his five minutes in
Civil War, I think you know where I'm coming from.
But to get away from that kind of existential dread, I also think that a lot of the newbies that come to these particular forums wonder WHY there are a bunch of people with actual money who have actually done something with it actually sitting at their keyboards typing away here and trying to help others. I think the simple existence of the BP forums are really hard to understand at face value for the general public.
There's got to be a reason, right? Does BiggerPockets pay us to socialize like this? As I've said here in the forums in the past, I was part of the Home Depot Seeds program once, and I got thousands of dollars of merchandise every month to write about it. I think a lot of newbies think it has to be something like that. Somewhere in there, there has to be a mechanism that makes the regular commentators some kind of money.
Really, how do you explain what it's like to live the different versions of this real estate life and be as focused as we are on things that are so different from what most people think about? There's got to be a catch, right? There's no way that these people are just giving this knowledge away...and then there's no way that those who have listened to good advice and profited greatly by it are just trying to return the favor.
So to end this, thank you, JD. I've picked up A LOT from you in the last few years.
