• Nfamwap
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    61 month ago

    A few years ago I worked as a telecoms engineer. The role itself was pretty free-roaming and a large part of your working day was unsupervised and allowed you to make your own decisions and your day to day achievements were pretty much all down to you and/or the guys you were working with.

    Anyway, the company had a spell where they hired a lot of ex armed forces personnel into various engineering roles, many of whom had done long stints in the military. Pretty much every veteran I worked with was smart, hard working, organised and a joy to work with. With one caveat, most of them needed an ‘order’ to do a particular thing, or pushing into thinking for themselves. They had spent their entire working life in a structured, order based environment, that left them unprepared when they were given the freedom to think for themselves.

    I can totally get how homelessness and addiction problems can beset people when the structure they have spent their whole lives within, is suddenly not there any longer.

    • @dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 month ago

      That’s so interesting. Objectively, it’s neither good nor bad. The indifferentness of the universe to our coping with freedom is wild and interesting, a rollercoaster on its own