I know.
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I personally find the words and similar messages to be kind of empty, but that has more to do with my particular world view perhaps. The one i have seen around that i genuinely liked was the “Live A Great Story” one because its something i’ve personally said before in similar terms.
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Actually, it might! You are not alone.
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The town where I live has an ongoing project that involves kids painting inspirational messages on rocks and then placing the rocks around town for people to find.
I happen on them now and then when I’m out with the dog; they’re a lot saccharine, a little poignant, and totally harmless. A typical example looks like this:
One day I found a blue rock hidden between the roots of a tree. I turned it over, expecting a message like “Never Give UP!” or “You Are Loved!” Instead, I received this gem:
Completely made my day.
It pleases me to think that there’s a rogue, proto-artist grade-schooler out there, irritated beyond endurance by the smug banality of the Kindness Rocks and determined to balance the scales in any way she can. I picture her, sitting up late at night, painting little nastygrams to the world and when the moon is low, hiding them around town for our edification.
I kept that rock and I’ve been looking but I’ve never found another like it.
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You’re OK by me! I would love to see that lawn sign & also want to print that quote out & put it on my wall. Thank you!
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I’m of two minds on this class of messages.
Barring specific cases where I have external knowledge that someone definitely doesn’t live up to their affirmative messaging in person; I have no reason to doubt the sincerity or positive intentions of people making these sorts of statements; so in that sense I have no reason to dismiss them as non-genuine; but I can’t shake the conclusion that, necessarily, statements of this sort are ultimately about the speaker rather than the audience.
In absence of any sort of evaluation of me, calling me beautiful can only be some combination of a belief that everyone is beautiful in at least some regard(and so a specific person must be beautiful) or a belief that humanity in general is beatiful and so individual instances of it must be; or potentially that ‘beautiful’ is a sufficiently mutable concept to embrace all people.
These needn’t be insincere beliefs; but even in full sincerity they are fundamentally abstract ones that apply to the speaker’s relationship with humanity generally or beauty as a concept. This isn’t to say that holding such nice ideas in that area is cliche, insincere, or otherwise bad(I have no reason to think so); just that such ideas are general; and cannot be specific to an individual about which the speaker has no specific information.
It’s only if there’s some space for individual judgement/assessment that the statement actually has a chance to be specific to the recipient rather than ultimately a reflection of the speaker’s general stance. This doesn’t mean that the assessment must be comparative; someone who assesses everyone they encounter as beautiful in some respect is still making assessments about them, rather than an abstract humanity, they don’t need an ‘unlike those ugly people’ clause to the assessment for that.
I think it’s the same class of distinction that has periodically come up (with a bit more theological charge) in discussions I’ve had with people who emphasize the all loving or all forgiving nature of a deity. I realize that, doctrinally, the demand that I be loved and/or forgiven on my merits isn’t going to fly(salvation by faith rather than works, postlapsarian concupiscence, etc.); but it’s still the case that when something will love or forgive anyone and anything that makes it deeply impersonal and abstract: it’s a pure expression of their nature in which your invovlement is purely contingent and incidental, it could be literally anyone else; and even if it weren’t anyone at all that property of their nature would presumably still apply.
I’ll save the 25 bucks and just stroll up and down the street, screaming “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!!” at passing vehicles and pedestrians. That would be nice.
I don’t think that whomever puts these up or makes them has bad intentions. Like i said i am a cynic so my interpretation has more to do with my state of mind in that moment, i’d rather not fully put my thoughts down on it because it’ll come across as me shitting on these kinds of messages when in reality i’m more on the indifferent side. They don’t do much for me but for those that do i do hope it makes some kind of difference.
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Heavily agree, I was going through a deep depressive funk about a year ago and feeling very down on the world after travelling through Myanmar and seeing the genocide denial in action, actually broke down crying seeing this sign in my home town. It’s such a small effort to put up but can have a deeply profound effect at the right moment
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As nice as that is, where I live that would be stolen or defaced not long after I set it in the yard. There are a number of malcontents about. I may look into the stickers though.
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