You can be continue to be frustrated being incorrect, or you can accept that you’re lying to yourself and move on.
It’s that easy. Human memory just doesn’t work like that.
> Life must be great as a baby: to be fed and clothed and carried places in soft pouches, to be waved and smiled at by adoring strangers, to have the temerity to scream because food hasn’t arrived quickly enough, and then to throw it on the ground when it is displeasing. It’s a shame none of us recalls exactly how good we once had it.
Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency. They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the kindness of their parents and other older humans in their environment. They lack language so have no other way of communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic need (and on that note, even knowing what those needs are half of the time, given that the ability to make sense of ones own senses is still being developed).
All of this while life is a nonstop series of first experiences, meaning that even the most mundane thing can (and often is) surprising, confusing and overwhelming, leading to a high need for reassurance, because being scared and wanting to make sure that you're really safe is honestly a very sensible reaction to have when you add all of those things up.
I'm not saying life sucks for babies and toddlers, but as a parent of a two-year old myself it's pretty obvious to me that it's no walk in the park for them either.
"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"
The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.
There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....
Ignoring the fact that you inserted a narrative that wasn't present in the article, YES OF COURSE THIS HAS A MAJOR IMPACT.
I'm a half-Dutch, half-Chinese man who spent the first years of my life in Ghana being blissfully happy and welcomed in the local community, and then the rest of my childhood being miserable in a Dutch village because I was excluded from that local community, all because I was "the local ethnic minority".
And I'm half-Asian, with parents from a higher-education background who had a good income. I only had to deal with "diet racism" compared to pretty much any other ethnic minority/social background in the Netherlands.
I've lived this and the fact that people like you keep insisting that my life experiences do not exist because they did not experience it is infuriating.
Anyway, fair points about the phone being a serious issue. But for goodness sake stop pretending that race and socio-economic background has no impact just because it makes you a little uncomfortable.