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Originally Posted by 68style
Has anyone here had to deal with aging parents who start to get really weird views on stuff? Like, they've been normal politically speaking or religiously most of their life but then suddenly it's like they start latching onto FB groups or talking incessantly to small groups of people who have... less than ideal views of the world?
My mom is up there in age now and in the last 6 months I basically can't go over to their house anymore without getting in a big argument with her because she just goes on and on about trans people and pronouns and that she's glad Gal Gadot isn't in the Barbie movie because she's Israeli and "Barbie isn't Israeli" to which I told her if she actually watched the movie she'd realize how ridiculous that statement is since the whole point of the movie is that anyone can be Barbie. It culminated the other day in a mini-rant about China people forcing us out of our own city in front of my GF who, despite growing up in Canada, is from China. Of course she threw in the obligatory "except you" at the end because that makes it all better.
It's becoming quite tedious and I'm concerned about her shutting off, she seems to be becoming more and more negative and miserable the more she gets into this stuff. Suggestions to talk to different people or change up her echo room a bit or perhaps even just realize that what she's reading might not be truthful have so far fallen on very deaf ears.
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My mother is getting there, stemmed from health scares during the covid years that caused her to be paranoid about vaccines and general doctor recommendations presented in mainstream media. What's ironic is that my younger sister that lives with them is studying to become a doctor. Thankfully she isn't so far off and I can still talk to her on these topics in a civilized manner (for now).
My father is more trusting of doctor recommendations, but he's turning more disgruntled by all the social media content posted online regarding bad citizen behavior. Lately, he's fixated on dashcam videos and saying how dangerous it is to drive, and I have to remind him that a YT channel on dashcam videos will only show content involving crashes.
It's interesting (and worrying) to see them navigate the way around all this social media content - there's way more content compared to what they grew up with and they don't have enough experience to filter through what they're seeing and recognize each creator's biases.