Over the last couple months, I've done a lot of surfing around, and I've lurked a whole bunch of other messageboards related to camping, hiking, alpine climbing and such. In the process, I couldn't help but notice that there seems to be a good number of people out there that seem to not only personally dislike hammocks or camping in them, but they actually have hostility towards them, and people that use them.
Now, I've slept on the ground, in a tent, on a pad (I own 3 of them), and I've had a great time. I don't like it as much as my hammock, and I've discovered that I dislike pads in my hammock, but I don't have any pent up resentment towards the inanimate objects or the people that use them. I just don't care.
I could pretend to be high minded and say that I take a "hike your own hike" attitude, but that's not it. It's just plain old apathy. If someone asks my opinion, I'll give it to them, but basically I consider how someone else chooses to camp (beyond littering, vandalism, and other types of criminality that effects everyone else) to be none of my business.
It seems to me that this type of hostility can't purely be one-sided. There's got to be something that hangers do that contribute to it. I see it as irrational, and obviously some of it is just people online being _____'s, but some of it's not.
Let's do a little self-examination and ask ourselves "What are we doing to cause this irrationality."
What do you suppose those things are?
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