The most important shift I’ve made in my life was when I started approaching conversations with the attitude that the other person could teach me something, no matter who it is. Sometimes it takes some digging, but I’ve found it to be true.
Often, I find those other places teach me a lot, but not intentionally. Seeing someone's mistakes is easier for me to learn from than explicit messages. Less survival bias, too.
This is really apparent if you've ever worked in retail, specifically small stores with few customers at a time. One of the parts I loved about working at vape shop was talking to people.
I’m a little drunk and I have not even read the article but I was discussing this very thing with my friends. We have so many stories and we are each going through so much struggle individually. Why can’t we be kind and considerate of each other?
And the recent heatwave? The last argument with my brother was so over the top it did permanent damage to our relationship. Upon reflection I do wonder how much heat had to do with it.
No. I would rather think its the lack of proper education on how to behave morally, how to have make valid argument, how our choices impact the life of others, and lack of self control training.
Non sequitur. Inflation and education quality are unrelated.
(Perhaps they are related when inflation gets really bad, but we aren't anywhere near that. And, education wasn't great when inflation was very near zero for a decade, and neither was social kindness.)
- The one you employ as a manipulation to get something you want out of an interaction. Not to make a moral judgement on this, we all do it, when you want to buy a pack of gum at the convenience store you affect kindness (we call it "being polite") in order to make the transaction go smoothly.
- The one which requires empathy. Empathy requires a sense of self, combined with the ability to recognise the same selfness in others.
Because going through a struggle tends to turn people inward and makes them see everything, including the harm they do to others, as if they were a victim just doing what they have to do to survive. It is very hard to overcome it because you have to become a kind of martyr, who accepts the reality of their suffering but who's too holy to blame it on everyone else, or even on yourself.
Kids are often nicer than adults because their lives are so easy, but if they don't learn to bear a cross (this is the best metaphor I know) they'll become nasty as they get older, as people reject them and their health starts failing. It's one thing to be a nice young man, another one entirely to be a nice overweight balding 60 year old with joint pain and a skin disease. That's not to say it's about age. It's about how good you feel, and age is just the big conveyor belt that everyone goes down whether they're ahead or behind their demographic.
You can watch this play out in you next time someone says or does something annoying when you're still smarting from a minor injury, like a stubbed toe. You'll tend to act as if they were the ones who stubbed it because blame wants to earth itself.
Generally, people who experience childhoods which are impoverished of the stimuli necessary to develop robust senses of self and the coping skills that come with it are left much less resilient to life struggles in adulthood.
If you have developed a sense of self early in childhood, then you are able to develop empathy for others, if you bring empathy in to a relationship, then you can be trusted and trust others. Think about it, you cannot rely on a relationship that does not have trust as it's basis, you cannot be trusted in a relationship if you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings, and you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings if you cannot perceive or understand your own.
If you have a sense of self, and then you have developed empathy, and then taken that empathy in to relationships, and if you have then made the moral choice with that to be a kind person, then that enables you to form resilient relationships. And you take those relationships with you in to adulthood. These relationships, and the coping mechanisms that got you them, are highly effective cushions for the shocks of adult life. Life changing struggles can still afflict such people and bring them down, but then they are much more able to recover since they still have the scaffolding they developed in childhood and they can rebuild.
For those with a childhood impoverished of the necessary stimuli, it is much more difficult, because they are rebuilding it all from scratch.
And then there are those for whom the experiences of life have been so damaging, possibly combined with genetics, that they may never be able to develop a functioning sense of self, or empathy and go through their entire lives. And yeah, the older you get, the more difficult it gets because you may not have the attributes that would enable you to turn it around earlier in life (family or school friends with whom relationships haven't yet been completely poisoned, good looks enough to meet someone new, meeting ambitious people your age at the start of their careers who are looking to network, etc..)
I think that what you call "learning to bear a cross" is really an application of empathy, and an important one. It's the knowledge that "if I have an emotional meltdown, those close to me will be forced in to the role of caring for me, which emotionally drains them."
It's such an important skill to know when to hide or bear your hurt, to spare others the burden of care, and when to share your hurt to acquire some care. It's a difficult balance to strike because if you go neglected for too long, you will completely meltdown, but if you elicit care too often, you will also elicit compassion fatigue from your carers (especially as an adult, I mean, parents will pretty much pour all the care required in to their young children, it's not that they are limitless, but the limits are way higher).
To be less transactional about it: you don't make every negative event be all about you, because you recognise that things affect others, even things that seem to only affect you. That requires a quite refined and well-developed sense of empathy where you are balancing various overlapping and conflicting needs of, potentially, several people at once.
Because empathy and kindness have to be instilled in children for it to develop. We all have the capacity for it, but the capacity has to be nourished.
Adult lives generally unfold in either one of two ways:
1. Wondering how so many people have made it to adulthood without having developed empathy. Even if you ignore empathy as a moral condition, it's acquisition is a practical condition which is a pre-requisite for managing many other aspects of adult life (careers, relationships, interactions with strangers, etc.). The idea that so many people are roaming the earth without having developed this capability is astonishing, slightly terrifying.
2. Wondering why, despite all my best efforts, I am unable to connect with anyone. Does everyone else experience this profound sense of hurt and isolation? Even when I am with people, I feel alone. Nothing I do alleviates this condition, except momentarily. I feel like I even lack a connection to myself, or that my self doesn't exist, except maybe in rare moments. It's like there is a void and I must fill it with something: religion, drugs, sex, spending, etc.
Ironically, the author mentions what you've done here directly and calls it "Narrative Take Over":
"We try to communicate "I understand" and go on to provide a personal anecdote. Our story is usually of something that we think is in the experiential vicinity of what someone is sharing with us. This, however, is not empathy."
The easiest way to be kind and considerate is to listen and attempt to understand rather than making assumptions. Even on the Internet :)
When you live in a system that increasingly benefits the few at the expense of many, anger is a natural immune response. A healthy catalyst for change, really.
In a word, righteousness. The human mind grew up in a world of divided bands and fighting. Us vs Them is a very comfortable paradigm. So now we have people fighting about Woke-ism or Gamer's Gate. People get bitterly angry about this because their personal morality is challenged; shame is a knife to cut the sinner. We feel a shared sense of righteousness with our own band - how dare they oppress minorities / how dare they challenge the way I was raised / how dare they take away my rights and personal choice / how dare they behave so recklessly.
Maybe you're angry about one of those things right now. Anger is an emotion that tells you to change something. If you can't change the thing you get angry about, then you get angry at that feeling of not being able to fix things; you get angry at people that get in the way. You get angry at people on 'the other side'. Then they respond by defending themselves and saying things that make you more angry. Once the fighting starts, you have the original problem and the original feelings about the problem, and you also have anger about the fighting, which quickly becomes bitter.
I don't know how or if humanity will stop this at scale. A path forward would be choosing not to use shame and righteousness, but that is a deeply alien feeling. Of course you want racists/wokists to feel bad; they are doing harm and they want you to feel bad! It would be unrighteous to not attack them!
----
I do not believe wokism is a problem in the way that racism is a problem. I believe that many people experience historic structural inequality. I believe that some people want their own race to prosper ahead of other races. I believe that people try to advance their own personal interests without regard to the power structures they participate in. I don't believe that shaming non-minorities really helps fix this.
Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
This word was popularized by the site Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and I believe it, as the opposite, hearkens back to solipsism, the philosophical idea of you being the only one to exist. It is interesting to see this word "sonder" not referenced at all in the article, I would have imagined it a meme within the Internet at this point.
> Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.
I feel the same, but then I think to myself: maybe those people are experiencing some quality of existence that I'm not, and thinking to themselves "this is the life".
It’s called the Aesthetic. From aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel.” , it’s when your senses are working at their peak and thinking goes to the background.
So you can enjoy an aesthetic experience in a far different manner than the unaesthetic, like reading, or figuring out a puzzle, etc.
I don't think so. There is of course a childlike magic in looking at the clouds and dreaming of the people who live there. But the feeling of fantasy a child gets when looking at clouds does only partly stem from not knowing what they consist of.
I have many topics that still fascinate me as much as they did when I was a kid – to be honest, maybe even more than back then, because now I know how ridiculously complex they are and what ultra-specific conditions needed to be there for this to emerge. Knowing more doesn't make things less miraculous, but more so.
And despite knowing a lot about fluid dynamics and clouds I can still just stare at a beautiful cloud in awe and wonder how it would be to live up there in the naive, romantic sense. I know a lot about acoustics and what makes my instrument work, but in the end I can still just sit there and play it. If anything that knowledge allows me to connect more intimately with the world around me
Losing your childlike side is something that happens to many people, because they are afraid of how it is being perceived from the outside – and then they internalize this so much that they don't even allow themselves awe and wonder even inside the privacy of their own heads.
Maybe this is coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect? So if someone is in the valley of people who don't know a lot, but think they know everything, the wonder of the world around them might indeed be lost for them.
I am completely with this angle as well. In a way I was saying 'Ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer'.
The fluid dynamics thing is a good example. Another one is the Demoscene. I knowing how it is done, or the limitations they are working with - that is where the magic comes from.
Did you know that water vapor is less dense than air, so it rises, and this is part of why clouds form?
Seriously, the atomic mass of H2O is 18. Compare to the other major parts of air which are N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40, and CO2 at 44. Everything beyond that is a rounding error.
maybe I'm just an asshole but I've felt whatever is the opposite of sonder these days when I come across people that are so clueless and inattentive they might as well be zombies.
it's hard to reconcile, right? conversely I've been the clueless guy enough to realize we all do it. like getting angry at random trash and then thinking "you know, maybe someone dropped this by accident when they thought they got it into their pocket"
Although you may be right, and they may be wrong. Not that I advocate going around thinking like this as it'll only lead to unhappiness and poor relationships (and you'll also very possibly be wrong).
Shades of the old joke: A man driving on the autobahn hears a newsflash on the radio "Warning for drivers on the A7 northbound! A car is going the wrong way!" "The hell ya say!", snorts the man , "It ain't just one car. It's hundreds of them!"
This reminded me of another joke. Apologies if I botch it, I’m terrible at joke delivery.
A person is driving with a passenger. The driver goes straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “that light was red! Aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.” After crossing several red lights this way, they come to a green light and come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “my brother might be out driving.”
A man climbs into a taxi, "Airport please, I'm late!".
The driver speeds up and starts going straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “That light was red! I'm not that late, aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “Don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.”
After crossing several red lights this way, they come closer to the airport, and at a green light they come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “Why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “Oh, my brother works on this side of town."
I try to remind myself that there are perfectly fine reasons for this to occur. For example, the person might suffer from insomnia. They might have a lower functioning brain due to developmental issues. They may have been in an accident which caused brain trauma. They might operate on a wavelength sufficiently different from you in that moment such that communication seems impossible, and you perceive that as their deficiency rather than a mutual problem.
The reasons to be compassionate are far more realistic and numerous than the possibility of a person being a zombie. It’s best to assume they have a story and a reason attached to their current state that, given time to consider, you would probably relate to them easily.
The most common explanation is one that didn't make your list, which is that they might not care at all about the subject being discussed. If it's a work situation that prompted it, that's by far the most likely answer to why they aren't using any brainpower to think about how to use the new system: their brainpower is already being used in the background to compare fishing lures. :-)
This was me as a child, quite literally. What kind of lure should I use after school at the lake, and how can I function minimally to survive class until then?
These people likely have rich inner lives. What makes it hard to hope and dream other than incredible sensitivity, difficult experiences, and complex stories and histories that paralyze a person as they move through life?
Life can be incredibly difficult. It can become scary to dream. The will and desire to do so comes much more easily when you world tells you it’s permissible and rewarding to do so. For many of us, this doesn’t happen. Dreams get crushed over and over, hopes washed away, and fortune doesn’t favour us nearly as much as others.
Not all of us are Epictetus, Viktor Frankl, or other wise philosophers who could take adversity and transform it into meaning and joy. Even so, I doubt very much that this kind of person is anything like a zombie. Maybe outwardly so, but that means very little.
There's another explanation which should be very realistically considered, but which people are (probably intentionally) blind to: they're not as dumb as you think, and you're not as smart as you think.
Sounds like a thing that everybody would acuse each other of in any given hyperindivisualistic society. I mean especially in the US you sadly have quite some people who would rather hurt themselves than have a penny go to the help of others. This is beyond pure indifference towards strangers. People actively despise living in a society (even if they ultimatly profit from it).
I usually have that reflection when I'm travelling. It's indeed a depressing feeling. Last time it happened I was in the middle of Rome/Italy with many unknown faces around me, that I was seeing for the first time and - thinking at that time - that I will never see them again.
I've had a melancholic moment traveling in a bus on the narrow roads in Nepal, and seeing some rock faces, just realizing that while the rocks will be there long after I am gone, I will never set my eyes on the same rock face again.
So many years later and I still think about that rock face for some reason.
The sad thing is, it's a fake Tumblr word not recognized by any dictionary. Not OED or MW or anywhere else. Tumblr has coined a lot of interesting words though; "genderfluid" is another that started as a joke, then had people adopting it as sexuality for real.
Official language recognition generally lags the real world by a significant amount. A word can be in use for many years before it even gets a consideration into a dictionary. Dictionary's reflect the world, not dictate it.
I’m not sure when this supposed joke began, but from what I found[1] with a quick search “genderfluid” was used at least as early as 1994 and not as a joke. The same source cites an appearance in Urban Dictionary in 2007, but the entry doesn’t appear anymore and the Wayback link is currently returning 503 errors for me.
A hallmark of immaturity is a person who makes assumptions about how easy someone else's life must be just because they are well off financially, have a bubbly persona, or live in a state of peace and gratitude. To be human is to suffer and at the very least to watch people you love suffer and sometimes die. I wish people would remember this, but more often they attempt to quantify the pain and create portraiture of a person they know nothing about, compare it to their own and then assume they can be bitter, resentful, or dismissive towards them.
But suffering and wealth are mutually exclusive events. plenty of non-rich people also suffer. This would only apply if you knew the rich person was suffering. Without this info, it's reasonable to assume that their life is actually better.
I have a similar philosophy (if I dare call it that): every person is living in their own world, shared by no one else.
What I mean is, reality is an interpretation of what we observe. Not only does everyone observe a unique combination of events from mostly unique perspectives, the unique events and experiences before an event change how current events are interpreted.
Two people can look at the same thing and see two different things, but build upon that and consider that no two people, from their own perspectice, live in the same world. You can find other people that share many of your perspectives but never all. No one will live in your world after you and no one has lived in it before you and no one will ever know it.
Thinking this way has helped me understand a lot of things. When I was younger, I couldn't understand how some people do this and that but then as life and time changed me so that I do or say those same things, I am seeing how those people didn't just make different decisions, they were really living in a different world.
When someone dares to step forward and speak up, listen. Just be. It's one of the most powerful things you can do. Hijacking conversation doesn't create connection, it breaks it.
I might be in a minority here but I feel a huge sense of relief when someone shares an anecdote that tells me they understand what I'm going through, because they've been through similar things themself.
(I'm probably oversharing, but one of my daughters has some rather severe developmental difficulties and has threatened to kill me, my wife, and our other daughter more times than I can remember. It is oddly comforting to hear other peoples' stories and know I'm not alone).
Same here. If the person doesn't derail the conversation, but provides context to how they interpret what I might be saying, that's comforting and shared empathy.
It depends if they're using it to empathize, or if they're using it to call attention to themselves. It requires a self-awareness to know that the moment is "not about them".
I feel the same, it's not that clear-cut. I think it can serve to convey understanding, familiarity, and also safe space to share that particular thing without judgment (i.e. like saying "don't worry what I will think, I've been there"). That's why I also have the need to do it when listening to others and caring to make them more comfortable and trusting to share.
Of course, the difference is usually whether it is done more as a side-note while keeping focus on the first person, once or twice in that conversation - vs getting excited and shifting focus to own experience, continuing to expand and branch the retelling, or remembering 5 additional occasions when that happened...
I think it can generally be clear whether you care and are participating in the conversation by doing it, or being self-absorbed and not really wanting to hear and emphatize...
Also, that sounds like a quite difficult situation, and glad to hear that you had opportunity (at least at those occasions) to share and feel un-alone in it. I hope it gets better.
That is very interesting. I've never understood that phenomenon. I've been through a bunch of hard things but another person telling me they've gone through it too essentially does nothing for my emotional state. I actually prefer not to hear more about problems and distract myself instead with doing something else.
> Our compassion can fatigue when we consume a high volume of trauma narratives through the media
I have never thought about this or know if I believe it to be fully true. But it's a fascinating perspective that, if nothing else, has some level of truth to it.
Definitely something I'll ponder as I think about important, real life relationships.
Hmmm I like the message but I partly disagree with some of what they are saying in regards to narrative tap out. I’ve found some things no one can truly understand some things that people go through unless they went through it themselves.
I’ve encountered it both ways, and theres just some things that people seem to only be able to understand on their own through experiences.
Opening up to other people is exhausting, they frequently either don’t know what to do or they try and act sympathetic or empathetic but eventually usually aren’t.
I think often about Frodo in lord of the rings. The burden he had to carry alone and how it changed him. I think many people have that one ring they carry around. You have to look at it from a Birds Eye view, the way our lives all run and are interconnected. It’s said that either someone you know directly is going through something rough or that person knows someone who’s got it rough. Thinking of that helps me be nicer and more patient with people.
But i think it’s foolish to expect them to be. I’ve been burned many times putting faith in people I shouldn’t. The only people who usually truly get you understand you because they went through it themselves. Of course this is just my experience, but I’ve found it keeps on ringing true as i get older and older.
I’ve felt this way before. But is it the same as your feeling? Probably not exactly, but I bet we could connect on it at some level.
Ultimately I’ve learned that it doesn’t serve me well either way to be too guarded or to expect a lot from others. I strive to be open and vulnerable with people despite past disappointments. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes something beautiful happens that I could not have anticipated.
Until you meet enough people and talk to them on a deep enough level and then you realise that those stories are all remarkably similar and that we're all really experiencing the same world together.
For much of my life, I was a jerk. I was insecure and often became offended and unkind when things didn't unfold the way I thought they should. It really screwed up my relationships and in my mid-50s, I found myself pretty much angry and alone in the world. I was constantly stuck in a story no one else really knew much about.
What I came to understand was that I had picked up certain ideas about myself over the course of my life. "I am this" and "I am that." They weren't really true, and so I was always kind of at odds with the world.
Over a period of years, I started to understand the situation better. I was fortunate to be able to hire a good therapist, and I worked with him for four years. I started reading about Buddhism, Advaita-Vedanta and other non-dual philosophies. I began to meditate and attend a local Buddhist temple.
I also listened to a lot of Alan Watts, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille and other spiritual teachers.
I also read and watched a lot of the work of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, Gabor Maté and others.
Eventually I came to realize that my false, egoic self was just an illusion, and that I no longer needed to take anything personally. I also developed a greater sense of compassion for other people, and started to notice how they were caught in the same trap that had held me for so many decades.
At this time, I don't really take things personally anymore. I'm generally at ease in the world. If this kind of stuff interests you, you might enjoy the following video:
It's not easy to make a fundamental change to your outlook like that, well done. I think most of us have at least a bit of what you're describing of yourself pre-mid-50s, and could use a little more untangling of these fixed narratives about ourselves.
I'm a big fan of Alan Watts', his talks are absolute gold.
Now that you have been through this once, do you think it's possible that if you went through all of the material you consumed in this period (assume photographic memory), would you be able to prepare a presentation (customized for yourself) with content that would be adequate to accelerate this process (and speculatively, a plausible range of how much) if you were to deliver itself to your past you (say, at the time that you originally started, and maybe also earlier points in time in your life)?
Well, it typically takes...I dunno, 2 to 5 years or so to make some substantial progress (with luck) I'd say, I wonder what could be accomplished in MUCH tighter time frames, even giving up some aspects.
Basically, it's one of those "what is possible?" questions.
One thing I've noticed with various different spiritual teachers is that it seems like a personality type match is highly beneficial - for example, Rupert never did much for me, whereas people like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Jiddu Krishnamurti I can listen to for hours. I wonder if there's something that could be done about this as well.
To speed up a process, I usually try to identify the rate-limiting step (the constraint.)
I would guess that one of the factors that affects the time required to see through the illusion of a separate, egoic self, is "How badly do you want a
much better existence than the one you've been living?"
Invalidating a low-level assumption of the kind we are discussing has to trigger a lot of re-evaluation by a person. In other words, it really turns everything on its head. I think people are often very smart, in a sub-conscious way, and they can see where self-inquiry might lead, and they say to themselves, in essence, "Screw that. Too scary!"
On the other hand, if you're really suffering, you'll probably pay a high price to escape it.
Unless you are stuck in a very poor country or with a debilitating illness, there are few other eras in history where you have as much freedom to change this.
> It's possible to grow numb when inundated by stories of hardship and pain.
Sometimes the problem is skepticism. There are people that tell stories who I'm relatively sure are fabulists. It's a lot of work to act engaged with a story that doesn't ring true.
I do agree that everyone is living a story that you know nothing about. But I think everyone on some level is aware of this lack of knowledge about other peoples' lives. In fact I feel it's rather obvious that even the most random person on the street lives a very complex life.
A call for compassion because people are "unaware" of the complex lives other people live is a feel good narrative that isn't true. Everyone is fully "aware."
The true horror of human nature is this: We are all aware of the hardships and the stories everyone else goes through. But our compassion has limits. At its most fundamental level, nobody cares about you and you don't really care about others.
It still works. Same way the bad guy in the movie gets told "I have a wife and kids" and sometimes spares the bank guard.
It is very different what we know when we sit on the couch and muse about it, from what we know when we are directly engaged in a particular set of actions. It helps when you're in the second to be reminded.
Spared because he slightly cares. Slightly, or else why did he instigate the hostage situation in the first place? On a gradient you can say he cares about 0.001%.
0.001% rounds to 0 which is inline with what I said. On a fundamental level, we don't care.
>It is very different what we know when we sit on the couch and muse about it, from what we know when we are directly engaged in a particular set of actions.
You're musing too. And you mused the opposite of what I mused.
I would say, my analysis goes beyond simple musing. It's evidence based.
Observe the actions and inaction of the world and yourself. How much of your wealth have you donated to people in need? You have enough wealth to save dying people. There are definitely people in the US who need money to pay for chemo or some other treatment for some terminal disease. How much effort did you spend to find these people and donate a fraction of your wealth to save a life?
None. People have already died because of your inaction. Entire complex stories have been already been lost... And does this inaction keep you awake at night? No. Because you don't care. And neither does anyone else.
This is evidence that what I am saying is more inline with truth then simple musing.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI didn't feel this way when I was younger. YMMV.
> Crowley, a demon: [during Jesus's crucifixion] What has he said that made everyone so upset?
> Aziraphale, an angel: Be kind to each other.
> Crowley: Oh yeah. That'll do it.
inflation and social media.
before we had just inflation. now we have social media that magnifies it.
inflation then widens wealth parity gap and social media reminds individuals to take risks they cannot afford and so on....
inflation causes stock prices to rise and factory outputs, exports to rise leading to more energy consumption.
edit: i think i know why your brother is mad at you
(Perhaps they are related when inflation gets really bad, but we aren't anywhere near that. And, education wasn't great when inflation was very near zero for a decade, and neither was social kindness.)
if income is stagnant money loses value faster due to inflation.
- The one you employ as a manipulation to get something you want out of an interaction. Not to make a moral judgement on this, we all do it, when you want to buy a pack of gum at the convenience store you affect kindness (we call it "being polite") in order to make the transaction go smoothly.
- The one which requires empathy. Empathy requires a sense of self, combined with the ability to recognise the same selfness in others.
Kids are often nicer than adults because their lives are so easy, but if they don't learn to bear a cross (this is the best metaphor I know) they'll become nasty as they get older, as people reject them and their health starts failing. It's one thing to be a nice young man, another one entirely to be a nice overweight balding 60 year old with joint pain and a skin disease. That's not to say it's about age. It's about how good you feel, and age is just the big conveyor belt that everyone goes down whether they're ahead or behind their demographic.
You can watch this play out in you next time someone says or does something annoying when you're still smarting from a minor injury, like a stubbed toe. You'll tend to act as if they were the ones who stubbed it because blame wants to earth itself.
Thanks for sharing
If you have developed a sense of self early in childhood, then you are able to develop empathy for others, if you bring empathy in to a relationship, then you can be trusted and trust others. Think about it, you cannot rely on a relationship that does not have trust as it's basis, you cannot be trusted in a relationship if you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings, and you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings if you cannot perceive or understand your own.
If you have a sense of self, and then you have developed empathy, and then taken that empathy in to relationships, and if you have then made the moral choice with that to be a kind person, then that enables you to form resilient relationships. And you take those relationships with you in to adulthood. These relationships, and the coping mechanisms that got you them, are highly effective cushions for the shocks of adult life. Life changing struggles can still afflict such people and bring them down, but then they are much more able to recover since they still have the scaffolding they developed in childhood and they can rebuild.
For those with a childhood impoverished of the necessary stimuli, it is much more difficult, because they are rebuilding it all from scratch.
And then there are those for whom the experiences of life have been so damaging, possibly combined with genetics, that they may never be able to develop a functioning sense of self, or empathy and go through their entire lives. And yeah, the older you get, the more difficult it gets because you may not have the attributes that would enable you to turn it around earlier in life (family or school friends with whom relationships haven't yet been completely poisoned, good looks enough to meet someone new, meeting ambitious people your age at the start of their careers who are looking to network, etc..)
It's such an important skill to know when to hide or bear your hurt, to spare others the burden of care, and when to share your hurt to acquire some care. It's a difficult balance to strike because if you go neglected for too long, you will completely meltdown, but if you elicit care too often, you will also elicit compassion fatigue from your carers (especially as an adult, I mean, parents will pretty much pour all the care required in to their young children, it's not that they are limitless, but the limits are way higher).
To be less transactional about it: you don't make every negative event be all about you, because you recognise that things affect others, even things that seem to only affect you. That requires a quite refined and well-developed sense of empathy where you are balancing various overlapping and conflicting needs of, potentially, several people at once.
Well I, for one, would love to. It's those hateful divisive others who are the problem.
Adult lives generally unfold in either one of two ways:
1. Wondering how so many people have made it to adulthood without having developed empathy. Even if you ignore empathy as a moral condition, it's acquisition is a practical condition which is a pre-requisite for managing many other aspects of adult life (careers, relationships, interactions with strangers, etc.). The idea that so many people are roaming the earth without having developed this capability is astonishing, slightly terrifying.
2. Wondering why, despite all my best efforts, I am unable to connect with anyone. Does everyone else experience this profound sense of hurt and isolation? Even when I am with people, I feel alone. Nothing I do alleviates this condition, except momentarily. I feel like I even lack a connection to myself, or that my self doesn't exist, except maybe in rare moments. It's like there is a void and I must fill it with something: religion, drugs, sex, spending, etc.
"We try to communicate "I understand" and go on to provide a personal anecdote. Our story is usually of something that we think is in the experiential vicinity of what someone is sharing with us. This, however, is not empathy."
The easiest way to be kind and considerate is to listen and attempt to understand rather than making assumptions. Even on the Internet :)
Because if you miss an opportunity you might miss putting food on the table specially if you live in a developed country.
Maybe you're angry about one of those things right now. Anger is an emotion that tells you to change something. If you can't change the thing you get angry about, then you get angry at that feeling of not being able to fix things; you get angry at people that get in the way. You get angry at people on 'the other side'. Then they respond by defending themselves and saying things that make you more angry. Once the fighting starts, you have the original problem and the original feelings about the problem, and you also have anger about the fighting, which quickly becomes bitter.
I don't know how or if humanity will stop this at scale. A path forward would be choosing not to use shame and righteousness, but that is a deeply alien feeling. Of course you want racists/wokists to feel bad; they are doing harm and they want you to feel bad! It would be unrighteous to not attack them!
----
I do not believe wokism is a problem in the way that racism is a problem. I believe that many people experience historic structural inequality. I believe that some people want their own race to prosper ahead of other races. I believe that people try to advance their own personal interests without regard to the power structures they participate in. I don't believe that shaming non-minorities really helps fix this.
Merely examining ones own life would reveal the infinite complexity within our conscious experience.
This word was popularized by the site Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and I believe it, as the opposite, hearkens back to solipsism, the philosophical idea of you being the only one to exist. It is interesting to see this word "sonder" not referenced at all in the article, I would have imagined it a meme within the Internet at this point.
[0] https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...
"There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
To believe otherwise is to have lost the wonder of discovery.
Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.
I feel the same, but then I think to myself: maybe those people are experiencing some quality of existence that I'm not, and thinking to themselves "this is the life".
Not knowing how a cloud works is magical for instance. But taking this line of thinking too far can be disastrous. There is a happy middle ground.
So you can enjoy an aesthetic experience in a far different manner than the unaesthetic, like reading, or figuring out a puzzle, etc.
I have many topics that still fascinate me as much as they did when I was a kid – to be honest, maybe even more than back then, because now I know how ridiculously complex they are and what ultra-specific conditions needed to be there for this to emerge. Knowing more doesn't make things less miraculous, but more so.
And despite knowing a lot about fluid dynamics and clouds I can still just stare at a beautiful cloud in awe and wonder how it would be to live up there in the naive, romantic sense. I know a lot about acoustics and what makes my instrument work, but in the end I can still just sit there and play it. If anything that knowledge allows me to connect more intimately with the world around me
Losing your childlike side is something that happens to many people, because they are afraid of how it is being perceived from the outside – and then they internalize this so much that they don't even allow themselves awe and wonder even inside the privacy of their own heads.
Maybe this is coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect? So if someone is in the valley of people who don't know a lot, but think they know everything, the wonder of the world around them might indeed be lost for them.
The fluid dynamics thing is a good example. Another one is the Demoscene. I knowing how it is done, or the limitations they are working with - that is where the magic comes from.
Did you know that water vapor is less dense than air, so it rises, and this is part of why clouds form?
Seriously, the atomic mass of H2O is 18. Compare to the other major parts of air which are N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40, and CO2 at 44. Everything beyond that is a rounding error.
Therefore, all else being equal, wet air rises.
Prove me wrong, find something that's not a node on a complication network.
A person is driving with a passenger. The driver goes straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “that light was red! Aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.” After crossing several red lights this way, they come to a green light and come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “my brother might be out driving.”
The driver speeds up and starts going straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “That light was red! I'm not that late, aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “Don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.”
After crossing several red lights this way, they come closer to the airport, and at a green light they come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “Why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “Oh, my brother works on this side of town."
‹ducks›
The reasons to be compassionate are far more realistic and numerous than the possibility of a person being a zombie. It’s best to assume they have a story and a reason attached to their current state that, given time to consider, you would probably relate to them easily.
This was me as a child, quite literally. What kind of lure should I use after school at the lake, and how can I function minimally to survive class until then?
My teachers thought I was a complete idiot, haha.
People who have no more hopes or dreams, other than to make it somehow through the day.
Life can be incredibly difficult. It can become scary to dream. The will and desire to do so comes much more easily when you world tells you it’s permissible and rewarding to do so. For many of us, this doesn’t happen. Dreams get crushed over and over, hopes washed away, and fortune doesn’t favour us nearly as much as others.
Not all of us are Epictetus, Viktor Frankl, or other wise philosophers who could take adversity and transform it into meaning and joy. Even so, I doubt very much that this kind of person is anything like a zombie. Maybe outwardly so, but that means very little.
Some people have this as default, after being grinded down enough.
There is then also no more rich inner life.
Only different grades of sadness, stress and numbness.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY
So many years later and I still think about that rock face for some reason.
1: https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Genderfluid#Etymology
Also: genderfluid isn't a sexuality. You've taken a terrible tumble into things you do not understand.
What I mean is, reality is an interpretation of what we observe. Not only does everyone observe a unique combination of events from mostly unique perspectives, the unique events and experiences before an event change how current events are interpreted.
Two people can look at the same thing and see two different things, but build upon that and consider that no two people, from their own perspectice, live in the same world. You can find other people that share many of your perspectives but never all. No one will live in your world after you and no one has lived in it before you and no one will ever know it.
Thinking this way has helped me understand a lot of things. When I was younger, I couldn't understand how some people do this and that but then as life and time changed me so that I do or say those same things, I am seeing how those people didn't just make different decisions, they were really living in a different world.
I might be in a minority here but I feel a huge sense of relief when someone shares an anecdote that tells me they understand what I'm going through, because they've been through similar things themself.
(I'm probably oversharing, but one of my daughters has some rather severe developmental difficulties and has threatened to kill me, my wife, and our other daughter more times than I can remember. It is oddly comforting to hear other peoples' stories and know I'm not alone).
Of course, the difference is usually whether it is done more as a side-note while keeping focus on the first person, once or twice in that conversation - vs getting excited and shifting focus to own experience, continuing to expand and branch the retelling, or remembering 5 additional occasions when that happened...
I think it can generally be clear whether you care and are participating in the conversation by doing it, or being self-absorbed and not really wanting to hear and emphatize...
Also, that sounds like a quite difficult situation, and glad to hear that you had opportunity (at least at those occasions) to share and feel un-alone in it. I hope it gets better.
I have never thought about this or know if I believe it to be fully true. But it's a fascinating perspective that, if nothing else, has some level of truth to it.
Definitely something I'll ponder as I think about important, real life relationships.
I’ve encountered it both ways, and theres just some things that people seem to only be able to understand on their own through experiences.
Opening up to other people is exhausting, they frequently either don’t know what to do or they try and act sympathetic or empathetic but eventually usually aren’t.
I think often about Frodo in lord of the rings. The burden he had to carry alone and how it changed him. I think many people have that one ring they carry around. You have to look at it from a Birds Eye view, the way our lives all run and are interconnected. It’s said that either someone you know directly is going through something rough or that person knows someone who’s got it rough. Thinking of that helps me be nicer and more patient with people.
But i think it’s foolish to expect them to be. I’ve been burned many times putting faith in people I shouldn’t. The only people who usually truly get you understand you because they went through it themselves. Of course this is just my experience, but I’ve found it keeps on ringing true as i get older and older.
Ultimately I’ve learned that it doesn’t serve me well either way to be too guarded or to expect a lot from others. I strive to be open and vulnerable with people despite past disappointments. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes something beautiful happens that I could not have anticipated.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
What I came to understand was that I had picked up certain ideas about myself over the course of my life. "I am this" and "I am that." They weren't really true, and so I was always kind of at odds with the world.
Over a period of years, I started to understand the situation better. I was fortunate to be able to hire a good therapist, and I worked with him for four years. I started reading about Buddhism, Advaita-Vedanta and other non-dual philosophies. I began to meditate and attend a local Buddhist temple.
I also listened to a lot of Alan Watts, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille and other spiritual teachers.
I also read and watched a lot of the work of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, Gabor Maté and others.
Eventually I came to realize that my false, egoic self was just an illusion, and that I no longer needed to take anything personally. I also developed a greater sense of compassion for other people, and started to notice how they were caught in the same trap that had held me for so many decades.
At this time, I don't really take things personally anymore. I'm generally at ease in the world. If this kind of stuff interests you, you might enjoy the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX1IFUDNtto
edits: Fixed up typos and missing words a bit.
I'm a big fan of Alan Watts', his talks are absolute gold.
Regarding Alan Watts, maybe check out the chillstep recordings of his different talks on YouTube, if you have not already done so. They are excellent!
Your question seems to be along the lines of "Is it possible to speed up the process of seeing that the separate, egoic self is an illusion?"
I think it is. In fact, Rupert Spira and others talk about "The Direct Path" for doing exactly this.
Why do you ask?
Basically, it's one of those "what is possible?" questions.
One thing I've noticed with various different spiritual teachers is that it seems like a personality type match is highly beneficial - for example, Rupert never did much for me, whereas people like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Jiddu Krishnamurti I can listen to for hours. I wonder if there's something that could be done about this as well.
To speed up a process, I usually try to identify the rate-limiting step (the constraint.)
I would guess that one of the factors that affects the time required to see through the illusion of a separate, egoic self, is "How badly do you want a much better existence than the one you've been living?"
Invalidating a low-level assumption of the kind we are discussing has to trigger a lot of re-evaluation by a person. In other words, it really turns everything on its head. I think people are often very smart, in a sub-conscious way, and they can see where self-inquiry might lead, and they say to themselves, in essence, "Screw that. Too scary!"
On the other hand, if you're really suffering, you'll probably pay a high price to escape it.
Not all of course. We do not just live for this moment, … at least not all of us believe in …
Just cannot say “nothing about”. Possibly “not all about”.
Tb;dr
Too bad a title do not read la.
Sometimes the problem is skepticism. There are people that tell stories who I'm relatively sure are fabulists. It's a lot of work to act engaged with a story that doesn't ring true.
I do agree that everyone is living a story that you know nothing about. But I think everyone on some level is aware of this lack of knowledge about other peoples' lives. In fact I feel it's rather obvious that even the most random person on the street lives a very complex life.
A call for compassion because people are "unaware" of the complex lives other people live is a feel good narrative that isn't true. Everyone is fully "aware."
The true horror of human nature is this: We are all aware of the hardships and the stories everyone else goes through. But our compassion has limits. At its most fundamental level, nobody cares about you and you don't really care about others.
It is very different what we know when we sit on the couch and muse about it, from what we know when we are directly engaged in a particular set of actions. It helps when you're in the second to be reminded.
0.001% rounds to 0 which is inline with what I said. On a fundamental level, we don't care.
>It is very different what we know when we sit on the couch and muse about it, from what we know when we are directly engaged in a particular set of actions.
You're musing too. And you mused the opposite of what I mused.
I would say, my analysis goes beyond simple musing. It's evidence based.
Observe the actions and inaction of the world and yourself. How much of your wealth have you donated to people in need? You have enough wealth to save dying people. There are definitely people in the US who need money to pay for chemo or some other treatment for some terminal disease. How much effort did you spend to find these people and donate a fraction of your wealth to save a life?
None. People have already died because of your inaction. Entire complex stories have been already been lost... And does this inaction keep you awake at night? No. Because you don't care. And neither does anyone else.
This is evidence that what I am saying is more inline with truth then simple musing.