What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?
joylere.substack.com
joylere.substack.com
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.
So many years later and I still think about that rock face for some reason.
Also: genderfluid isn't a sexuality. You've taken a terrible tumble into things you do not understand.
I didn't feel this way when I was younger. YMMV.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
But you should probably maybe ignore most of it. Because there is more shared between us than we want to admit.
I was talking to some guy here in Bangkok recently last night. He's Jewish and I'm Jamaican. It turns out our lives were remarkably similar. Right down to me working in the same city he lived in 30 years ago. We were making jokes about both of our Jewish friends because we experienced the same things with them.
We experienced a lot of the same things too. It was very interesting having that more than hour long conversation.
He experienced a lot of negative things in his life. I experienced many of the same negative things in my life. We spoke about a guy on my team here from a totally different very poor South East Asian country who experienced similar things in his life too.
So yes, maybe the order of things, or the severity of things that happen in each of our lives are different, but most of the encounters and experiences are similar to what other people see.
We are not that special. We are not that unique. We eat the same things, watch the same shows, want the same things for our children.
The difference between now and before, is that we could put people in fewer buckets, now there are a few more buckets we can put people in. And really, if you stop to thing, not that many more buckets, since human nature sort of remains consistent regardless of the times.
And the sooner we understand that a white nationalist has many similar experiences to a black nationalist, the sooner we will realize, that hey, "that guy is very much like me".
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.
So much advice about communication is couched in the language of victimhood vs unspecified aggressions. That’s fine for memes on LinkedIn, maybe. We should expect more from someone who studies psychology for a living.
No one should say “It’s not about me.” It’s always, for you, about you, first. You judge yourself, position yourself, posture yourself, plan your next move, on and on relentlessly. You must do this. Even the author of this piece wrote it for her own needs, first, and expressed a philosophy that makes her feel better.
Conversation is an exchange. When someone points a finger at a supposed “takeover,” that in and of itself, is attempt at a takeover. EVERY utterance can be interpreted as a takeover if you choose to see it that way. Or instead of takeover you can see it differently: as energy flow. Sometimes I talk to a friend who needs me to hear him. He indicates this by talking without stopping. He hasn’t “taken over,” though. He has signaled his need and I can choose to accept it or make a counter proposal of my own need.
A better way to have written about this would be for the author to stop blaming people for wanting to share anecdotes and connect in that way (which IS a kind of empathizing, regardless of what she claims). Instead, simply say “if you don’t make room to hear quiet narratives from ambivalent or timid people, then you may never hear them. If you care about these people, consider how your behavior might be disabling them.” In other words, it is all about me, and I am playing a First-Person Talker game as I live my life. So if I want be safe and happy I better do things that encourage the people my happiness depends upon to open up to me.
That is my choice, and it is a pragmatic choice, not a moral one. No moral order requires me to self-censor my voice, because if that were true then we would have to say that anyone who ever spoke up in a conversation was committing a sin, since anyone who breaks the silence has blocked others from talking.
I went on a date with a woman in 1991. I talked constantly. She seemed reluctant to say anything. We were married a few weeks later. I am still married to her 31 years later. After we were married she helped me learn how to make quiet space for her to share her thoughts with me. I do this because I choose for her to be happy; because it’s all about my own safety and happiness, which comes through her.
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.
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.
Merely examining ones own life would reveal the infinite complexity within our conscious experience.
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.
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.
Everything else is just variations on that theme. You like Italian food, and this person likes Amish food, well whoop-de-doop.
People make a bigger deal out of Italian food or Amish food or Istanbullian food because what else are ya gonna do? I'm not saying it is good or bad, but I think I pretty much know almost everyone's story. You're born, you do stuff, then you die. And some will go to heaven, most to hell even though they think they'll go to heaven, and we atheists are just going to die.
.
If you like Bill:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
.
Or if you like your Ecclesiastes:
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can describe;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear content with hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
and what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a case where one can say,
“Look, this is new”?
It has already existed
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance
of those who came before,
and those yet to come will not be remembered
by those who follow after.