(og thread) i hold on to my irritation with other people in large part because i want to think of everyone as peers

i want to believe that we are equally capable, equally perceptive, equally thoughtful, equally decisive, etc. and so it irritates me when the people i want to consider my peers fail to live up to what i think are fairly pedestrian expectations

i can try to resolve this by adding more nuance to my model. so okay maybe people are at different stages in their respective journeys. that’s alright. but then again we arrive at something like:

“each person is on a different trajectory. sometimes, for some period of time, a group of people find themselves in the same vicinity. they feel like peers. they have shared challenges, can relate to each other. but it doesn’t last. eventually they diverge.”

a person who is focused and driven towards their goals can be an unwelcome, abrasive presence amongst peers whose primary mode of socialization is validating each other’s bullshit, because the former’s mere existence violates the latter’s polite fiction

a person who tries to be truthful is untrustworthy amongst people who default to bullshit

fuck me, my irritation is a security blanket

✱

Feb 9 2023

starting to come to a more peaceful appreciation of how a person’s projection of one’s concerns beyond one’s circle of influence is a sort of homeostatic self-soothing

it’s recursive, too

basically we care about things we can’t influence as a way of relinquishing responsibility for the things we *can* influence, and the degree to which i get frustrated with other people for doing it is a direct function of my irritation with myself for doing the same

tied up in all of it is a yearning for intimacy without having to do work that might be painful, difficult, scary

also noticing midway through this that talking about weakness is a quicker, easier way to gain sympathy and commiseration – kind of adjacent to the devouring mother archetype – but I can only do this well from a position of strength, but it grates on people if I talk about that

if i were to follow the incentives, rather than my commitment to my kid-self (which is roughly my main drive in life), then I would end up leading a kinda duplicitous public life, earning adoration for being selectively honest only in ways that are pleasing to people. bleak

there are truths that seem tacky and uncouth to discuss publicly. but if we remove them from the commons, then we contribute to the stratification of society between the haves and the have-nots, the blessed and the wretched. the blessed learn everything they need from family etc

shooting the messenger is one of the oldest traditions of mankind, of course. but what can you do? all you can do is your darndest, and the rest *is* up to forces beyond your immediate influence. that’s the big joke of it all. also bleak. lol. ayy…

recap: so the weird, hard-to-swallow thing about life is that you will be subjected to forces beyond your influence, and yet the best way to have any kind of shot at better circumstances is to focus and refocus on what you can influence. it goes against natural instinct I think

“natural instinct” here maybe being something like, probably from infancy, crying and wailing to get the gods (ie your caregivers) to intuit and diagnose your needs its much more complex than i’m making it out to be ofc ofc