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To be curious about the anomaly requires us to spend time and effort studying what does not fit in. Our fixation is disruptive to the standard ways of thinking.
Most people don’t want new ways of thinking or unique insight: we want stability. Even when presented with a new truth, we graft it onto our old ideas, slightly expanding our worldview without having to rethink or dismiss our intuitive normalcy.
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A friend commented on this, illustrating the prevalence of negativity to shape your perception of the world, and our blindness to mundane excellence.
Similarly, we are not rewarded for insights, but are punished for errors: we try harder not to make mistakes than we do to grow.
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Our reasoning is sound: given this then that. But if our given assumption is not real then a myth has been propagated, and our prediction will be wrong.
Examples: Does congress serve the people? Do jobs really want talented hard workers? In both cases the answer is no, which should change your predictive calculus.
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The joy of manual labor is not only the ability to produce something tangible.
More importantly, this is a skill you can get good at; your skill speaks for itself.
In white-collar office politics, there are seldom straightforward measurements. Every action is fraught with navigating the politics of choice and opinion, hierarchies, and turf management, while metrics are a sliding scale of ad-hoc rationalization.
Yes, you can still be micromanaged and overworked doing manual labor, but the appeal is in the objective proof that transcends petty politics.
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Consider that aesthetics is a distancing from enjoyment to analyze or judge.
True belief has no distance, while aesthetic belief is a complex game played for enjoyment.
The difficulty is when your aestheticized emotions are confused (or bleed into) your identity as true belief: at this point, everything is the game.
Even anger and fear, which appear natural, are enacted a satisfy a role: they produce an effect that affects others, providing the aesthete with pleasure in their manipulations. Once beliefs become aesthetic and sincerity is deserted for the joy of the game, there is a deeper problem: When escalating artificiality is the reward, it may be pleasurable to invoke horror and watch the world burn.
(ideas from Charles Blattberg)
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Name-calling is labeling, which is a shortcut to feeling superior. Higher morality would require complex understanding, which leads to compassion rather than condescension.
Worse yet, once labeled (defined), we dismiss the hard work of further consideration or re-investigation.
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Capitalism allowed all men to be equal rather than blindly despised.
The traditional tribal divisions of race, religion, nationality, and gender were supplanted by individual virtues of ambition, merit, and commerce. Necessarily, destructive tendencies emerge, yet trade made others potentially valuable. Thus consideration replaced prejudice.
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After reading a social media article you agree with, studies show that it further polarizes you into your prior beliefs if offered the opposite point of view. The opposing extreme is too foreign and alien to draw you to the middle.
When you’re shooting for a target you do not aim for the edges (polarized views); you aim for the center. If you want the conversion to a thoughtful reality, aim for the center instead of radical evangelism.
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"Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality."
To be led away from yourself towards some alien thing is to encounter something independent of your consciousness. You cannot take it over, deny it, or swallow up.
(Quote and paraphrase of Iris Murdoch.)
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Systems are good, but if your system doesn’t adapt you are wasting time and energy.
You don’t need to treat a fluff book like a research paper, or a practical guide like a deep novel.
However, with people we should fight the willingness to categorize and treat them in efficient, prescribed ways. By listening we can almost always find value, which enriches us both.
