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Narcissism is an internal protection, a selfishness that paradoxically closes others out while demanding from them.
To encounter one who somehow dismantles the walls to provoke genuine concern becomes the narcissist’s scariest moment: to care is an infinitely more difficult a journey.
From Walter Kern
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We get caught up in extremes, arguing hyperbolic hypotheticals and slandering the middle road.
There is a fear of being labeled “lukewarm” or “hypocrite” for not going all the way: we seek purity in all positions and all ideologies.
The unfortunate irony of purity is isolation (manufacturing your own loneliness). Maintaining your position precludes change; this insight (purity is an isolating, alienating sickness) is required to embrace commonality, rationality, respect, or diversity.
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We love an inversion of common concepts: it feels like wisdom to flip understanding.
However this tendency is not always sagacious but instead formulaic, prompting a popular dismissal of the forthright as pedestrian.
inspired by: Goethe, “Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.”
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Relationship fights tend to get caught up in an “instance.” There are moments of disagreement; both sides pitch themself as rational, the other as hurtful or inconsiderate, and a list of details and grievances unfolds.
You can choose to make war, but the details are irrelevant. You could get past them in a second if… if something else more fundamental was repaired.
Someone (maybe both parties) doesn’t feel loved. What if you choose to love them so thoroughly that they stop acting out? Would loving them, instead of focusing on your pain, also heal you?
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We tend to moderate justification, never going all out in either direction.
The calculus was done for us long ago: constraint and middling allow continued participation in a pluralistic, democratic group, which has more benefit than voicing (or enacting) aggressive justifications.
Yet, many people feign moderation and plurality is rampant with extremism, which infers that moderation is a disguise of the coward, the bully, the idiot, and the intelligent. The only true believer is the boring.
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Achievement is hitting the mark, which requires us to incrementally measure and adjust.
Soon, we are successful: we have reached and superseded the goal.
We have become excellent at increasing the measurement and manipulating the scorecard metric, but have we displaced the goal with a measure?
Strathern’s law states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This replacement can become a subversion, such as when NYC police needed to maintain high crime numbers for funding, they implemented a “stop-and-frisk” policy that infringed on citizens’ rights. Instead of “protect and serve” to inflate the measure it required harassment.
This is similar to a simulacra, where the original motivation is lost, yet the real-world effects are amplified and out of control
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In the pre-digital era, a universal similarity of content was reflected back to the mass audience (the public): they gazed into the mirror of media and (mostly) saw their values reflected back. (This is the pre-collapse tower of Babel.)
The digital era fractured the mirror into shards, which captured groups and separated them, provoking fragmented views from which yelling erupts.
In a mythic, psychoanalytic reading, the fragmentation and subsequent rage is a tantrum of yearning for wholeness. We wish to rejoin the primordial Eden or heavenly parents from which we have been expelled.
partially from Jonathan Haidt
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When you look to the future, you hope and worry; you begin to plan, project, forecast, and fidget; you cease to be present and enliven potential concerns that determine your actual behavior.
When considering the future, you try to fight for a “future you” who doesn’t exist, but might.
Paradoxically, in clinging to fictitious dreams and concerns (attempting to manifest one and dodge the other), you are not your best in the present moment, which assures a distracted outcome. That is, you only achieve being absent now.
If you are your best self now, right now, and right now and now, your future self will be the compilation of all those present, best versions of you.
Please consider the future during a set aside time and decide who you want to be, but realize that version will only emerge from your behavior in the present.
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What you pay attention to matters. It is in the end, who you will become.
Participating in petty politics or inflating mundane worries at work shapes you. Similarly, ignoring your friends isolates you. Where your attention is (or is not) is who you are right now, but it also shapes you.
Once you know who you want to be when you die (a person at peace, without regrets) any other behavior compromises your goals: keep your focus.
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If we are constantly hurt and disappointed by the world, if our system of understanding how we should be treated by others keeps failing, we need to admit that the problem is not in the world but in ourselves.
Our reactions, wants, and pains are based upon expectations not met. Our idealism sets us up for failure, which is to be hurt and victimized.
Bad things happen in the world, but our purposeful obtusity provokes repeated failure.
