Thoughts on engaging with the world in a productive manner
Thoughts on engaging with the world in a productive manner
I'm back again, after a few weeks, have had some time to mull over my thoughts and i've been bothered by something recently so figured, i'd dump it here since this place is pretty slick.
I see a lot of people engaging with certain things e.g. politics (this isn't about politics dw) on a very surface level manner, and i have a few problems with it, i'm not getting into the meta problems here since it's not about politics. But i will get into the more social problems i have with it.
The biggest problem that i have with it is that it promotes an unhealthy level of interaction with topics and concepts, it promotes focusing on the optics more so than the underlying mechanics which can lead to you having incredibly shallow beliefs (another topic i'll probably come back to in a later post) which can undermine your belief structure. As well as leading to you feeling or believing that you are accomplishing something, when in reality all you're doing is yelling at someone on the internet. Anger is an incredibly powerful emotion, that's why it's been commoditized so often.
Most of the time, when you end up engaging in this kind of rhetoric, it is intentional, not on your side ironically but on the side of social function of it's purpose. Let's take an example from history, the salem witch trials are a perfect example of this problem. From a social aspect, the purpose is to exert control over society. It's understood differently from a personal view, and that's intentional.
Try to be conscious of how you interact with people, especially those in group settings. Try to speak for a purposeful manner. It's important that the collective meaning of the words you convey primarily go towards improving things. Now i'm not saying that you shouldn't have fun with your friends, goof around, be silly and just generally have a good time, that's different we're humans and we're social creatures, it's important to do that as well. I'm just saying that it's important to be conscious of what you're consuming, how you're contemplating it, how you respond to it, and most importantly how you engage with other people.
Don't think too hard about the things you see online that irk you, ultimately in the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing and they will never amount to nothing. It's more important that you try and genuinely interact with other people, the most powerful force of change is human interaction. Oh and if you find yourself engaging in this, don't be hard on yourself, just be consciously aware of it and it's impacts.
Nice, it's always good to be mindful of what we feed on - news/media/escapism.
I like your closing paragraphs, too!
yeah, the closing paragraphs are a newer thing i'm toying around with after being a little off-put by all the self help stuff that's out there now (not saying it isn't good) being almost entirely focused on the habitual and gamified aspects of things. It's a really good way for some people to pick up something, but i also think it's ironic that we try to be a good individual through the same mechanisms that got us working unhealthy hours, having an unhealthy mindset about productivity, and always pushing to do something.
it always turned me away from things like that. Same reason the "gurus" are often looked down upon, except it's a little more fundamental in this case. It also tails off of my last post about improving yourself first and foremost, so that way you can extend the healthy and happy version of yourself to other people in order to spread it effectively.
I think it's important to have the capacity to look at things through a neutral aspect ratio. Only once you fully comprehend it without any external factors, can you effectively utilize it, or use it to better yourself. That's the way i like to look at it, it helps promote contained thought which is often what i find to be most influential. It's really easy to latch onto things from outside influences while ignoring our own very acute ability to comprehend things.
At the very least i'm hoping that it works to plant an idea of something into someones head, rather than giving them a discipline or methodology to live by. I think that's one of the more potent ways things tend to spread, so i'm trying to utilize it productively here.
While there's something to be said about not consuming only ragebait and fearbait, a healthy diet does require one consume some amount of content about the injustices perpetuated by the current system, otherwise one can easily get locked into a just world fallacy full of privilege because they focus on only seeing the good stuff.
I will agree that arguing online is mostly pointless, but I've had multiple people over the years tell me that I reading my arguments online radicalized them, or otherwise deprogrammed them from bad philosophies such as Objectivism. So you can never be sure which thing you say online will plant a seed in someone else's mind. Just make sure not to get drawn into flamewars. Those are definitely useless and just make everyone look bad.
yeah absolutely, this is often why i try to conceptualize the opposing parties rhetoric in a manner that i can understand it's utility (essentially, i'm understanding it from a third party perspective, not a first party one) it also allows you to keep your beliefs deeply rooted (though like i said, that's a different topic altogether, and i think i'll be posting about that specifically later)
I find more often than not that it's pretty easy to tell who wants to actually discuss something with you, and who wants to just argue with you, because most of the time someone willing to discuss something, is a decent person, who isn't trying to hit you with inflammatory statements or anything silly like that, and i'll often engage quite a bit with those people because it's fun learning about how other people understand the world. But then you get the people who are just like "yeah ok buddy, whatever you say" and those people are looking to shitpost more than anything, usually it's not worth arguing with them, unless you want to get silly. In which case it can be fun sometimes.
I find more often than not, that someone having a positive opinion of you as a person, even if you vehemently disagree on something, builds a personable relationship between the two of you, which can often insulate the violent rhetoric commonly seen these days, from the actual people who would otherwise experience it. Like for example, if you were to sit a transphobic person in front of a trans person, and then let them have a long and civil discussion about things pertaining the two of them, both parties would learn a lot, and would have a more personified understanding of the other party, which allows for more work to be done after the fact, since you no longer feel like screaming at each other.
Especially in the modern era with our political system being so polarized on either side, i really only think that this is going to be a beneficial aspect to interacting with people. It's often said the best way to stop racism, is to get people interacting with members of other races, and it's also said that the best way to stop sexism is to get people interacting with those of the opposite sex. Exposure therapy works to treat things like anxiety, racism, and sexism, i see no reason it shouldn't have a similar impact on more fundamental concepts underlying these issues as well.
at the end of the day if someone has their mind made up, you have very little to try and change their mind, but what you do have is them. They're more than capable of changing their own mind, so i tend to think it's more likely that you can influence someone into changing their own mind, rather than changing their mind directly, because it doesn't matter how true/false something is to someone who simply wants to hold that point.
it also just stems from my personal belief that i shouldn't try and directly influence someone to do something, i should merely provide the tools, information, and ability for them to do something on their own. It's both intended to give people the concept that they can just do things because a lot of people don't think that they can, which is simply not true. But also to try and keep myself out of the negative hellhole that manipulation can end up in. Other people have free will independent from mine, it'd be weird, if they agreed with everything i thought. And i encourage other people not to do so by using satire pretty often. Though like i said, this doesn't prevent me from discussing things in a heavily sterilized manner as i find it interesting to do so.