Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
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.
maybe I'm just an asshole but I've felt whatever is the opposite of sonder these days when I come across people that are so clueless and inattentive they might as well be zombies.
I usually have that reflection when I'm travelling. It's indeed a depressing feeling. Last time it happened I was in the middle of Rome/Italy with many unknown faces around me, that I was seeing for the first time and - thinking at that time - that I will never see them again.
The most important shift I’ve made in my life was when I started approaching conversations with the attitude that the other person could teach me something, no matter who it is. Sometimes it takes some digging, but I’ve found it to be true.
Hmmm I like the message but I partly disagree with some of what they are saying in regards to narrative tap out. I’ve found some things no one can truly understand some things that people go through unless they went through it themselves.
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.
I’ve felt this way before. But is it the same as your feeling? Probably not exactly, but I bet we could connect on it at some level.
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.
When someone dares to step forward and speak up, listen. Just be. It's one of the most powerful things you can do. Hijacking conversation doesn't create connection, it breaks it.
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).
I feel the same, it's not that clear-cut. I think it can serve to convey understanding, familiarity, and also safe space to share that particular thing without judgment (i.e. like saying "don't worry what I will think, I've been there"). That's why I also have the need to do it when listening to others and caring to make them more comfortable and trusting to share.
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.
It depends if they're using it to empathize, or if they're using it to call attention to themselves. It requires a self-awareness to know that the moment is "not about them".
Same here. If the person doesn't derail the conversation, but provides context to how they interpret what I might be saying, that's comforting and shared empathy.
That is very interesting. I've never understood that phenomenon. I've been through a bunch of hard things but another person telling me they've gone through it too essentially does nothing for my emotional state. I actually prefer not to hear more about problems and distract myself instead with doing something else.
I’m a little drunk and I have not even read the article but I was discussing this very thing with my friends. We have so many stories and we are each going through so much struggle individually. Why can’t we be kind and considerate of each other?
Because going through a struggle tends to turn people inward and makes them see everything, including the harm they do to others, as if they were a victim just doing what they have to do to survive. It is very hard to overcome it because you have to become a kind of martyr, who accepts the reality of their suffering but who's too holy to blame it on everyone else, or even on yourself.
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.
Because empathy and kindness have to be instilled in children for it to develop. We all have the capacity for it, but the capacity has to be nourished.
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.
In a word, righteousness. The human mind grew up in a world of divided bands and fighting. Us vs Them is a very comfortable paradigm. So now we have people fighting about Woke-ism or Gamer's Gate. People get bitterly angry about this because their personal morality is challenged; shame is a knife to cut the sinner. We feel a shared sense of righteousness with our own band - how dare they oppress minorities / how dare they challenge the way I was raised / how dare they take away my rights and personal choice / how dare they behave so recklessly.
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.
Ironically, the author mentions what you've done here directly and calls it "Narrative Take Over":
"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 :)
When you live in a system that increasingly benefits the few at the expense of many, anger is a natural immune response. A healthy catalyst for change, really.
A hallmark of immaturity is a person who makes assumptions about how easy someone else's life must be just because they are well off financially, have a bubbly persona, or live in a state of peace and gratitude. To be human is to suffer and at the very least to watch people you love suffer and sometimes die. I wish people would remember this, but more often they attempt to quantify the pain and create portraiture of a person they know nothing about, compare it to their own and then assume they can be bitter, resentful, or dismissive towards them.
But suffering and wealth are mutually exclusive events. plenty of non-rich people also suffer. This would only apply if you knew the rich person was suffering. Without this info, it's reasonable to assume that their life is actually better.
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 still works. Same way the bad guy in the movie gets told "I have a wife and kids" and sometimes spares the bank guard.
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.
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".
I'd be curious to know how many other people had no sex from their mid 30s to their late 50s (20+ years). Maybe there are many more out there that aren't saying anything but it's certainly not a common narrative. My fiction is if I walked down the street and asked i'd be hard pressed to find someone in a similar situation.
I have a similar philosophy (if I dare call it that): every person is living in their own world, shared by no one else.
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.
The Narrative Takeover section is lazy thinking and lazy writing. Nearly every sentence is a claim made in thin air, devoid of practical guidance.
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.
That section is not wrong, it's just being implicit about the second-order choice that you allude to in your last sentence. You certainly don't have to do anything that the article suggests, unless your conversational partner, and your goals for the relationship require it.
For much of my life, I was a jerk. I was insecure and often became offended and unkind when things didn't unfold the way I thought they should. It really screwed up my relationships and in my mid-50s, I found myself pretty much angry and alone in the world. I was constantly stuck in a story no one else really knew much about.
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:
It's not easy to make a fundamental change to your outlook like that, well done. I think most of us have at least a bit of what you're describing of yourself pre-mid-50s, and could use a little more untangling of these fixed narratives about ourselves.
I'm a big fan of Alan Watts', his talks are absolute gold.
Now that you have been through this once, do you think it's possible that if you went through all of the material you consumed in this period (assume photographic memory), would you be able to prepare a presentation (customized for yourself) with content that would be adequate to accelerate this process (and speculatively, a plausible range of how much) if you were to deliver itself to your past you (say, at the time that you originally started, and maybe also earlier points in time in your life)?
This is really apparent if you've ever worked in retail, specifically small stores with few customers at a time. One of the parts I loved about working at vape shop was talking to people.
> Our compassion can fatigue when we consume a high volume of trauma narratives through the media
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.
Until you meet enough people and talk to them on a deep enough level and then you realise that those stories are all remarkably similar and that we're all really experiencing the same world together.
Anyone else picturing google, facebook, etc. employees reading this headline, loling and muttering under their breath "That's what you think Joy. How's your [insert issue shared privately on their platform here] doing?"
The important question is how much of the story is true. We only remember a version of events that occurred and some other witness will have a slightly different version. Ultimately, the story which we make up is entirely our own and it might be far away from the reality.
> It's possible to grow numb when inundated by stories of hardship and pain.
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.
[+] [-] cercatrova|3 years ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] routerl|3 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] hatsunearu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boredemployee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gouda-gouda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmejorge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovaVeles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apocadam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leach|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pryelluw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbill|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] alluro2|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SleepilyLimping|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larve|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vouaobrasil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samtimalsina|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] routerl|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] scaramanga|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwawaylinux|3 years ago|reply
Well I, for one, would love to. It's those hateful divisive others who are the problem.
[+] [-] csours|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shark_laser|3 years ago|reply
"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 :)
[+] [-] sumedh|3 years ago|reply
Because if you miss an opportunity you might miss putting food on the table specially if you live in a developed country.
[+] [-] pshc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fibonacc|3 years ago|reply
inflation and social media.
before we had just inflation. now we have social media that magnifies it.
[+] [-] sometimeshuman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltasevennine|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vasco|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eric4smith|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] throwaway84535|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] satisfice|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] b3morales|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jes|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elevaet|3 years ago|reply
I'm a big fan of Alan Watts', his talks are absolute gold.
[+] [-] mistermann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobsmooth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmathai|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scaramanga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyeball|3 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] snapplebobapple|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwhyan|3 years ago|reply
Merely examining ones own life would reveal the infinite complexity within our conscious experience.
[+] [-] braindead_in|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
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.