I don’t get the whole car being someone’s identity thing. Whether it’s their whole identity or just a part of it, doesn’t matter.
A vehicle is a tool to get things done. Transporting people and things from location to location. But so many people are making it into a statement. I have no idea why.
I never wanted my car to make any statements, nor stand out in any way whatsoever. The reason of simple: no matter who you are, what you value, what you believe, there’s always going to be people that disagree with you. A nontrivial number of those that disagree with your viewpoint, have the aptitude and willingness to mess with your property, especially when you’re not looking.
So you’re going to leave your opinion, on one of the most expensive things you own, while it is parked in public spaces with (more often than not) zero security against people’s access to your shit.
But so many people are making it into a statement. I have no idea why.
If you keep chasing this question, you eventually get to a very dark place and realize just how little free-will our species has. I am dead serious, unless you want to wreck your entire perception of yourself and our species and deal with a very severe depressive episode, cease your investigations.
I think I’m like 90% the way there already, I dealt with it by simply giving up on humanity.
I see everyone who is working class as essentially slave labor with extra steps. You get the “freedom” to live how you want, as long as you are working to earn a living because you’re not worthy of being alive if you aren’t helping someone pursue their capitalistic dreams. You’re also “free” to choose where you want to live, because every square inch of the planet is “owned” by someone (with few exceptions), and you’ll either end up having to pay someone to buy land to live on, or pay someone with land every month indefinitely to use their land to live.
Comparing today’s working conditions to slavery: slaves are frequently provided food and shelter. They’re also frequently provided medical care (though, there’s a limit where you’re not worth keeping alive). Everything is provided for you by the master. You’re not paid, but you also don’t need money to continue to live.
In modern times you “choose” your job from an array of equally bad options, all of which barely pay you enough to buy food, and afford rent, and often, they pay less than a living wage, so you need to pool how much you make with others too have a place to stay. You don’t get to rise up or progress to a more prestigious position in society, you’re at the bottom and that’s where you will stay. Except for you being given enough means to provide for yourself the same things you would be provided for free as a slave, there’s little difference between the two.
The most notable difference is that you can’t whip employees. There’s no lashings for stepping out of line. Though, we could draw correlations between lashings and what happens in prison, but I digress.
Economically, most of society might actually be better off with working for room and board, since then they don’t need to worry about how to pay the bills, that’s all taken care of for them.
The choices we have available to us as the writing class are a farce to convince those that cannot see the bigger picture, into believing they are free. The educational system has been eroded and dumbed down enough that the vast majority of people fit the criteria of just smart enough to do the work, but not smart enough to question it, or anything else.
Seeing the truth of the social picture is yes, the first part.
The last 10% is the hardest part, because that’s where you find yourself in the picture, and the hopelessness of the larger picture.
The blackest pill I’ve had to swallow as an adult is the empirical, material reality of what we are, what our qualia actually is, and film-strip that everyone is trapped in, thinking we’re making our own choices. Or more correctly, not thinking at all.
We don’t actually think about things, it’s an illusion your mind makes to “explain” things. Like the decisions you make to fulfill survival imperatives. We all live in this state on various levels, but none of us live outside of it. We’re having an experience, yes, but we don’t use free will.
I know we have some form free-will, but I genuinely don’t think we have access to it in most cases. Maybe some tiny, buried spark of something, a teeny seed that in another several million years may turn into a creature that really does make choices and understand the universe.
We’ve got a long, long way to get there though. The keys that pushed me over that last threshold was trying to understand where my own thoughts originate, where all of our feelings and experiences originate from, how we form language in our minds and trying to find what forms those “words” and that realization alone was terrifying but then realizing that not everyone even has THAT much, that most people are walking through life just reacting and experiencing and not even attempting to think with language and abstraction.
Most people don’t read. 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate. This is a failing on many levels, but the fact that it’s a failing at all means that we broadly don’t care enough to make the most important thing we have, the only TRUE thing we each possess, a priority. We do not care. We rather live a life of experiencing and reacting and believing our post-hoc rationalizations than try to break free of ice-age instincts and survival tools. And this shouldn’t be a surprise, we were living in that world less than 100 grandparents ago. We’re the SAME creature. We’re not conscious yet. We’re just really good at tricking ourselves as we manipulate our world in increasingly complex ways.
The abstraction of thought is an interesting consideration, one I’ve done some research into. Our mind is the only known thing which has named itself.
With that being said, I think you would enjoy “thinking fast and slow” (it’s a book). In that book he goes into detail about fast thinking which is heuristical and what we refer to as “muscle memory”, “habit”, or “doing without thinking”. The interesting assertion he made about this “system 1” as he calls it, is that it lacks any ability to consider a statement as false. Every statement that goes into system 1, is considered to be true unless otherwise determined. System 2, or slow thinking, is more sapient and contemplative. This is what we would think is “us” as an abstract concept. Almost all of the information that goes into system 2 is filtered by system 1, so unless we reevaluate more carefully directing system 1 to examine everything, we are working off of incomplete data. Only what system 1 believes is relevant for the circumstances for system 2 to know. The rest is filtered out (to varying extents, depending on what executive function you have) as unnecessary. Things like background noises, other people speaking to eachother, signs, text, and other visual markers that are not important to what we’re currently doing (and have not historically been important). System 1 just discards that data constantly.
I would say that universally, we all use the faculties of system 1 quite extensively, but we are largely unaware of it… We operate on “autopilot” more or less. There’s a nontrivial number of people who seem to actively refuse to engage system 2, and do any cognitive and logical thinking. When they must, they do the bare minimum, and often opt to follow whatever tribe they identify as a part of. Whether that tribe is a sports team, a country, a political system or politician, or it’s a religion or something. They turn to those people whom they trust (for better or worse) to make the best decision for them, and tell them what to think. This is especially bad because often, those people are making selfish choices. They’re directing people to achieve an objective that benefits them directly, often at the expense of those who are following along.
This whole thing has more or less been beaten into us, both by family, friends, and communities, but also ingrained into us as a survival trait from when we hunted and gathered primarily. Where the survival of the tribe was the most important thing, at the cost of all other tribes and people and creatures.
We no longer need that survival trait of going along with whatever tribe we were born into, but it’s not one we can easily disregard, since it’s been ingrained in our cultural persona since we started walking around, many millennia ago.
There’s still plenty of people walking up to the fact that they don’t need to follow along to what others want of you, or do as they tell you to do. Getting away from the strong tribalism that is now mostly just a plague on humanity.
The problem is that the thinkers are independent, and neither want to follow, nor lead.
So here we are. Trajectory set to failure. Following these tribal leaders serving their own interests above all others. Removing one tribal leader just creates a part vacuum where another will step in to take their place, someone who is just as bad or worse with few exceptions.
This might be the first time I actually read a book recommended by someone on the internet. I feel like you’re dangerously close to how I think and feel, for better or worse, and while the revelation and understanding made me despair, I think pushing through and learning more might be the only way forward.
I am seeing our species’ future, where it’s just going to be cycles of back-and-forth, fighting our worst survival instincts or giving into them as we just make fascism and oppression over and over again because we’re not built to form a universal bond. Likely because for the million years or so before we even started agriculture or mastered fire, we were killing each other in wars without record, countless bloody fights between tribes of humans until we all just learned to hate and distrust anyone even slightly different than us. It made our brains grow so fast that our heads are now lethal weapons against our own mothers, but it also made the idea of a unified, borderless and compassionate world strictly unattainable. So what’s left? What’s the alternative?
Barring an actual threat from beyond like a 3-body-problem alien (a fantastic story btw) that would unite us all against a common enemy, then I don’t see us getting past this current state of shuffling pieces around on the bored to make little pockets of group-think and superficial relationships like skin color tribes, video-game culture tribes, religious tribes, and so on. We have brains forged from threats and enemies, and that is what we will see in each other before we see friends every time, and any little differences will always be amplified through that “System 1” as we invent rationalizations for not engaging our System 2.
My best advice for where you are right now, is “be the change you want to see in the world”
Where you see indifference, show compassion. Where you see ignorance, learn and try to educate anyone who will listen.
Be the kind of person you wish this world was occupied by. Be better.
Three only reason I’m still alive is because I know how many people would be significantly harmed if I were to do something different. They’re some of the only people I care about, and I don’t want them to be sad. My strongest motivator is that I would rather suffer though a life so they don’t have to suffer as much though theirs. I am a helper. I provide assistance. Always have, always will.
The only reason I accept any money for helping ever, is because I require it to have a home, food, and the resources with which to assist others.
That’s my purpose.
I will also point out that this is the reason I will never have children. I didn’t ask to be put in the position I’m in. I didn’t request to live a life. If someone asked me, I probably would have laughed in their face. Are you kidding? Do you see what life is like? No thanks. I’ll choose oblivion over dealing with the vast majority of people that currently occupy the world; and with that said, since I can’t ask my future children if they want to exist at all, I’m going to err on the side of caution, and not condemn someone who I would surely care about deeply, to a life, here. I’ll save them that sufferage.
Always remember, exceptions exist. Exceptions will always exist. Examples like the late, great, Mr Rogers. He’s a shining example that exceptions exist. There’s a lot more I could point to, but I’ll let you ponder that at your leisure.
Unfortunately, for every positive exception, it seems there are a hundred exceptions the opposite direction. People who knowingly and willfully harm others for personal gain. There’s a bias here though. Good, nice, and kind people, don’t generally make headlines. So the media and by consequence, the majority of people of our culture, crave and glorify sensationalism. So we see and hear about the ridiculous, cruel, evil and terrible people far more often than the random acts of kindness that people show to eachother every day. Recognize the bias and work against it to train your system 1 to learn that what we’re being told is almost always skewed towards the negatives. That the world isn’t 100% good, but it’s not 100% evil either, the truth lies somewhere in between.
I also made this decision on children for the very same reasons. I am very much also in the role of “helper” in my world, I don’t know any other way to be but I kind of lost touch with how to want anything for myself so there is a danger to it.
Anyway, thank you for the intelligent exchange, it’s rare as praseodymium lately.
I don’t get the whole car being someone’s identity thing. Whether it’s their whole identity or just a part of it, doesn’t matter.
A vehicle is a tool to get things done. Transporting people and things from location to location. But so many people are making it into a statement. I have no idea why.
I never wanted my car to make any statements, nor stand out in any way whatsoever. The reason of simple: no matter who you are, what you value, what you believe, there’s always going to be people that disagree with you. A nontrivial number of those that disagree with your viewpoint, have the aptitude and willingness to mess with your property, especially when you’re not looking.
So you’re going to leave your opinion, on one of the most expensive things you own, while it is parked in public spaces with (more often than not) zero security against people’s access to your shit.
I just… I don’t get it.
If you keep chasing this question, you eventually get to a very dark place and realize just how little free-will our species has. I am dead serious, unless you want to wreck your entire perception of yourself and our species and deal with a very severe depressive episode, cease your investigations.
I think I’m like 90% the way there already, I dealt with it by simply giving up on humanity.
I see everyone who is working class as essentially slave labor with extra steps. You get the “freedom” to live how you want, as long as you are working to earn a living because you’re not worthy of being alive if you aren’t helping someone pursue their capitalistic dreams. You’re also “free” to choose where you want to live, because every square inch of the planet is “owned” by someone (with few exceptions), and you’ll either end up having to pay someone to buy land to live on, or pay someone with land every month indefinitely to use their land to live.
Comparing today’s working conditions to slavery: slaves are frequently provided food and shelter. They’re also frequently provided medical care (though, there’s a limit where you’re not worth keeping alive). Everything is provided for you by the master. You’re not paid, but you also don’t need money to continue to live. In modern times you “choose” your job from an array of equally bad options, all of which barely pay you enough to buy food, and afford rent, and often, they pay less than a living wage, so you need to pool how much you make with others too have a place to stay. You don’t get to rise up or progress to a more prestigious position in society, you’re at the bottom and that’s where you will stay. Except for you being given enough means to provide for yourself the same things you would be provided for free as a slave, there’s little difference between the two.
The most notable difference is that you can’t whip employees. There’s no lashings for stepping out of line. Though, we could draw correlations between lashings and what happens in prison, but I digress.
Economically, most of society might actually be better off with working for room and board, since then they don’t need to worry about how to pay the bills, that’s all taken care of for them.
The choices we have available to us as the writing class are a farce to convince those that cannot see the bigger picture, into believing they are free. The educational system has been eroded and dumbed down enough that the vast majority of people fit the criteria of just smart enough to do the work, but not smart enough to question it, or anything else.
Seeing the truth of the social picture is yes, the first part.
The last 10% is the hardest part, because that’s where you find yourself in the picture, and the hopelessness of the larger picture.
The blackest pill I’ve had to swallow as an adult is the empirical, material reality of what we are, what our qualia actually is, and film-strip that everyone is trapped in, thinking we’re making our own choices. Or more correctly, not thinking at all.
We don’t actually think about things, it’s an illusion your mind makes to “explain” things. Like the decisions you make to fulfill survival imperatives. We all live in this state on various levels, but none of us live outside of it. We’re having an experience, yes, but we don’t use free will.
I know we have some form free-will, but I genuinely don’t think we have access to it in most cases. Maybe some tiny, buried spark of something, a teeny seed that in another several million years may turn into a creature that really does make choices and understand the universe.
We’ve got a long, long way to get there though. The keys that pushed me over that last threshold was trying to understand where my own thoughts originate, where all of our feelings and experiences originate from, how we form language in our minds and trying to find what forms those “words” and that realization alone was terrifying but then realizing that not everyone even has THAT much, that most people are walking through life just reacting and experiencing and not even attempting to think with language and abstraction.
Most people don’t read. 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate. This is a failing on many levels, but the fact that it’s a failing at all means that we broadly don’t care enough to make the most important thing we have, the only TRUE thing we each possess, a priority. We do not care. We rather live a life of experiencing and reacting and believing our post-hoc rationalizations than try to break free of ice-age instincts and survival tools. And this shouldn’t be a surprise, we were living in that world less than 100 grandparents ago. We’re the SAME creature. We’re not conscious yet. We’re just really good at tricking ourselves as we manipulate our world in increasingly complex ways.
The abstraction of thought is an interesting consideration, one I’ve done some research into. Our mind is the only known thing which has named itself.
With that being said, I think you would enjoy “thinking fast and slow” (it’s a book). In that book he goes into detail about fast thinking which is heuristical and what we refer to as “muscle memory”, “habit”, or “doing without thinking”. The interesting assertion he made about this “system 1” as he calls it, is that it lacks any ability to consider a statement as false. Every statement that goes into system 1, is considered to be true unless otherwise determined. System 2, or slow thinking, is more sapient and contemplative. This is what we would think is “us” as an abstract concept. Almost all of the information that goes into system 2 is filtered by system 1, so unless we reevaluate more carefully directing system 1 to examine everything, we are working off of incomplete data. Only what system 1 believes is relevant for the circumstances for system 2 to know. The rest is filtered out (to varying extents, depending on what executive function you have) as unnecessary. Things like background noises, other people speaking to eachother, signs, text, and other visual markers that are not important to what we’re currently doing (and have not historically been important). System 1 just discards that data constantly.
I would say that universally, we all use the faculties of system 1 quite extensively, but we are largely unaware of it… We operate on “autopilot” more or less. There’s a nontrivial number of people who seem to actively refuse to engage system 2, and do any cognitive and logical thinking. When they must, they do the bare minimum, and often opt to follow whatever tribe they identify as a part of. Whether that tribe is a sports team, a country, a political system or politician, or it’s a religion or something. They turn to those people whom they trust (for better or worse) to make the best decision for them, and tell them what to think. This is especially bad because often, those people are making selfish choices. They’re directing people to achieve an objective that benefits them directly, often at the expense of those who are following along.
This whole thing has more or less been beaten into us, both by family, friends, and communities, but also ingrained into us as a survival trait from when we hunted and gathered primarily. Where the survival of the tribe was the most important thing, at the cost of all other tribes and people and creatures.
We no longer need that survival trait of going along with whatever tribe we were born into, but it’s not one we can easily disregard, since it’s been ingrained in our cultural persona since we started walking around, many millennia ago.
There’s still plenty of people walking up to the fact that they don’t need to follow along to what others want of you, or do as they tell you to do. Getting away from the strong tribalism that is now mostly just a plague on humanity.
The problem is that the thinkers are independent, and neither want to follow, nor lead.
So here we are. Trajectory set to failure. Following these tribal leaders serving their own interests above all others. Removing one tribal leader just creates a part vacuum where another will step in to take their place, someone who is just as bad or worse with few exceptions.
This might be the first time I actually read a book recommended by someone on the internet. I feel like you’re dangerously close to how I think and feel, for better or worse, and while the revelation and understanding made me despair, I think pushing through and learning more might be the only way forward.
I am seeing our species’ future, where it’s just going to be cycles of back-and-forth, fighting our worst survival instincts or giving into them as we just make fascism and oppression over and over again because we’re not built to form a universal bond. Likely because for the million years or so before we even started agriculture or mastered fire, we were killing each other in wars without record, countless bloody fights between tribes of humans until we all just learned to hate and distrust anyone even slightly different than us. It made our brains grow so fast that our heads are now lethal weapons against our own mothers, but it also made the idea of a unified, borderless and compassionate world strictly unattainable. So what’s left? What’s the alternative?
Barring an actual threat from beyond like a 3-body-problem alien (a fantastic story btw) that would unite us all against a common enemy, then I don’t see us getting past this current state of shuffling pieces around on the bored to make little pockets of group-think and superficial relationships like skin color tribes, video-game culture tribes, religious tribes, and so on. We have brains forged from threats and enemies, and that is what we will see in each other before we see friends every time, and any little differences will always be amplified through that “System 1” as we invent rationalizations for not engaging our System 2.
I get it, 100%.
My best advice for where you are right now, is “be the change you want to see in the world”
Where you see indifference, show compassion. Where you see ignorance, learn and try to educate anyone who will listen.
Be the kind of person you wish this world was occupied by. Be better.
Three only reason I’m still alive is because I know how many people would be significantly harmed if I were to do something different. They’re some of the only people I care about, and I don’t want them to be sad. My strongest motivator is that I would rather suffer though a life so they don’t have to suffer as much though theirs. I am a helper. I provide assistance. Always have, always will. The only reason I accept any money for helping ever, is because I require it to have a home, food, and the resources with which to assist others. That’s my purpose.
I will also point out that this is the reason I will never have children. I didn’t ask to be put in the position I’m in. I didn’t request to live a life. If someone asked me, I probably would have laughed in their face. Are you kidding? Do you see what life is like? No thanks. I’ll choose oblivion over dealing with the vast majority of people that currently occupy the world; and with that said, since I can’t ask my future children if they want to exist at all, I’m going to err on the side of caution, and not condemn someone who I would surely care about deeply, to a life, here. I’ll save them that sufferage.
Always remember, exceptions exist. Exceptions will always exist. Examples like the late, great, Mr Rogers. He’s a shining example that exceptions exist. There’s a lot more I could point to, but I’ll let you ponder that at your leisure.
Unfortunately, for every positive exception, it seems there are a hundred exceptions the opposite direction. People who knowingly and willfully harm others for personal gain. There’s a bias here though. Good, nice, and kind people, don’t generally make headlines. So the media and by consequence, the majority of people of our culture, crave and glorify sensationalism. So we see and hear about the ridiculous, cruel, evil and terrible people far more often than the random acts of kindness that people show to eachother every day. Recognize the bias and work against it to train your system 1 to learn that what we’re being told is almost always skewed towards the negatives. That the world isn’t 100% good, but it’s not 100% evil either, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Be well.
I also made this decision on children for the very same reasons. I am very much also in the role of “helper” in my world, I don’t know any other way to be but I kind of lost touch with how to want anything for myself so there is a danger to it.
Anyway, thank you for the intelligent exchange, it’s rare as praseodymium lately.