Alright, time to pass this stone.
It’s occurred to me lately that I can be rather…. thoughtless.
Specifically, I rarely give any thought to how much my presence in people’s lives affects them. It almost never occurs to me that someone might miss me or that I should take time out of whatever it was I planned to do in order to go see people who might be craving my company but are too shy to ask for it.
And I could blame it all on depression. It’s true that I still have trouble imagining anyone actually wanting me around. A deep part of me is still convinced that people only put up with me out of pity and that they wish I would go away and leave them alone.
But there’s more to it than that. That’s a rather conveeeeinient attitude to have when the basic problem is that I have a very strong need for autonomy.
A need so strong that precludes thoughts that might interfere with it. Thoughts like “I should drop that person a line” or “I should see what so-and-so is up to” or “I should stop playing this video game and log on to Tapestries so people who loves me there get to see me for once;. ”
It’s that last one that’s the real kicker. It exposes the rotten face of my video game addiction and shows how much of my life it has hollowed out from within.
Like I have said here before, there was a time before Skyrim happened to me that I spent a lot of my time in front of the computer logged into Tapestries so I could chat with my fuzzy friends there while doing whatever on the Web.
These days it would mostly be Facebook and YouTube.
But then Skyrim happened, and I became strongly addicted to it, and while I eventually kicked my Skyrim habit, the underlying video game addiction never went away.
It just moved on to different games.
But worse is the realization that my drives for autonomy is so strong that it makes me want to avoid any actual emotional and/or social obligations.
And that’s not cool. Not cool at all. It’s certainly not consistent with all the griping and moaning I do about feeling isolated and lonely.
In theory, I should welcome commitment and the closeness it brings.
Instead, it gives me that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped and makes me want to bolt for yonder horizon like a spooked mare.
So yeah, I am lonely, but it’s not because the big mean world coldly ignores me despite how cute and lovable and amazing I am.
It’s because I don’t even know how to be close to people. And the very thought of it actually happening makes me want to scream into the cold dark night.
Something very important in me broke when I was raped. When I retreated into the world of my mind to escape, steel shutters slammed down inside me and cut me off from the richer emotional world that exists beyond the cerebral realm.
It’s a wonder that I didn’t end up autistic.
Instead I’m just like, really really smart.
And that’s all I know how to do. Be really really smart.
And it makes me a wizard.
But it also makes me alone.
More after the break.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality
Just learned about this from a Cracked podcast, and it blew my mind.
In its original form, it goes like this :
That works in a sort of “pithy quotes for business meetings” sort of way, but it doesn’t get at the root of the genius of this observation.
To get closer, we will explain “bikeshedding”.
It revolves around an anecdote from Parkinson about being in a high level meeting in the British government where a 30 billion pound nuclear power plant was approved in minutes with no hint of a debate, but the next items on the agenda, whether they should build a 350 pound bike shed AT said power plant. was debated hotly for many many hours and was not, in fact, resolved at that meeting.
From this we can derive a better formulation : The simpler the issue, the more people will be willing to express and defend a position on that issue.
In other words people are most willing to have and express opinions on issues simple enough for them to understand.
That nuclear power plant was a huge issue with many many layers and in order to really have an intelligent opinion on it you might even need to have some idea of how they work, and so mum was the word.
Bike sheds, on the other hand, are easy to understand. A child could understand the issue. And so that’s the battleground people are willing to fight in.
It might seem super obvious when put like that, but it explains so much.
For example, this is how wedge issues work. The issues that actually matter are complicated and nuanced and pretty scary to the average person.
But reduce it to “gays are coming for your kids!” or “it’s minorities’ fault they get shot”, and now it’s simple enough for people to get behind.
As an aside : this creates a kind of trap for conservatives where they think they understand an issue but then get their ass kicked when they present their terrible arguments to the general public.
Anyhow, clearly it is incumbent upon real liberals to create their own wedge issues that move people in the right direction for a change.
Things like “Donald Trump wants poor people to starve!” or “The Republicans want you to be poor” or my personal fave, “rich people are stealing your money!”.
Because they totally are. Where do you think the money for tax cuts comes from?
Another part of this is a willingness to tell people that they ARE smart enough to understand these things and that their opinion matters.
Which is true. You might not understand macroeconomics, but anyone can understand why giving tax money to the super rich is wrong. They may not get the details of the social assistance system, but they understand that families should not be left to die. They might not get the intricate details of how the GOP has manipulated them, but they understand that people who treat you badly don’t deserve your loyalty.
We can totally move the goalposts way to the left if we are willing to accept that most people are not liberal intellectuals and that the only way to reach them is to reduce things down to a level they can understand, even if it isn’t the complete truth.
After all, we aren’t doing this for marks.
We’re doing it to save the world.
And that’s way more important than your fussy elitist feelings.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.