(og thread) i dont feel like anybody ever talked to me about filters and boundaries in the way that i’d have liked to hear about them
you need quite a lot of info about the world to actually begin to use them in an appropriate & effective way
i wonder if people dont like admitting this
we often hear simplistic-ish directives like “ignore the haters” or “don’t be an asshole” but both of these are actually very, very complicated things in practice!
ignore the haters: ok, how do you make sure you don’t overcorrect and accidentally ignore good, necessary criticism from people who care about you?
don’t be an asshole: ok, how do you make sure you don’t overcorrect and accidentally let yourself be exploited by bad-faith actors?
the only real answer to this, as far as I can tell, is
- hope you had good placement in the birth lottery, lol
- grow wise over time through painful experiences, mistakes, failures, study, reflection
it makes complete sense to be anxious as fuck while you’re figuring it out
seems a lot of people roughly default to a certain posture in the world (open/closed, etc), and they sorta accept the tradeoffs that come with it. the wild thing is they might not even realize that they’re doing this, or that they have a choice at all
when i look back on my teens and early 20s, i see that I “wasted” many, MAAAANY hours talking with people in conversations that, I can now see in retrospect, were 98% doomed to fail from the start. but it took that raw experience for me to have any genuine knowledge about it
also part of wisdom is realizing that you can still be surprised even when you do everything correctly. sometimes the expert player who does everything right gets steamrollered by the random newbie who got ridiculously lucky. so there’s no point ever being smug about anything
in retrospect I don’t consider those hours “wasted”, because I now see that they made me wise. and here by wisdom I mean, they gave me the interior understanding from experience, a felt sensitivity to the kind of frames people are operating with, the assumptions they tend to have
and even then like, the most critical thing at the heart of it is to restate that i have no idea wtf i’m talking about. because the moment you’re like “oh yea, this is just like that, so it will definitely happen exactly the same way” is exactly the moment you get killshot’d
i feel like all of this parallels with the phenomenon of imposter syndrome
you cannot solve either of these problems inside your own head, by simply thinking harder or smarter or whatever. because the problem is not inside your head, not exactly. it’s in-between you & the world. so increased anxiety & neuroticism, “think harder”, doesn’t actually help, in my experience.
what helps is hearing from other people about their experiences. reading is a pretty great proxy, you can get a LOT from that, but even so I think there’s something you glean from people’s body language.
“talk to loads of people!!” is a tremendous solution to a lot of problems that I very seldom hear people prescribe. i wonder why?
expand your search! whether you’re looking for a spouse, a friend, a cofounder. talk to 1000 people instead of 50. it takes more time yea, but the world is big, and people’s values, experiences, backgrounds vary tremendously, and new people’s POVs can change your whole life.
you can’t think your way out of a perspective problem. not exactly, not directly. you have to be creative and try to figure out new ways to look at things from different angles. some people travel or fast or use drugs or whatever. you also can literally talk to people.
here’s a funny point: I think if you’re intellectually honest, there’s a period of time that you might have to spend hanging out with losers just to be sure, lol. I no longer feel the urge to investigate. took many years! i mean i’m still sort of broadly curious, generally. but I’m also much more mindful/aware of how that immersion affects my psyche, sense of well-being, etc. takes some preparation.
I no longer feel a compulsion to make sure that people “get it”. it’s not my job. I was not put on this earth to be captain save-a-hoe. I let people come to me if they want, it’s opt-in now. took me many years to come to a sense of peace about this 🤗 feels good now