Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
My brain loudly uses the categories of 'sky' and 'earth' for how we understand problems. Sky problems are stuff you go to therapy for, things u get mad at people for, like having a complex; earth problems are mechanical, like having digestion problems. Seems obvious, but 1/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
sometimes there's a grey area in between, and sometimes they shift. Autism used to be blamed on mothers for being cold or whatever (sky problem), but then we figured out it just happens regardless (earth problem). Or one of my fav examples,
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Charles Whitman was a mass shooter, stabbing his mom and wife and then shooting 14 more ppl (sky problem!) who we found out had a brain tumor that, good chance, was the cause of these urges, which he'd tried to get treatment for (earth problem!).
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Or there's one case you can google of a guy who developed sudden intense pedophilic urges (sky problem!) which turned out to be caused by brain cancer (earth problem!). When they removed the cancer, the urges went away.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
The division feels interesting to me because we *feel* so differently about them; they rest in different sections of the way we process things. I've written complaints before about how I think hippies class too many earth problems as sky problems.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
But the core of earth vs sky seems to be "how much power does my dislike have to change this?" The examples I gave above shifted from sky to earth because of realizations that being mad at the people would literally do nothing, in the same way being mad at a rock doesn't move it.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Sky problems are *social*; if your rage/horror causes people to behave differently, then your rage/horror is evolutionarily beneficial for construction of the social net. If it *doesn't* cause change, then it's not, it's wasted energy, and I think we know this intuitively
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Maybe this is all basic, but it feels like a frame that pokes at an interesting thing to me - on some deep level, everything is 'truly' an earth problem. Viewing the sensation of 'blame' in ourselves as somethin like a mechanical function to maintain social nets seems important
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David Shariatmadari
@D_Shariatmadari
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
there's an aspect to this which is the mind/body division, and that's been dissolved in all sorts of ways by much recent research: eg, inflammation and depression, schizophrenia and immunity, the mechanisms of chronic pain etc etc
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Scarlet Falcon
@birdmademejoin
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
IMO it's not just how much yelling at people can change things, it's also the converse... an earth problem is something where your impetus can lead to a tangible fix outside the social world. In that way autism is in-between, since neither solution really changes things.
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grumpysavior
@grumpysavior
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
yes!!! like technically, nothing is anybody's 'fault', but it doesn't seem like you could run a society like that, so we figure out by trial and error where to draw the line between victim blaming and holding people accountable
Ahmed Ayad
@AhmedAyad1989
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Maybe everything is 'truly' an earth problem, some manifestations showing in the sky, or equivalently, maybe everything is 'truly' a sky problem, with some manifestations showing in the earth 🤷🏽‍♂️
OuroborosAnarchy
@OuroborosAnarc1
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
There are constant feedback loops in both directions. Having a chronic pain condition can make one easily irritable at other people. Being worried about social issues can give one high blood pressure and digestive problems and so on
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