Ironically, spreading memes that say “think for yourself!” doesn’t help — because those are commands too!
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Making “judgy” pronouncements about how awful insecure people are, isn’t helpful either for making them less insecure.
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But neither is just accommodating people’s insecurities indefinitely going to make them any less insecure. Insecurity is not merely an “unmet need” that goes away once you meet it.
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What conditions promote being more reflective and generative rather than reactive? What gets you away from “judginess” or “being insecure about being judged”?
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1. Truly asocial contemplation. Getting alone and into a nonverbal, feral state; or writing or drawing where definitely nobody will see. Calling it “meditation” is too virtue-signal-y. Just try to do something that doesn’t have social pressure.
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2. Focus attention on something super concrete (like making a physical object) or super impersonal (like math/science); something that prompts you to think about the thing itself, not your image.
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3. Don’t underestimate “merely intellectual” understanding; the literal words and their dictionary meanings and parsing the logical structure. This level of understanding is “shallow” or “mere” because you don’t feel compelled to act on it.
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That “mereness” is bad from the perspective that desires obedience (“you merely comprehend what I say, you don’t *do* it!”) but it’s good if you want to understand what’s going on before acting.
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Getting other people to reflect is hard, but I think it helps to keep the topic on things that lend themselves to “merely abstract geeking out”, because people will naturally have more reflective attitudes about that stuff.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @vgr
What do you think about the phenomenon where people go abstract in order to avoid looking at their actual hang-ups/trauma/deep-problems? (I really want the answer "then they should", because that would be beautiful. But it seems sometimes helpful to not rationalise
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I think that “going abstract to hide from problems” is a thing too, and it can get in the way of progress. I’ve known about that failure mode for so long it seems obvious to me, and I wanted to call attention to the opposite one.
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