The thing that makes “judgment” freighted, makes it “judgmental”, is really hard to explain to people who aren’t as sensitive to it. It really is like your words are magic binding commands, “thou shalt feel bad about thyself.”
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Twitter is especially bad for this because most tweets are commands or evaluative judgments. You just scroll through and get dozens of people telling you what to do and think.
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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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Replying to @s_r_constantin @vgr
I wonder whether this is the key reason STEM fields are in a better state than the humanities.
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