I spend A LOT of time thinking about myself. Maybe that’s vanity, pridefulness, narcissism, or even solipsism. But many of the things I’m most curious about have to do with personal experience, psychology, worldviews, and memory. How else can I investigate these but by introspection? I will probably never be able to know "what it’s like" to be another person, but when I try to imagine how it might be, I do so by trying to imagine all of the parameters of conscious experience and how they might be tweaked. As a few examples, how would I experience some particular moment if I:
*was more or less materialistic
*was more or less confident
*believed in some particular religion
*had no financial concerns
*had a terminal illness
*was a woman or a different race or both
*had different values or priorities
*had different life experiences
…etc. This list can go on forever, and the permutations are likely infinite. I guess my point in saying all of this is that unless I’m doing some activity that requires mental focus, I’m more than likely thinking about myself and thinking about how I think about existence.
I consider myself to be a very warm, compassionate, polite person. I try to be genuine and respectful to everyone I meet, and as far as I can tell most people that know me seem to like me okay. If I offend or disgust anyone, they either hide it well or else I’m clueless.
Two people, in as many days, have indicated to me that I may have an overly-negative attitude about life. And if I go back through the last several years, many people close to me have expressed similar opinions or criticisms of my attitude. I don’t deny that I can be a really negative person at times, but I think I’m mostly negative with respect to prognostications of the future. Which is to say I am not negative in my assessments of other people or present situations, I am a loving and supportive father and a cool guy to hang out with, as long as we aren’t talking about the future or the ugly parts of my past. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you. I don’t, for example, whine about how bad the food is at a restaurant, or fixate on the negative aspects of any situation. If anything, I am making the most out of a situation and enjoying it to the extent possible.
But if you ask me about the future, I mean yeah, it looks bleak to me. We’re overpopulating the planet, we’re polluting it and recklessly consuming expendable resources, killing off biodiversity, we haven't been back to the moon in over 40 years; our country’s deficit spending is out of control, our education system is a mess, we don’t make anything worthwhile in this country anymore, we have the two worst presidential candidates in U.S. history; I assume that I’ll never find love, that any relationship will end in betrayal, that I’m not good enough to attract women, that I’ll never have the career I want, and that I’ll die from some horrible disease or accident before retirement age. I fully acknowledge that this is some really negative stuff, and it seems to be unrealistically, overwhelmingly negative. No single prediction about the future is unrealistic, but it doesn’t seem like an accurate prediction that absolutely everything is going to be a disaster. I can see this objectively, and I don’t want to be negative anymore, but I don’t know what to do about it.
As far as I can tell, my negativity about the future is extrapolated from my past experiences. I mean, how else does one predict future events than to look at past data? Things have gone fairly poorly for me in pretty much every chapter of my adult life. I’m not wallowing in pity here, I’m just trying to uncover the mechanism of my negativity. How am I supposed to defy experience, data, and history, and assume that everything is going to be just peachy even though all indications are to the contrary?
It seems to me that it would be willful ignorance for me to say, "I want the future to be good, therefore it will be good. I want to be more handsome, charismatic, and beloved and therefore I shall be." Is silly, empty, meaningless positivity a better attitude than evidence-based negativity? I still have hopes and dreams and fantasies about pleasant things, and I would very much like for them to come true, but the psychological leap from wanting something to expecting something is not only daunting, but it is tantamount to the abdication of reason. This is not a price I am willing to pay for positivity. Reason is the keystone of most every concept I hold dear.
Can someone tell me what’s wrong with me, and how I can fix it?
I totally examine myself, like Socrates pointed out. I also wonder if at times our experiences are part of just one larger experience, not separate from, but part of, the 'I am you' kind of thing... if that makes sense. I'm not religious, but I think Jesus was into that thought process before they strung him up. It's the inter-connectedness of humanity that not only attempts to understand the world, but by doing so humanity becomes more unified and tolerant of each other. This shared attempt to relate to the world may be why we seem to have so much in common.
ReplyDeleteThere are other things in the post that I relate to. And I have come to believe that mental trauma plays a part in the way I look at the world. And I recently did some writing about my past experiences as a way to understand myself (just some junky poetry), and I realized that just getting into that was traumatic. I was a mess for two weeks.
Getting into what happened in my past is painful, and why would I want to undergo any more pain? Right? I have a better view of what happened now, and of me, and I find I can relate to what would have before been unrelated things.
So, there's that. I can understand others a little bit better by getting in touch with myself, and the remnants of the trauma I was still dealing with.
Whoa. I got off on a tangent about me. Sorry. I'm still stuck on introspection stuff at the start of your post.
The logical part in the second half has helped me think of a new post idea. But there is more that needs to be said about it: Why does it feel there is so little that can be done to stop all the bad things happening in this world?
When we try to look at the world from others point of view we see so much more bad things happening in the world. Things that are beyond our control. And I often think about how to affect change in the world. Having sparring matches with people on forums doesn't do the job, because people have come to conclusions based on their way of thinking. So unless we address the way people think, things won't change.
So how do we get people to alter their way of thinking? Is it possible? Socrates and Jesus and other might have been trying to do just that, trying to get more people to start getting in touch with perspectives of others. It does seem the opposite to tribalism, doesn't it. And it has to start with the self, the hardest thing to tackle. I must first admit there is a problem with the way I see the world, a problem with why I place importance of some things over others.
Let it begin with me.