Sensitive to bullshit and social mismatch

Some people are sensitive to bullshit, far more than those around them. This inevitably makes them outliers, because the largest collectives around us are built around and maintained by bullshit, i.e. the myths of the system. ⁶ Question the fundamental assumptions behind our economy, or schooling, or the medical system, or the entire technological system which contains all of those, and what you find is a series of bullshit which justifies, or attempts to justify, why human quality of life must be subordinate to "necessities" such as the growth of GDP, the bureaucratic demands of all of our institutions, and ultimately, the need to maintain and grow the technological system at all costs.
In general, what is called a strength is that which favors the dominant collective, i.e. whether there is match between the individual and their society. But in truth, every "weakness" is probably a strength given another environment:

• Anxious people are better at foreseeing risks (whether their anxiety makes them better at handling those risks is debatable)
• Emotionally sensitive people are more prone to be traumatized but they also have far more empathy ⁷
• People who frequently dissociate are good at working in abstract realms, like mathematics and software engineering
• People who are insecure at least care enough about how they relate to other people that they are affected by it. Contrast that with a psychopath who has no self-doubt whatsoever, and it's clear that the complete opposite of insecurity is rather unhealthy, though it obviously doesn't mean that insecurity is either, I merely want to point out that it is a sign of perhaps deeper empathy ⁸
• Procrastination is a strategy which makes a lot of sense, because ultimately the things which people procrastinate on is utterly irrelevant, like seriously who will ever read or even care about your middle school dissertations one year from now, let alone further in the future? So the fact that people procrastinate so much in the modern world is a testament to how bullshit "work" has become, that the only motivation is a socially enforced punishment, as opposed to intrinsic motivations such as learning things which one is interested in, or contributing to a community
• Someone who cannot motivate themselves to work on important things might be a great team-player, good at meeting other people's demands, but have poor initiative ⁹
Point being, there is no virtue to being well adjusted to a sick society. Better to focus on what you want to see more of, rather than appeal to standards you didn't approve of. Not an easy thing to do, after all being a good person in a corrupt world is the conflict of a great deal of stories, but still, it is what is easy to live with, as opposed to what is easy in the moment.

Footnotes

⁴ It's usually guys who are like this. Women being more social people tend to let go of their self-image more easily, and thank god for that, at least half of the population isn’t filled with as many egocentric pricks.

⁵ The clichés of the nerds, "popular" kids and so on have been a disaster for the youth. A way to filter people based on crude categories as opposed to actually paying attention to them. Very useful for the education system which is primarily concerned with sorting out people, terrible for human beings growing in the world and learning how to interact with one another.

Links and tags

Go back to the list of blog posts

Journal     Untaggedsub

2025-01-30