The difference between your and you’re
The difference between your and you’re.
Empathy. It shocks me how many “adults” have a toddler-level understanding of their relationship to the world (as in it doesn’t revolve around them) and society (as in we have responsibility for each other). So many “adults” sound like screeching toddlers whenever there’s a hint of someone else getting something they don’t get. It even reaches the level of “I don’t like this movie so it shouldn’t have been made” as if the very existence of entertainment or education or whatever in a field they themselves don’t prefer is a personal affront.
And this isn’t even a right-wing thing. The feminist National Action Committee in Canada was turned from a potent and feared political force to a laughingstock by ostensible left-wing women deciding that their concerns over daycare trumped native women’s active murders among other intersectional issues.
Something that bothers me about a lot of people’s sense of empathy is that they’re only able to employ it by directly relating events to themselves. It’s like a stereotypical “How would you feel if this happened to your daughter?” thing, where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it’s possible for them to get into.
I also hear this a lot around disasters, whether they be natural, terrorist attacks, etc. If you’re around somebody who has been anywhere near the location of the event, get ready for the “Gosh, that’s so awful. I was only there six years ago, it could have been me.” Can’t you just fucking care about the wellbeing of things that aren’t you? Feel bad because a bad thing happened, not by making it about yourself.
where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it’s possible for them to get into.
I wonder if there is a distinguishing term for this.
Empathy = The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (no matter how different they are from you)
? = The “ability” to imagine yourself in a situation that someone else, who’s very similar to you, experienced.
God this is true, there’s a staggering amount of people that lack it. So much selfishness as well
I lost most of mine during Covid. The amount of selfishness by people during that time has made me want to never be empathetic towards them… and there were A LOT of selfish people.
I have to confess I lost all empathy for people in the west over COVID for a while. While we were being hit with the heaviest and largest quarantine in history, cowering down in terror in our apartments, I kept one thought in my head in the first two weeks: “We’re suffering so the rest of the world has time to prepare and fight back.”
Then all y’all didn’t prepare. Didn’t fight back. Instead broke quarantine restrictions because you needed a fucking haircut.
I mean even ignoring the clown-pants-wearing CDC, the sheer utter shitfuckery of the average person freaking out because they had to wear a couple of fucking grams of paper over their mouth and nose, squealing like stuck pigs and generally acting like entitled shitheads over it, not to mention the people who not only broke quarantine, but fucking bragged about it on social media (like the bridal shower that turned into a massive cluster of cases), just had me gobsmacked in disbelief.
So when Wuhan opened up again and people did things like celebrate with a massive pool party that sent shockwaves of (typical) hatred at the Chinese around the world for daring to celebrate after living through the worst quarantine in history and coming out whole, I decided all y’all chucklefucks could die for all I gave a shit about.
Took me a few years to shove that rage back down and clamp it into a red-hot ball deep in my heart.
Now I feel sorry for people suffering again.
Except Trump supporters suffering at the hands of his idiot policies, I mean.
Selfishness can be trained away, lack of empathy not very much it seems.
Happily we store all these non-empats in position of power.
I think empathy can be trained. Children in general (I mean very young children) have no empathy. They’re vicious little sociopaths. But if they’re gently introduced to empathy as they grow, by the time they’re, like, 5 they will have empathy. (Those who were not taught to be empathic by 5 will never be able to develop it.
coughMuskcough coughTrumpcough
But you can lose empathy over time. Trauma can make you lose empathy. Fury (c.f. my above rant about COVID-19) can make you lose empathy. Tragedy can make you lose empathy. THAT kind of empathy loss, however, can be re-learned. It’s not even all that hard. The world just has to stop beating up on you a while, or you just have to meet someone who has it worse than you do to snap back.
I think overall, most people are just too dumb. I mean you could always say that, regardless of how smart the population actually is in absolute terms, simply based on variability. But still, so many things can be traced back to this. Of course, smart people also do really dumb shit, just less often.
There are no smart people. Everybody is stupid (where “stupid” is defined as “prone to maladaptive behaviour and/or belief”), no exceptions. There are just some fields society values more when less stupid than others.
If everyone is the same, why do some consistently do far less stupid shit than others? That is not something the society defines. Some are literally too stupid to see how their actions directly lead to their own harm. No need to look at “complex” things like voting trump as an immigrant with the wrong skin color and then getting deported.
The difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Yep it’s a classic symptom for me though. It’s often not nice for neuro people to have it pointed out to them, and it really isn’t nice when people do it to me. It’s embarrassing and taps into horrible memories from school.
Knowing the absolute basics of using a computer
Eh, it depends. I don’t know how to sew, except to fix a hole in my sock. Couldn’t make a coat, never needed or wanted to.
My mother can’t use a computer besides checking her emails and finding a movie to watch, which is all she needs and wants to know.
Now, if it’s your job to use one effectively and haven’t got a clue? I expect you’d end up in management in no time.
