today my therapist told me that sometimes negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, self loathing, etc are like the hiccups. they’re uncomfortable, we don’t like them, there’s no way to turn them off; they can even be incapacitating for a while. we don’t always know where they came from or when they’ll go away, so sometimes instead of focusing on why we feel a certain way we need to get better at recognizing its temporary nature, keeping perspective, and enduring discomfort. i feel like a lot of self-improvement rhetoric is about pinpointing specific causes for negative thoughts/behaviors so you can eradicate them, but people with chronic mental illness really need to work on allowing themselves to experience these feelings without going into a downward spiral.
with the caveat that mindfulness isn’t for everyone, it can be useful here. “oh crud, I’m feeling X again. well, there it is. this sure is happening right now.” acknowledging without interrogating or trying to draw conclusions.
what I like about it is it gives me room to feel the feeling, but also to step back one and say “yep, that’s a feeling I’m having,” which is better than “I am this feeling and this is forever.”
(how much time have I wasted trying to figure out WHY I’m feeling something when it was really just the equivalent of a random muscle cramp?)
no, only if you’re choosing to make others suffer to make yourself feel good
enjoying making other people happy is a great thing
There is a Jewish story about a wealthy man who came to his rabbi and said “I have decided to build an orphanage, can you put me in touch with the relevant people”
The rabbi was delighted to do it, and introduced the man to some charities. After a few weeks, the man came back to the rabbi.
“I have decided not to build the orphanage,” he said. “I realised that I was only doing it because I wanted to be admired as a philanthropist, my motives were selfish.”
The rabbi answered, “do you think the orphans will care what your motives were? Build the orphanage!”
I think there was a similar anecdote about Abraham Lincoln and a pig, but from the other direction
The Fable of Abraham Lincoln and the Pigs
Once Lincoln was traveling in a mud-wagon coach along a swampy, rural area. His fellow passenger was his good friend and US Senator Edward Dickinson Baker, who later lost his life in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff at the onset of the American Civil War.
While they were conversing in the mud-wagon coach, Lincoln remarked to Baker that in doing good and evil, all people are motivated by selfishness. Just as Baker challenged Lincoln’s assertion, their coach crossed a rickety bridge over a slough (a large swampy marsh.)
Abruptly, Lincoln and Baker glimpsed a mother pig making a terrible squeal because her piglets were stuck in the swamp, couldn’t get out, and were in danger of drowning.
As their coach started to head away, Lincoln yelled, “Driver, can’t you stop just a moment?” The driver replied, “If the other fellow don’t object.”
With Baker’s approval, Lincoln jumped out of the wagon, ran to the slough, lifted the piglets one by one out of the swamp, and carried them to the dry bank of the swamp.
When Lincoln returned to the coach, Baker remarked, “Now, Abe, where does selfishness come in this little episode?”
Lincoln replied, “Why, bless your soul, Ed, that was the very essence of selfishness. I would have had no peace of mind all day had I gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?”
anyway I think the idea that good needs to be externally motivated and that the giver isn’t allowed to benefit from it, even inside their own head, is extremely puritanical and nature and can be discarded
Listen! The fact that other people’s suffering affects us and makes us feel bad is a sign that we as a species ARE pretty good actually.
Your good deeds are not “selfishly motivated”; they are motivated by 5-6 million years of evolutionary pressure towards caring for our fellow humans.
Doing good things for others because it makes you feel happy and not doing cruel or neglectful things to others because that would make you feel sad is not a sign you are selfish. Its a sign you are a good person, because those structures that do those things still exist in your brain, like they are supposed to.
so the megalodon is most definitely extinct? how do scientists know?
well, the thing about large predators is that they leave an impact on an ecosystem big enough that you can tell they’re there, even if you never observe one directly. in this case, we know they’re definitely extinct because of the behavior of whales! whales used to max out at about 50 ft long and were fast and agile, entirely because of predation by megalodon!
but about 2 million years ago, our whales began to rapidly increase in size until we ended up with real monsters like the blue whale. this pretty directly lines up with the extinction of megalodon, and the removal of the pressure they were putting on large whale populations.
basically, large whales can get away with being gigantic, slow tanks in the oceans today because there simply isn’t a predator big enough to take them on anymore. if megalodon still existed, we would be seeing its impact on whale populations! whales would be smaller, and a hell of a lot more skittish than they are.
everything in a given ecosystem is connected, and you can often get important information about the unknown parts by observing the behavior of other parts of the ecosystem.
All this, and the fact that if the ocean had sharks as big as Megalodon and had enough of them to sustain the species at all, we would have found at least one Megalodon tooth washed up on a beach somewhere that wasn’t fossilized. More likely, we would have found hundreds of such teeth every year for as long as we have existed.
“We didn’t know giant squid existed!” is a common argument I see from cryptozoologists, but it’s also flat out false. We did know. We knew there were giant squid for centuries because we found remains of them for centuries. We simply hadn’t captured or filmed a live one!
Okay, so I am well aware that this isn’t atall how evolution or natural selection works, but I still want a horror film that begins with a pair of scientists with dramatic music playing in the background as they pour over piles of records, until one of them turns to the other and says “it’s the whales. They’re becoming smaller, and more skittish.”
The other scientist looks out the window, over the sea. “Mother of god,” she whispers.
Alternatively;
We begin to find giant shark teeth washing up on shore. People freak out. “Scientists find evidence megalodons never went extinct!”
Then the lead scientist calms everyone down so they can explain. “No. It’s worse than that. If they never went extinct, we would’ve found evidence like this before now. This means… ” Dramatically takes off glasses.
“They’ve just come back.”
“But they can’t just suddenly come back like that!”
“You’re right. Someone brought them back.”
PLEASE,,,
Jesus Christ Super-predator
I’m pretty sure that I was the one driving when we all got into this little circus car but now I’m wedged under the back seat and the clowns have just ramped us off the grandstands and directly onto the popcorn cart
