You aren't alone. I am reading the thread and have no fucking clue what the hell is going on. My mind just can't process any of this.RaikuFA said:
Individualism is stupid
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What always happens, a pair of people hijack the thread to get into a pointless, pedantic argument about something only tangentially connected to the original subject, and then blabbed at each other in a passive aggressive way for 3+ pages. Seriously how is this not familiar to you?Parasondox said:
You've been here since 2013, this should be old hat for you by now.
True. I just didn't pay close attention to the names half the time. I admit I go off topic just a bit but when I do it still links to the original question. If it goes to far off topic, I make sure to end that conversation and carry on with the original subject. The OP does deserve that bit of respect.Happyninja42 said:What always happens, a pair of people hijack the thread to get into a pointless, pedantic argument about something only tangentially connected to the original subject, and then blabbed at each other in a passive aggressive way for 3+ pages. Seriously how is this not familiar to you?Parasondox said:
Someone told me I should stop caring what other people think, so I immediately disregarded their opinion. =D
It's sad that this is what keeps happening.Happyninja42 said:What always happens, a pair of people hijack the thread to get into a pointless, pedantic argument about something only tangentially connected to the original subject, and then blabbed at each other in a passive aggressive way for 3+ pages. Seriously how is this not familiar to you?Parasondox said:
So you hate individualism because it makes you feel lonely?Dismal purple said:
That's understandable. However, there are lots of way to combat that. Start talking to your neighbours, do volunteering, visit your fam more often, etc.
Individualism is really not your problem here. People do not socialize less because of individualism. I would say it is the opposite. Once people really become comfortable with themselves they begin to do what they really want, and are ultimately happier. And if individuals are happier, then the whole community benefits.
If you take away necessity then people will definitely socialize less. Espescially in progressive states you have people all living on their own island with barely any outside contact. Just consider the loneliness 'epidemic'. The amount of singles that is probably the largest in human history. The rampant onset of social isolation and alienation. The high rates of depression and other psychological illnesses. These are definitely products of our times b/c social behavior has become a merely optional affair that knows as many 'losers' as the economic ratrace does.Glongpre said:
I'm not saying the alternatives to western, progressive, individualistic society is better. Though I'm inclined to agree with a previous poster that a happy middle ground between an individualistic and a more 'traditional'(caring) society would probably be best.
Protagoras, is that you?Dismal purple said:
In any case. Are you as capable of responding well to other people as you think? Maybe they don't want to be bothered with your questions right now. Or maybe you just come off as overly insecure. Or maybe you are just asking the wrong people.
There is a correlation between happiness and extroversion. But that doesn't suggest happy people become extroverts. There are such things as happy introverts.Glongpre said:
But the problem is, and not to be offensive, extroverts also speak a lot of mindless crap solely because it's been a little while since they stopped talking. And making the case that individualism leads to extroversion seems like a pretty flimsy argument to me. Surely the whole point of individualism isn't merely surface, shallow sensibilities of social engagement. Surely individuality is born from chaotic and complex selfhood that requires extensive insight and introspection of things people perhaps don't otherwise think about.
If something is easy or not difficult to consume, it is by definition simple. If lots of people understand everything you're talking about perfectly, then chances are you've wasted your life and haven't studied the more perplexing aspects of reality or sufficiently searched out for those experiences of which are at least complex and unique in their niche understanding.
The best scientist or philosopher, or artist, or whatever is going to be the one who struggles to dumb down what they do enough to be understood by nearly all people, and impart true meaning of the concepts they're juggling with, without adequate exploration by the listener.
I mean, I can't imagine a less individualistic experience than a hyperconsumerist society where fashion becomes an immeasurable mess of disjointed nuances, and where everybody has to go to the hottest new club on the circuit, and everybody listens to gthe same psychologically approved default aesthetic of known hit songs, and where all your friends ever talk about if how great they look, and laughing like hyenas as the gossip about the superficialities of their peers or collectively pool into the latest sportsball arena to watch the latest sportsball match and go home, month after mnonth, year after year, and so on till the day they die.
The only individual things about you are the demons in your head, after all. That's you, indivisible. No rubric of spoken or written language will adequately describe it. Adequately itemize, co-ordinate and make it expressable. The more demons screaming at you? The more demons you imagine? That's you+. Crippled by anxiety and crippled by self-concocted theories born of paranoia and fear? You've gone to the you+ core of your being and you have met the essence of your Night of the World.
It's also pretty terrible and there's a reason why people want other people to distract them from it. If you'd like to know how fucking terrible, talk to a low functioning schizophrenic person. That's where your individuality might take you. Someplace incomprehensible to others and inherently frightening to both sufferer and onlooker. Individuality achieved.
I kind of empathize with the OP. It would be nice to just have someone tell me what to wear ... because then I don't get demons about it in my head. Suddenly it's not my fault. Hence why fashion magazines are basically the only proof that if God exists they might care for us all along... but that message is increasingly waning, because they keep on telling us different stuff at the same time, and I can't wear everything they're suggesting ... or even necessarily own something like it to begin with.
See? And this shit is just clothes ... and we're stuck worrying about it because we can't just ask someone; "what should I wear?" and expect a clear, curt, 'that'.
It all boils down to this: Choice. Your choice depends on your perception of things and you're free to do (and choose) what you want to as long as your decision doesn't hurt/harm someone. That said, just like there are two faces to a coin, every argument has two sides. You'll find people who'll agree or disagree with you depending on their beliefs and experiences.
This makes me think of my uncle's wife. He's Dutch like me, and she's American. (He moved to America to work there) Every now and then they would come over to the Netherlands on vacation and to meet the family here. And for the wife, it was a huge culture shock at first. She found people to be a lot more involved in other people's lives here. Less individualistic. I personally don't see it that way, but then again I've never been to America so I don't know what it's like over there.
stroopwafel said:
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I am not saying either of those things. You guys are putting words in my mouth.Addendum_Forthcoming said:
People do not socialize less because of individualism. Knowing yourself better does not make you want to talk less, because knowing brings confidence.
There is a loneliness epidemic because of mental issues, not because of individualism.
The point of individualism is so that people find out their passions, and then they can contribute meaningfully to society, because what they do is something they greatly enjoy. It is the idea that someone will be more motivated and more innovative because the subject is something they love to do. The whole, when you love your work, it is no longer considered work thing.
Socializing is a part of human psychology, it will always be a necessity. Even introverts need some social loving.
Anyway, my point was that once you know yourself, you will become more comfortable with yourself (ie. confidence, self esteem), and therefore, you will speak your mind when you want to.
You won't magically turn into an extrovert.
You won't become anxious and depressed from individualism.
Unless I am completely off on what individualism actually is. Which I might be.
Knowing yourself is kind of a double edged sword. Can you know yourself without having gone to the battlefield? Can you know yourself without facing prejudice solely for who you are and inherent qualities of self-construction? Can you really know yourself without spending a month in places like the Niger Delta, a poisoned wasteland that helps arm the means of Western consumption? Can you really know yourself without diving deep into the near-infinite strands of influence that lace thr very patternings of your neuronal connections in the neuroplasticity-abounding world of constant, unrelenting access to corporatised social and consumer media?Glongpre said:
Frankly, I posit no one really wants to know themselves, and to do so is nothing short of madness. No one really wants to know what they might do if confronted with constant life or death. The casual abuse that stymies the spirit. The horrors of the world that they help mindlessly inflict through swishing about different windows on your Galaxy smartphone. Nor the infinite rebirth of your very thought patterns where not even your consciousness is sacred, and where 90% of your memories are false anf effortlessly recrafted as whatever is convenient of your brain as you dredge them up (false memory phenomena, for instance) ... not even your life as you know it is real, and subject to convenient alteration because your brain has to cope somehow.
Knowing yourself, particularly the last one above ... picture the insanity of reliving every emotion, pain (bodily and emotionally) or the sum total of your existence the moment you face the dread of retrospection and contemplatimg the evils you are capable of at once? In short, knowing yourself is a curse of incapacitating terror that would tear your mind asunder.
In short we settle for simply trying to live as we feel in the everpresent of our lives. Self and individuality given over to subtle whispers of the brain juggling what is right, and how not to live in constant pain... all without dredging up the horrors, the trauma, of a life spent pretending you're doing anything else.
Individualism is the curse of being forced to confront the horrors of your station. Living simply by the most comfortable variant of our everpresent self is the refutation and circumnavigation around *living out* that constant misery that would paralyze us doing anything.
Hence anxiety when we consider our interactions all too much.
For example. I'm trans. It has caused me the loss of those people others tell me should love me unconditionally. It caused me homelessness. Casual abuse to begin with. Physical violence.
Yet I don't call myself trans because of my past but because of my everpresent self construction that I will be miserable if I can't at least choose the methods and facets of my daily interactions. If I think too much (or indeed felt everything of the past), on what it cost me, I would likely kill myself because the future even remotely resembling it is s heavy burden. I persist for the everpresent. And it pays not to think too deeply on it. On the individual experiences that are mine and mine alone.
Imagine if those thoughts, felt with the immediacy of their pain, pervaded every second of my existence. Just how likely do you think I would even think about going outside? I might even cloister myself in my apartment until I starved. But I cope because it's not 'me' at that moment. I survive because I am dead to myself. Hardship does not breed sympathetic hearts for a reason. It breeds either melancholy or callousness.
It's a balance between comfortable acceptance without true introspective analysis of our individual existence. Not the other way around.
To be an individual is to confront fully all that has brought you to this point. Consider it deeply. Let that abyss of a merging of past evils and sll future potential penetrate your soul and discover that you are free only to suffer your freedom.
... and worse still ... you start to see that same latent horror in the deadest parts of another's eye. Suspended for all to see, but perhaps you are fortunate in that you are not that insane to do so. Paranoia isn't irrational. It's seeing individuals in light of what they can very feasibly do and have possibly done.
Being 'sane' is just learning how to ignore it and being a creature of immediate impulse. Smile snd squee at another's outfit, mindless platitudes how good someone may look, thoughtless preoccupations that keep the dark at bay. It's not staring into your own abyss or the bloody head that sprouts from another's phantasmagorical visage beheld superficially by your own preconceptions... leaning close to peer into those pupils... and asking; "What have you done to be yourself right now...?"
-----------------
TL;DR; Being an individual, truly contemplating the self and others, leads to the mental illness you describe. There is a reason philosophy birthed psychology, psychiatry, and neuropsychology ... the same terrors in the metaphysical conundrums of pure, unadulterated madness remains a constant theme of all that we are and confronted by. So we invent meaning in the madndss, create drugs to dullen its blade, and study the very processes of the brain so maybe... just maybe ... we can fucking kill it without reducing the beauty it can, so very occasionally, produce.
My advice? Shut it down before it is truly unleashed as an undying presence of dread that persists for as long as our humanity does. 'Being yourself' is not worth it. Live simply as a beast escaping pain and help others to do the same. Be that beast of careful impulse, and try as much as possible to angle it so it makes yourself and others happy without sacrificing so much your future capabilities to repeat this process for eternity. That is the hard and fast rule I live by and it seems to do the trick.
Do not quantify yourself. Do not assess total self. And never, ever, try to be the sum of yourself. You'll die, crying and utterly mad.
At the very least it will protect all people from even base ideas of self contemplation like this;
Hmmm, interesting perspective.Addendum_Forthcoming said:
I have the complete opposite view on this though.
Getting to know myself better, really digging into my self, has done nothing but benefit me. I didn't really talk to anyone until I was 20 because I was so filled with anxiety and fear. I didn't want to feel embarrassed, I didn't want to do something that could possibly cause me "harm" in some way. So I retreated within myself, into a part of my mind where I was no longer present. I would always think of the future (the consequences) or the past (what I should have done). I was not living in the moment. All I was doing was hurting myself.
But once I began to look inside myself, and understand why I was acting as I did, I began to see that what I was doing was silly. I wanted to interact with people. I wanted to be free from this fear. I was not who I should be.
I have really improved in the past 3 years. I am basically a completely different person, it is pretty fucking amazing, I think. I still have some lingering fears, but they will fall to my will before the end.
I'm sorry you have had a tough life (much tougher than mine, all things considered), but I think facing yourself is the strongest thing anyone can do. It is facing the events of your entire life, and comparing who you are now, to the person you really want to be.
Anyway, based on my subjective experience, being an individual has been nothing but a positive for me.
Take care, fellow human.
Basically my issue with children's television:
> Kids, you need to accept others for what they are
> Except if there is something about you that doesn't fit
> In that case you need to change/hide and others will accept you.
And yeah, I get it, the message is something-something self-improvement, however a lot of kids' shows are really hypocrite when it comes to overcoming things that do not "fit in".
> Kids, you need to accept others for what they are
> Except if there is something about you that doesn't fit
> In that case you need to change/hide and others will accept you.
And yeah, I get it, the message is something-something self-improvement, however a lot of kids' shows are really hypocrite when it comes to overcoming things that do not "fit in".
Hmm. No, that sounds about right, actually. Accept other people's shortcomings, and work on your own. That's not hypocritical. Hypocritical would be working on other people's shortcomings while accepting your own.
I think I should really clarify, let's say that children's television isn't exactly subtle about what they teach, and while definitely not targeted at teens or older, it can get pretty heavy-handed the subject matter they handle. I am talking about those shows that can't decide if their main message is "we're all equal" or "we're different, but that's alright", because I've seen a lot of shows my nieces watch that fall into these pitfalls.Pyrian said:
From reading through the various replies, if Dismal is being honest, they're essentially lonely, sad and looking for somewhere else to place the blame. I mean they've said things like 'When no one needs financial support from their family, then family stops seeing each other'.
Sorry you have a shitty life, but you're really reaching in trying to displace the blame here.
Sorry you have a shitty life, but you're really reaching in trying to displace the blame here.