Comment by j_crick

Comment by j_crick 10 months ago

Oh, we all do run on them, I think, because our experiences are moderated by chemicals in our brains anyway. Shift your hormonal balance here or there just a bit, and this or that part of your identity or behavior can get marginally out of your control.

Some people, like you, in their "default" state can control their behavior to a degree that allows them to choose the "loudness" of their reactions to external stimuli. Perhaps you can still be technically angered by something minuscule, but at least you're able to choose to not react and refocus your attention onto something else. Therefore, it might be said that you have the ability to reflect upon your feelings and behavior in perceived real time and adjust them to some degree. It's like you're an external observer to a state machine of yourself, or you're running a reflective feedback loop always on, or that you can actually give the taxi driver of your brain actual directions that they would follow. Which, I certainly agree, is quite practical and useful, liberating even.

In my earlier comment I tried to imply that for many people what you experience as normal may be borderline impossible, therefore getting angry at a phone is "normal". It is that they may be not able to target their reactions with any precision that you're used to. I think you can find evidence of that pretty much everywhere.

SirMaster 10 months ago

Damn, I feel like you explained how I experience my existence better than I could lol.

How other people experience it, I just have to do my best to imagine it.

I mean is not like I can’t get mad. It just takes way, way more I guess. Like if someone killed my pet or something I wound certainly be angry. But something like my phone UI just seems so trivial and so minuscule and unimportant in the grand scheme of life that it doesn’t seem to warrant getting angry at.

The apparent irrationality of getting angry at something so small and honestly meaningless compared to life seems to allow me to “ignore” it.

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j_crick 10 months ago

> How other people experience it, I just have to do my best to imagine it.
Imagine somebody planted a virus on your desktop, or just sneakily RDP-ed into your session and took control over your mouse and keyboard, like kids were joking on each other in computer classes back in the days. Now your mouse runs amok and keyboard types whatever, and you're sitting powerless and screaming at the screen because nothing is done and your day is ruined.
It's a shallow analogy, but in principle if you don't control your attention strongly enough, it gets hijacked by whatever your brain is trained to prioritize "subconsciously". And then once your attention is hijacked and you can't control it, you can only take the backseat and react, because the "virus" is already in your system. That's why and how clickbait titles or "outrage porn" or "reaction youtube videos" work, ditto for tiktok, instagram et cetera.
Unless you proactively and consciously keep running the firewall/antivirus of "why am I doing this right now and what do I get out of this?", your mind will be infected, that's an axiom.
From my observations I find it very ironic that for people who have stronger firewalls there will always be more sophisticated viruses and attack vectors. Don't get outraged at your phone every day? No problem, your next visit to a high profile restaurant will get to you once they stop making your favorite dish the way you liked, or city council orders demolition of an old building you find beautiful, or your favorite producer of high-end bike gears goes bankrupt just when you were to buy some hardware from them, or you maybe waited for a model update of a car you wanted to buy and this year they totally ruined it. Political or economical systems? State of climate, culture, some industry? Oh, there's so much of it. It can be of any complexity, the axiom remains.
Keeping your cool and your tolerance to insignificant things high enough also eats at your runtime resources, if you live among other humans and not like somewhere alone in the mountains after renouncing all earthly pleasures. So it's inevitable to drop it once in a while. Triviality of what will trigger it next time is, thus, entirely arbitrary.

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- SirMaster 10 months ago
  
  Pretty much all those things you listed as examples are things that are way outside of my control.
  I never saw the point of getting angry or frustrated at things that are outside my control.
  If you were to ask me what the last thing I was angry at, I literally couldn’t tell you. It was that long ago and rare and not really important enough to be memorable anyways.
  You are making me think that the way I react to things is odd or really uncommon. If that’s true, I never really realized that.
  
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