2026mar8: the trippy thing about filters is that we’re ~never not using them, and every filter has pros and cons. and we seldom perceive the true nature of each filter, the true consequences.
✱
(2020jul11 thread) “ignore the haters” is a more complex directive than people without haters realize
because it’s not always obvious in advance who’s a hater and who’s not
deciding to ignore some subset of people requires introducing filters
working with filters can change you
no system is perfect. ie, every system has errors
so you have to choose what kind of errors you prefer
do you want to accidentally ignore people who aren’t haters?
or do you want to accidentally take haters as seriously as you take everyone else?
both have costs!
if you choose strong filters, some non-haters will get filtered out, and a subset of them will think poorly of you for it
if you choose weak filters, some haters will get inside your spaces, and worse, inside your head
✱
i dont feel like anybody ever talked to me about filters and boundaries in the way that i’d have liked to hear about them. you need quite a lot of info about the world to actually begin to use them in an appropriate & effective way. i wonder if people dont like admitting this?
we often hear simplistic-ish directives like “ignore the haters” or “don’t be an asshole” but both of these are actually very, very complicated things in practice!
- ignore the haters: ok, how do you make sure you don’t overcorrect and accidentally ignore good, necessary criticism from people who care about you?
- don’t be an asshole: ok, how do you make sure you don’t overcorrect and accidentally let yourself be exploited by bad-faith actors?
the only real answer to this, as far as I can tell, is
- hope you had good placement in the birth lottery, lol
- grow wise over time through painful experiences, mistakes, failures, study, reflection
it makes complete sense to be anxious as fuck while you’re figuring it out
seems a lot of people roughly default to a certain posture in the world (open/closed, etc), and they sorta accept the tradeoffs that come with it. the wild thing is they might not even realize that they’re doing this, or that they have a choice at all
when i look back on my teens and early 20s, i see that I “wasted” many, MAAAANY hours talking with people in conversations that, I can now see in retrospect, were 98% doomed to fail from the start. but it took that raw experience for me to have any genuine knowledge about it.
also part of wisdom is realizing that you can still be surprised even when you do everything correctly. sometimes the expert player who does everything right gets steamrollered by the random newbie who got ridiculously lucky. so there’s no point ever being smug about anything.
in retrospect I don’t consider those hours “wasted”, because I now see that they made me wise. and here by wisdom I mean, they gave me the interior understanding from experience, a felt sensitivity to the kind of frames people are operating with, the assumptions they tend to have
and even then like, the most critical thing at the heart of it is to restate that i have no idea wtf i’m talking about. because the moment you’re like “oh yea, this is just like that, so it will definitely happen exactly the same way” is exactly the moment you get killshot’d
i feel like all of this parallels with the phenomenon of imposter syndrome. you cannot solve either of these problems inside your own head, by simply thinking harder or smarter or whatever. because the problem is not inside your head, not exactly. it’s in-between you & the world, so increased anxiety & neuroticism, “think harder”, doesn’t actually help, in my experience. what helps is hearing from other people abt their experiences. reading is a pretty great proxy, you can get a LOT from that, but even so I think there’s something you glean from people’s body language.
“talk to loads of people!!” is a tremendous solution to a lot of problems that I very seldom hear people prescribe. i wonder why
expand your search. whether you’re looking for a spouse, a friend, a cofounder, talk to 1000 people instead of 50.
it takes more time yea, but the world is big, and people’s values, experiences, backgrounds vary tremendously, and new people’s POVs can change your whole life. you can’t* think your way out of a perspective problem. (*not exactly, not directly. you have to be creative and try to figure out new ways to look at things from different angles. some people travel or fast or use drugs or whatever. you also can literally talk to people.)
anyway this whole thread was me talking to my kid-self, if you’re not feeling it, don’t worry about it lol keep scrollin’
i’m not quite done tho lmao. here’s a funny point. I think if you’re intellectually honest, there’s a period of time that you might have to spend hanging out with losers just to be sure, lol. I no longer feel the urge to investigate. took many years!
i mean i’m still sort of broadly curious, generally. but I’m also much more mindful/aware of how that immersion affects my psyche, sense of well-being, etc. takes some preparation.
I no longer feel a compulsion to make sure that people “get it”. it’s not my job. I was not put on this earth to be captain save-a-hoe. I let people come to me if they want, it’s opt-in now. took me many years to come to a sense of peace about this 🤗 feels good now
✱
(2019nov16 ‘suicide-by-cop’ thread)
This isn’t about a recent thing but I just got reminded about how sometimes depressed dudes argue with me in a strangely earnest and hopeful sort of way. It’s kiiiind of a “suicide by cop” energy, where you find a kind person to be annoying to until something gives
- If the person gives up on you, ha. Kindness is bullshit! Nihilistic misanthropy wins again
- If the person has no boundaries and persists with trying to help you, ha. Free attention and makeshift therapy from a sucker
People are complex and layered. I do believe that practically everyone has some part of them that wants genuine connection. But some people who are tied up in their issues will basically use their light as a sort of siren song bait to drag other people down with them
Life is pretty crazy in this sort of rocky territory. I’m intimately familiar with it. I used to be a musician who hung out with people battling addictions and other issues. It’s very messy and there’s no clear right or wrong, good or bad, no simple answers
The guiding question that I think was helpful for me was: what sort of life do you want for yourself? What sort of people do you want in your life? You have no obligation to force yourself to be around miserable people. You don’t have to be a full-time savior of the broken
when I was going through my transition phase, I second-guessed myself a lot. I was becoming happier, but was this happiness fake and bullshit? Isn’t it just an echo chamber, to surround yourself with good people? How convenient! How delusional! How fake! Etc etc
But what the miserable don’t point out so much is that all configurations are self-reinforcing, ie misery forms an echo-chamber too. You can’t really escape this. You have to save yourself first, if only so that you have the energy to keep playing
I used to obsessively try to help other people, from a place of neediness. If I help to fix other broken people maybe I will be less broken myself. It took a long time to learn that I can help others by taking care of myself: embodying a nourishing vibe
“I’m trying to save you here” is a frame that seems positive but it can sometimes actually reinforces the dynamic that the other person is a hapless victim that needs saving, and will always need a savior. Ultimately I think we each have to take responsibility for ourselves
Which isn’t to prop up some simplistic “by your bootstraps” individualism. We are social creatures, we need each other. We flourish amongst each other. But there’s a difference between needing help and being needy. Neediness is a sort of corrosive, wretched fixation that can ruin relationships. See also: you can’t fix your friends (youtube.com)
✱
(2022jan28) when i was a teenager I had an older friend who was a dick to me all the time. I would write these long, rambly facebook status essays etc, and he would summarize them in a rather scathing and insulting way- “so in other words / you’re saying, just A B C?”
back then I was like, god, yea, fuck, you’re so smart, i’m so stupid, you took a few words to say what i took so long to say. but now I look back and I realize, it is ALWAYS easier to summarize something backwards than to write it forwards, and this doesn’t invalidate the essay!
and yknow, part of the confusion, part of why i tolerated him for so long, was that he actually read my essays. so even as he was abusing me in my replies, I saw it as some kind of tough love, like he must really care about me to read everything so closely. and he was also simultaneously at times the most encouraging person I knew.
and looking back I see that it was complicated. a multi-part framework makes it easier to process. I think a part of him did genuinely care about a part of me. and those two parts were great friends. but a part of him was also a vicious, vindictive asshole. and I have enough context to have some idea of where that came from. he was himself bullied and abused as a kid, for reasons that had nothing to do with him personally. and there’s a part of me that really feels for that part of him, and wanted (and still wants!) to protect him.
until I was maybe 22, nobody else had ever seen or known me as intimately as he had. it’s helped me tremendously to have sought out new and different people to confide in, learn about, relate to. it took me a long time to learn that love doesn’t have to be vicious.
and, yknow. it’s not like I could point to my family and say, “see, love is supposed to be patient, kind, gentle…” lol. I knew it from books and movies and music, but I didn’t know it firsthand until I was about 23. I learned it largely from my colleagues. is that weird? lol
my wife always knew. we were bf/gf then. when we were ~18, she told me some soft version of “your friends are terrible” and at the time I was like, ah, this is a typical case of a jealous gf trying to tear a guy from his mates. nope. she is tremendously prescient re: these things
here again I find myself thinking that a multi-part framework would’ve made things much clearer and less contentious. people don’t have to be either terrible or amazing, they can be both.
i don’t think my friend hated me or wanted me to suffer or feel pain or anything like that. even the “worst” part of him, I think, wasn’t trying to be abusive, but was trying to assert his own dominance. it was his insecurity that brought us together, and it also disfigured us
he was also simultaneously the most encouraging, supportive person in the group, and the most socially skilled. I mean, he was significantly older than everyone else, so. yea. at the time we all thought it was super cool/flattering that he hung out with us
but now that I’m older than he was when we first met, it’s like. wait a minute. why was he hanging out with teenagers, lol. couldn’t he find friends his own age? like, I have some younger mutuals on here – i have pretty clear boundaries with them, & I am v careful not to overstep
anyway. we’ve since mostly drifted apart and I think that’s for the best for both of us. I still feel a deep bond of kinship with him, that’s something that doesn’t change. at a glance I think he’s doing better than he used to, and I imagine he’d say the same about me
I actually had multiple friends who used to be vicious with me about my writing, lol. This is a different guy!! I think a big part of why we tolerated each other’s cruelty was that we each were also cruel to ourselves internally and we related to each other on that front
my social options when I was 16 seemed to be either to hang out with boring prestige-seekers or tortured artists with a full spectrum of undiagnosed issues. seriously ~14 years later it seems that every single one of us has a “surprise” – adhd, bpd, ocd, my old crew got it all
so like understanding this stuff was never a mere academic curiosity for me, I needed to know the truth, I needed to know what worked, so that I could learn to be loved by the people I wanted to be loved by, which is the people who were fucked up just like me
like yea y’kno it turns out there are people who do radiate genuine warmth & sunshine from their being, and if you hang out around them, it does rub off on you, and that’s fantastic, actually! it can be lifesaving! I’d say it saved mine! but few people talk about that last part
and here if this stuff doesn’t make sense I think I can use Frodo, Gollum and Sam as a proxy for thinking about it.
everyone agrees that Sam is a great friend, right? “I can’t carry it for you mr frodo but I can carry you!” wow, what a saint, beatific sunshine of a friend.
sure, yes, and: consider about how sam feels about gollum. Sam does not see gollum as redeemable. he sees him as a cursed, pathetic wretch. we know as the audience that gollum is internally conflicted, and that frodo is enduring the ring’s corruption too
sam’s disdain for gollum is something that has an impact on frodo, because frodo knows that there is a gollum of his own inside his own heart. I don’t think frodo can find lasting peace and happiness just by mimicking/LARPing as sam. he has to face and love his own inner gollum
although, huh, here I would want to say something to frodo, which is:
just because you can feel the corruption of the ring,
does not mean that you need to identify with every single person who has also been corrupted by it
gollum’s torment does not prophesize your own
it is not frodo’s job to save gollum
the tender paradox is always… that insisting on that heroic rescue would perpetuate that problem, because it reemphasizes the frame that gollum is wretched, unbearable, and in some sense must be destroyed
so how do you walk the path here? I think there’s a common impulse here to ask, “ok so what’s the remedy, what do I change, what do I fix”– and in here too still there is a neediness for things to be better. the challenge is really to accept things as they are. sounds weird i kno
but we can’t fix our friends. we can’t fix our family. we can’t fix our children. they are not our property to fix.
we can only be present with them. few people have spent much time ever being truly present. it’s rejuvenating, transformative.
it is precisely the impulse to fix things, that anxiety about things being broken, and brokenness being bad, that makes everything worse.
the galaxy brain frame shifts are like, 1, brokenness is ok, and 2, nothing is broken actually
and this might sound like parlor game sophistry in text, but you can feel it in music. in music, the flinching from mistakes is what makes a mistake a Mistake. otherwise its just happy accidents that you can integrate into your play.