For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
I’m not sure if this answers the question but I feel like the older I get the more I see through “the game of life” and once that illusion gets shattered it’s impossible to unsee. Much of the status seeking, tribal behaviour becomes nearly impossible to partake in once you start seeing what it’s all for.
Go ask a person why their Instagram is filled to the brim with pictures of their face, for example, and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic. Try doing that while being fully conscious about the true motivations behind it. You can’t - something has to give.
However, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Sure you can pat yourself on the back for being above it all but it makes it really difficult for anyone to try and integrate in normal everyday social situations when all of it just feels like a performance.
It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.
In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.
But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.
A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.
I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.
Add in a psychedelic experience or two, and it becomes impossible not to recognize how ridiculous it all is.
Can be done without them, of course, but psychedelics can blast you right to that position, for better or worse.
I’ve taken the slow route and have been doing mindfulness meditation for a decade which probably plays a role in all this.
I encounter this when chatting with a family member and she mentions that she “loves animals” and who “couldn’t hurt a fly” while also being an omnivore. She feels sorry for the animals when she thinks of industrial farming, but does her best to never think about it. When this topic comes up, I don’t say anything (we’ve been through the topic in the past), but she sees the impatience with her bullshit on my face, and gets flustered by the fact that someone doesn’t consider this cognitive dissonance normal.
I can somewhat relate with that. Eating meat is one of the few behaviours that I still do despite being unable to morally defend it. It’s not even that I’m trying not to think about it or have to somehow deceive myself believing that it’s good. I know exactly what I’m doing. The convenience of it simply outweighs the moral guilt.
What I think would possibly make me feel different about it is someone handing me a gun and telling me to shoot a cow. If it turns out that I can’t do it, then that really puts into question the outsourcing of the messy part of it in the first place.
There is a difference between being narcissistic and craving validation. It’s completely normal to want validation, feel needed, wanted and appreciated.
It’s very sad that every human need has been turned into a subscription based service.
Yeah I also have autism
Take it as a call to develop deep, authentic relationships with those people who are willing to let their guard down with you.
You don’t have to fully integrate, I guess. As in, people don’t have to be your intellectual/ideological peers or see things as clearly, but you can still enjoy their company. If anything, it’s your moral responsibility to guide them and elucidate them when needed because, well, who else is gonna do it? They can’t do it for themselves, else they wouldn’t be posting a million selfies or doing whatever other nonsense they’re up to after their PFC has developed sufficiently. You’re gonna have to lead the blind to water, you don’t want them to die of thirst, right? The way is important too, because you don’t want them to see you as an annoying, moralising, “no fun allowed” kinda guy, they’ll just run away from you… but with the right approach you can be the somewhat wise unc/paternal figure of your group.
Beware though, people WILL call you asking for guidance on your days off and it’ll be up to you to define the limits of your relationships so you don’t end up moving to a cabin in the woods disconnected from everything, but it is definitely rewarding and very prosocial.
Humans are narcissistic and selfish because over the millenia the ones that were selfish outcompeted the ones that weren’t. It’s totally natural to be selfish. Some are just better at hiding it than others.
However there is also a simple social aspect to including yourself in photos. It’s a clear visceral way to say “I was here”. A photo without your face does not have capture the “you” part of that statement. Social interaction is not just an exchanging of ideas, it’s also about building relationships, and for that to happen, the “you” part of the equation is vital.
To be fair I rarely include myself in photos, but for the same reason I am also less integrated into my social circles.
If narcissism is so adaptive towards survival, why don’t you put a couple dozen narcissists together on a deserted island see how well they’re doing after a week.