Humanity lives in a bubble, and at the edge of that bubble is an incredibly harsh reality.
Someone has to stand guard, typically men. Part of staring into the void is wearing emotional armor. On occasion you should take a break, go towards the middle of the bubble, be safe and warm, take a bath, eat, drop your armor, etc.
But that doesn't mean you were wrong to have worn armor at the wall. Nor does it mean the bubble is reality.
Reality is harsh, and everyone is trying to forget that. I commend those who refuse to.
From what I've seen this attitude often actually creates and reinforces this harsh reality, though.
Most of our reality is composed of humans doing things, and if you dig deep enough into why humans are doing various bad things, you'll find a lot of confused, closed up people chasing odd status markers because they need it to survive against other parties chasing odd status markers. It's an error that endlessly feeds itself, and the only escape is to cancel it somewhere - do something else.
The point is kind of moot when the people you are supposedly protecting against are of your own kind.
What about reality is harsh, and of that harshness, what is best addressed by emotional armor, and of that, do you know of any better coping mechanisms than that emotional armor? Although I do have a direction in mind, I am legit asking to understand your perspective and knowledge.
6 weeks ago Epstein was suicided because his trial might have led to even a few of the super rich 1% from getting reprimanded for raping child sex slaves. Not only is there nothing any of us can really do about it, the world forgot in less than week.
Bad is winning. No path to utopia takes the "let them rich rape children" fork in the road.
2. Emotional armor:
The above example is a single drop in the ocean. Empathizing with the raped children hurts. Feeling your powerlessness to do anything about it hurts. Now start adding the 1000 other awful things that have being done to people. You already have, and you already have shut down. Nobody can feel that much pain. But having armor is more about letting yourself take as many hits as possible before shutting down than hiding. The more cold your empathy, the more you can stare into the void.
3. Better coping mechanisms
Dumping this shit into the safe space would defeat the point. It would just make the world even worse. I put what I can into trying to recruit. We could really use more strong people, if you're interested. Most of it though, I let it hurt me, then I use this awesome feature of being a human where I forget about things. In the moment it sucks, but over time I look back and see a beautiful existence.
Valor is a quality not easily acquired, and I wish to.
Yeah, that's about the direction I was expecting. I absolutely agree with you that these are things are good reasons to have emotional armor.
I disagree that they're reality.
There's reality, consensus reality, and the outcomes of our collective actions. Including the second two in the first one implies it's unalterable, implies they're not fundamentally artificial.
Rape, murder, death of family and friends, famine, cancer, torture. Getting stabbed. Being shot. Being enslaved. Total war. Being exterminated. Stuff like that.
Is reality that harsh? Certainly there are immutable truths to be found, and of those, a certain subset aren't pleasant. But by and large in my experience, reality is largely neutral. What's often much harsher than any reality are the status quos of societal systems, and though they may be difficult to mutate, they are mutable.
As much as I detest things like the Men's Rights movement and MGTOW and other such groups, they've sprung up largely to fill the void left by the various (and rightful) excisions made into masculinity by progressive politics. We've learned how much of what was traditionally defined as masculine was not only sexist, but also just straight up harmful, both to men and everyone else. The problem is we set about destroying these elements of masculinity without then replacing them with something else, and nature abhors a vacuum. So now we have large sects of male demographics leaning into the toxicity, because having a bad identity is better than having no identity.
If I have one serious complaint with progressives, it's that the majority seem to regard men as privileged so far beyond everyone else that they have no legitimate complaints, and it's bullshit. And not only is it bullshit, it's ultimately self-defeating. With each lonely young man who is ignored and cast out of any kind of progressive minded group, the alt-right and MRA activists gain another pawn, easily radicalized against those who hate him when he himself has done nothing wrong.
So no, I don't think reality is that harsh. I think humans are harsh.
This is not a story of how utopias are made. Write that story in your head, then compare and contrast. Maybe read up on 20th century torture.
I lived the good life for a while, then I got pushed to the fringe, and now I'm somewhere in between. The worst I saw was nothing compared to the worst there has been, but it was bad enough to make one thing very, very clear: happiness stands on the back of suffering.
You may think that your question is innocent, that your optimism is an answer. In reality, you're just spitting in the face of less fortunate people. Imagine looking an abused child in the eyes and saying "is reality that harsh?" Or saying that to homeless people. Maybe go find a couple HK protesters who have vanished, I'm sure they're having a great time.
Good worlds don't let this shit happen. It's not a few people slipping through the cracks, it's a fucking dystopia.
Those are things humans do to other humans, it's not the emptyness of space, the harsh reality of the universe, doing that to us. To "stand guard" at the edge of humanity as if to ward of some outside intrusion of evil just doesn't make sense. There is still plenty of suffering to be had even if all humans were excellent to each other, but that would take so much bite out of it.
It sounds like you're on the tail end of existentialism, which is good. It does keep going for a while passed that.
Seems like you may be heading towards Absurdism. If so, I recommend Optimistic Nihilism instead. It's much less of a kick in the shins to the envious tortured souls you never notice watching you.
The person you responded to said they think reality isn't harsh, humans are, and you replied with a bunch of harsh things humans do as if that contradicted their comment, which it doesn't. Yet you're contradicting yourself:
> In the moment it sucks, but over time I look back and see a beautiful existence.
vs.
> Imagine looking an abused child in the eyes and saying "is reality that harsh?"
I find it interesting you namecheck Optimistic Nihilism because that's largely where I'm at. And I'm sorry but you just aren't presenting much here that's intrinsic, naturally occurring harshness but instead the manifestations of cruel people, which is exactly what I posted about in the first place.
I don't think the world is that cruel. I think people, both individually and as a group, are tremendously cruel and capable of terrible things that in turn make the world cruel.
In short, to borrow the words of Rorschach from Watchmen, “...God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew... God doesn't make the world this way. We do.”
Someone has to stand guard, typically men. Part of staring into the void is wearing emotional armor. On occasion you should take a break, go towards the middle of the bubble, be safe and warm, take a bath, eat, drop your armor, etc.
But that doesn't mean you were wrong to have worn armor at the wall. Nor does it mean the bubble is reality.
Reality is harsh, and everyone is trying to forget that. I commend those who refuse to.