over the years I’ve found there’s a discernable “signature” to the way people are confidently wrong vs the way people are confidently right. it’s hard to pin down to any one element though. it’s discerned more ecologically. confidently wrong has a clunky bluntness to it
the wrong tend to overuse words like “only” and “never” and often get kinda needlessly aggressive. it’s like they’re trying to bully you into accepting their position. the person who knows they’re right can be more chill and is often kinda laughing about it
A complication tho,
is when the person who’s right is also anxious, for whatever reason. This *does* happen often, and idk what the % of each quadrant is altogether. Probably domain-dependent too
I have a lot of thoughts about this, as someone who both tweets a lot and likes reading books
I think for starters a lot of people do themselves a disservice by comparing their current/adult selves with their tutorial zone kid selves who read when there was little else to do
second, I think as people accumulate socialization there’s a lot of “books I should want to read, books I’m supposed to read, books I ought to read” etc which muddy up the list of books you’ll actually read, which is the books you simply want to read
third, and this is related to the first point, I think people have this mental model of reading as something you set aside hours of uninterrupted time for. lots of ppl fantasize about reading books in 1-4 sittings. But they never quite have time for that. But funnily enough,
collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind
1. john oliver
2. harry potter
3. guy discovers that viktor from arcane looks just like him, then discovers the amount of porn of him, thirsty fangirls of him, and realizes that it's not his looks holding him back but his personality
connected a few dots i’ve been simmering on for years now
oversimplified: one of the reasons there arent ~“simple solutions to everybody’s human problems” is that what sets off a cascade of insight for someone at one tier of wretchedness can worsen things for someone below
the recent prevalence of the phrase “skill issue” is a useful example to gesture at. it’s a scissor that can cleave a peviously nebulous group into camps of people who feel energized and people who feel demoralized by it
for private individuals, this is basically a good thing. ish. mostly. sorta. you want to be at least mildly polarizing enough that the social reality around you rearranges itself to suit you.
or rather, we cant escape or avoid this. it’s always happening! similar pattern as:
I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that each person has some kind of “wretchedness floor” in their cached worldview. eg re: that viral tiktok girl who moved to Texas. I saw a comment saying “where are her friends?” some people struggle to imagine that someone might not have any
similar general phrasing in other situations is like “where were the parents?” oftentimes the answer is “not there!” or “contributing to the problem!”
most people have a sort of maybe 3-step algorithm (honestly 3 is generous lol it’s probably mostly 1 sometimes 2) abt how to deal with most problems, you get some all time hits like “cheer up”, “man up”, “get over it”, “it’s not so bad”, some fun new phrases like “skill issue”,
this^ makes me want to approach this from another angle... there's something to all of this about Time, and varying forms of time-blindness, and the scales of time that we are socialized to consider and not-consider
i'll try and speedrun a form of it in a few tweets. my first big rugpull shock was probably when the women who raised me, left me. i seem to remember feeling the world going white, cold, screeching, the abandonment felt like a kind of death