Thread by @visakanv

With each passing year I get slightly more comfortable accepting the fact that most complainers don’t really want to do stuff. but still it makes me sad because it means I have to revise my assessment of people in general. I can still love them, but I can’t respect them as much

I spent a lot of my teens and early 20s trying to encourage complainers to do stuff. It was very unproductive and frustrating. I’ve since found that life is 100x better by seeking out people who do stuff. I kinda still have a soft spot for complainers bc in my heart I’m one too

this actually intersects with this previous thread. In a sense it’s disrespectful to “manage” or “deal with” someone in a way that’s presumes they’re diff than who they are. But how do you “really know” who someone “really is”? We barely know ourselves. Yet the 🌍 spins madly on

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1330669524929024000

so okay, you try to escape this conundrum by emptying your cup of assumptions and presuppositions - as far as possible, anyway - and engage with each lovely new person as a fresh set of infinite possibilities...

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1129212169701085186

where do you go from there? IME, I find pretty quickly that different people have different interests, priorities, capabilities and so on, and it would be dishonest to pretend that this isn’t the case. I don’t wanna be harsh or hurtful to anyone but this is just how it is afaict

Sometimes it feels like all one can do is to try to minimise harshness. And there are so many ways to be harsh, unwittingly, unintentionally. It can be a kind of harshness to misread or misinterpret somebody. And yet the nature of communication means this is near *inevitable*

the wrong takeaway here would be to renounce reality - that itself is a kind of harshness to oneself, and you are a person of this universe just like everybody else. I think musicians have this figured out: it’s ok to make mistakes but you try your best to fix and flow as you go

you try to be clear about who you are, what you’re about, what games you want to play - as far as you can, anyway - and be open and inviting to others who want to play similar or complementary games. there is no universal game that’s for everyone and that’s okay

you could reframe this entire train of thought to be one about healthy and good boundaries. I suppose then I am grieving about the inevitability of exclusion. It is not possible to be perfectly inclusive. You can try. You will fail. You can try again, better, wiser. Fail better

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1269482528118673409

I want to be for everyone, but that is a material impossibility. So I have to choose. “I refuse to choose” is also a choice, and one that relinquishes responsibility to the winds of randomness. Can a person do better than chance? Yes: many such cases. Although not nearly enough

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/981637431639228416

A combat medic has to make some grotesquely difficult triaging decisions. He’d love to save everyone if he could, but the best he can do is the best he can do. It’s nobody’s responsibility to save the world. But some of us do have more power than others.

I suppose I’m wondering about what it might be like to renegotiate my relationship with futility, and whether that might do me or anybody else any good. I feel like there’s something very powerful here that I’m not properly facing