“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
“Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.”
– Ken Kesey
“Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”
― Gregory Maguire
funny how when my friends give me their reads of my situation with "I might be projecting", it's accurate
recently also saw someone wrongly project his own shit onto a friend with an assertive "look at you, typical X, doing things like Y on purpose, you know what you're doing"
my read is that this is foundationally about intellectual humility
my friends aren't being fake-humble when they say they might be projecting, they're being honest
but because they're intellectually honest, they've gotten good at modelling things well and making good reads
whereas a recurring thing with people who are too confident with their reads seems to be that that they pattern-match based on a couple of phrases. eg someone seeing me say "pattern-match" and assume I work in tech, QT "tech bros love to pretend they've invented social dynamics"
took me years to begin to understand that one of the most heroic things you can do is not hate yourself
writing a book lol. will be published hopefully end of the month: gum.co/introspect
a short answer might be, take inventory of yourself, identify specific behaviors that you love and do more of that. investigate what you hate, and be genuinely curious to understand how/why
when I was a kid, people used to call me a head-in-the-clouds, castle-in-the-sky naive idealistic dreamer but in retrospect that gave me a lot of the frame-shifting finesse and dexterity that helps me make good decisions as an adult
there def was some cost to it,
but like 95% of that cost could’ve been mitigated if I had a big brother / mentor figure like myself to show me the ropes and nudge me in the right directions
and heck, from my POV now, I’d take on double the cost if I could get double the benefit lol
my head was “in the clouds” making an effort to model reality in a way that made sense to me. It’s a costly and tedious process but once you have it people start saying how unfair it is that you seem to get things right all the time, how lucky you must be, or genetically gifted