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"
a way to avoid like 80% of the errors in this space is to just refuse to label things as much as you can. it's more effort at the start, but with practice you can get good at it, move just as fast as others, and make fewer mistakes, which is lucrative
a thing i dislike about a lot of advice you'll find on the internet – and this is kind of a consequence of search engine optimization – is most advice ends up being very tactical. like if you struggle with sleep, you'll encounter a lot of "use blackout blinds, wind down early..."
but it's not just about SEO, it's also abt the fact that tactical advice is the easiest to give, it's never wrong, but if you have a wicked problem that you haven't been able to solve, the issue is rarely bad tactics. most people with wicked problems already know all the tactics
having a moment where I realize I don't... make much of an effort to *experience* the kinship of my friends
it's kind of weird, like, i've put in all this effort into *making* friends, but I hardly spend any time *enjoying* them
both are quite elegantly explained by fear
I used to spend loads of my time lounging around with my friends as a teenager, we were a group of misfits and we could be kinda casually harsh and cruel with each other but there was a love there, maybe largely out of a sense of shared suffering
the adults in my life often attacked/insulted/shamed me for this, and the hardest part was that there was a part of me that agreed with them, like at some level we were certainly a bunch of low-lifes just fucking around aimlessly. AND we also had big ambitious dreams. it's messy
“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
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