Posts tagged with "social commentary"

The Bias of Insecurity

I like to think that humans are, in gen­er­al, cere­bral beings, unaf­fect­ed by bias or emo­tion.

But every time I’m met with a big­ot, who has noth­ing to cling to but the strength of their opin­ions, I lose this hope.

The more they speak, the more they prove them­selves as inca­pable of accept­ing any­thing but their own beliefs. Added to this is a lack of self-aware­ness, caus­ing them believe that they’re not closed-mind­ed, they’re just right.

Often it betrays an inse­cu­ri­ty. You can tell that under­neath their words, they har­bour a sub­con­scious feel­ing that they’re wrong. To make up for this, they express them­selves strong­ly enough to con­vince them­selves that they’re right.

As log­i­cal­ly as you explain things, step-by-step, premise to con­clu­sion, they won’t under­stand. They’ll nev­er be able to accept the truth, and remain com­plete­ly igno­rant.

It’s impos­si­ble to have a dis­cus­sion with some­one like this.

The dis­cus­sion is super­fi­cial, and the issue lies with­in the per­son them­selves.

What To Accept?

They always say time changes things, but you actu­al­ly have to change them your­self.

—Andy Warhol

Many of my rela­tion­ships, roman­tic or oth­er­wise, are often approached, at least par­tial­ly, based on the hope that the oth­er per­son will change. This change can take the form of some­thing as sim­ple as prompt­ness, as frus­trat­ing as tidi­ness, or as grand as self-cen­tered­ness.

Change, syn­ony­mous with improve­ment, has been the basis of my life. It takes a self-aware­ness of my faults, com­bined with a desire to change these faults, to improve. Assuming that oth­ers are the same way has been one of the biggest mis­takes I’ve ever made. When the veil is lift­ed, and I real­ize that some­one is stuck in their per­son­al­i­ty, I lose my faith in human­i­ty. For the frac­tion of peo­ple who are con­scious enough to know that they need to change, (and I mean this in an absolute sense, where almost any­one would agree that some­thing needs improve­ment, such as tem­per or closed-mind­ed­ness) only a frac­tion of those are actu­al­ly able to do so.

It’s not that some peo­ple have willpow­er and some don’t. It’s that some peo­ple are ready to change and oth­ers are not.

This means that when I meet some­one, I either have to accept or reject them for who they are, because that’s most like­ly who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. I have to stop accept­ing some­one based on the hope that they will get bet­ter.

Acceptance, which has always been a dif­fi­cult thing for me, thus becomes the most impor­tant thing in my rela­tion­ships. It also remains one of the most hard­est things for me to change.

So should I learn to accept this about myself, the way I should learn to accept things of oth­ers?

Just Forget

Jeff: I can tell you feel the same
dar: do you still talk to her?
Jeff: no…I actu­al­ly specif­i­cal­ly told her not to talk to me again
Jeff: cause of some creepy stalk­er shit she was doing
dar: haha­ha
Jeff: and she still e‑mails me
dar: damn..
dar: she’s going to kill you in the dark
Jeff: haha­ha­ha­ha­ha­ha­hah­ha­ha­haaaahh
dar: she prob. knows where u live
dar: and watch­es you

In uni­ver­si­ty I met Mike, half-heart­ed­ly doing his biol­o­gy home­work in my cryp­tol­ogy class to hang out with his old high-school friend, the lat­ter of whom was one of my clique. Mike has an odd charis­ma. His out­spo­ken­ness means that he exudes con­fi­dence, and the girls love him for it. I’m nev­er real­ly sure if his mild chau­vin­ism is a seri­ous atti­tude, or just some­thing he projects around oth­er guys to fit in. One of those sex­ist ass­holes the girls can’t seem to resist.

He once con­fessed, “I have this Korean chick fol­low­ing me. You know, the kind you have to kick off your leg like a dog”.

Those girls are only in the movies, I thought to myself. The dorky ones with the glass­es who have impos­si­ble crush­es on the main char­ac­ters, who, in turn, are com­plete­ly blind to the awk­ward advances. The girls who sac­ri­fice their chance at hap­pi­ness, because they love him so much and just want him to be hap­py, mar­tyring them­selves in the minds of teen audi­ences every­where.

But they do exist. Those stub­born girls who still try to keep con­tact after you tell them you nev­er want to speak to them again. The girls who con­tin­ue to check your blog at an aver­age of twice a day, some sick voyeuris­tic fas­ci­na­tion.

Those girls you wished would for­get about you, so you could for­get about them.

The Power Of Freedom

I have an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult time deal­ing with peo­ple who choose to com­plain about some­thing and do noth­ing about it. These are the peo­ple who gripe about the jobs that feed them, decry the rela­tion­ships they’re too scared to leave, pine for bet­ter lives when a bet­ter life is only a few steps away. Religious doc­trines of pre­des­ti­na­tion aside, as humans we’re the mas­ters of our fate. We con­trol what hap­pens, because we have the respon­si­bil­i­ty — the response abil­i­ty — to make change hap­pen.

When the bad starts to out­weigh the good, then it’s time to shut the fuck up and be active in chang­ing the sit­u­a­tion. When the good is still greater than the bad, then it’s time to shut the fuck up and deal with what­ev­er minor prob­lems there are.

And when life hands you lemons, make lemon­ade, try to find a guy whose life has giv­en him vod­ka, and have a par­ty.

Second-Hand Compliment

Sometimes, a sec­ond-hand com­pli­ment is bet­ter than a first-hand one. It means that there’s some­thing the com­pli­ment giv­er does­n’t want one to know, as if it’s a weak­ness. Of course, one should always ques­tion how some­one comes across this infor­ma­tion, and their motives for let­ting one know what oth­ers may con­sid­er a secret that can be used against a per­son.