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100% agree.
I would also add our Individualistic and Puritanical culture to the mix of causes. We’re told all of your problems are 100% in your control, and that if you’re not working 100% of the time that you’re a worthless piece of shit that doesn’t deserve to live, that no structural issues exist, that there’s nothing you can’t 100% overcome with enough individual determination. It’s so unbelievably toxic and unhealthy, and causes people to not only not have sympathy or empathy for others, but to see empathy as a negative trait, as a weakness.
Your perspective on your problems is 100% yours, not it itself.
Sorta, this kind of thinking can only take you so far before the dissonance destroys your mental health.
Additionally, not everyone believes that just your mental state is yours to control. Many folks justify their own wealth by believing that they deserve everything they have and that people who have less by extension deserve their poverty.
Not sure why there should be any dissonance.
It’s not about deserving anything and it’s not about control. It’s not about justification. Quite the opposite. There are many societal and cultural expectations for people to behave a certain way, for example, and I think that many of these lead to problems for people because they cannot or don’t want to meet them.
You cannot change anything about society by yourself. You cannot change the system by yourself. But you can change your relationship to it and break free from its chains and realize the power you actually have in the situation. Ruminating about how bad everything is keeps you blind to it.
That’s such a meaningless sentiment. Sure, I can try to “feel positive” about my ability to navigate or overcome systemic issues, but that doesn’t make it so that I actually can. This is just “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking with a toxic positivity veneer.
It’s only as meaningless as you make it :)
It’s not about positivity, it’s about acceptance which allows you to navigate the situation better.
This is pretty interesting. Reminds me of the ADHD posts on here where people get their meds right and are like “I have superpowers now. I just think about doing something and I do it.”
I would like to add something else: laziness and relaxation are totally fine as a part of your life. Athletes know that how you recover from training is as important as the training you do. They literally schedule rest days, and rest periods in each day. If you want to do anything well, you have to have time away from it to recover.
Another succinct quote: “The brain learns during the breaks.” Repeating the same thing uninterrupted in order to learn it won’t help.
What this comes down to and what is ultimately the better question, why are so many people unable to sympathizes with others?
Either they think they’re better than everyone else, or they hate themselves and project ?
They’re just brainwashed by puritanical, capitalist “work ethic”. A lot of people who have nothing and work their way up by engaging with systems that steal their labor, in turn see those systems as good because they’re ahead of where they were before, without understanding that those systems intentionally create situations of poverty in order to drive disadvantageous labor participation.
If you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep
That is a popular myth. The truth is the opposite.
The feeling of warmth is the heat leaving your body and the receptors on your skin are detecting it. Meanwhile your core temperature is going down.
Then perhaps a better phrasing is “may be the only way to feel warm and get to sleep”, even if it doesn’t actually warm you.
Regardless, it is a bad decision by the homeless person and an example which a better informed author would have left out. Insomnia is less harmful than hypothermia.
It isn’t that alcohol doesn’t really warm you, it is worse than that. It actually makes your body core colder while giving the illusion of the opposite.
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As someone who’s literally been in the figurative position you’re using to attack someone:
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Neither I nor anyone else who’s experienced homelessness is a pawn for your Internet argument bullshit. How dare you? Go pay the next panhandler you see $50 as penance.
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You are completely wrong. It is absolutely horrible and disgusting that you’re out here arguing that someone might want to freeze to death. These are the words of someone who’s never been more than a little chilly, not someone who’s had to struggle against the cold to survive.
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Seriously, go give a homeless person $50 and get our shared struggle out of your mouth.
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You are assuming they were making an informed decision in order to paint me as a monster. Nice.
There is more to it than temperature that is overlooked by brevity. When you’re in a stressful, and uncomfortable, situation like that the numbness helps with the cold, possibly uneven, ground.
It can quiet the mind. And the inhibition can help nullify the fight or flight response aiding in getting to sleep.
There are several properties of alcohol that makes it seem like a reasonable deduction to drink a bit in order to sleep. Even if it is harmful and could compound the suffering down the line.
Maybe they do get warm then get the last sleep they’ll ever need.
The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.
Often, though, the barrier is that procrastinators have executive functioning challenges — they struggle to divide a large responsibility into a series of discrete, specific, and ordered tasks. Here’s an example of executive functioning in action: I completed my dissertation (from proposal to data collection to final defense) in a little over a year. I was able to write my dissertation pretty easily and quickly because I knew that I had to a) compile research on the topic, b) outline the paper, c) schedule regular writing periods, and d) chip away at the paper, section by section, day by day, according to a schedule I had pre-determined.
Yeah, this matches my experience from when I used to tutor people. They tended to be below grade level and would fall victim to a fear of failure, since their self-esteem has taken hits from struggling with the work, in their mind the failure would be confirmation that they’re stupid and would make them not want to try. Getting them to change their mentality resulted in more productive sessions going forward and accomplishing that required addressing the root causes of their anxiety and/or skill deficits.
I make high tech stuff but had a 40% attendence rate and was terrible in school. I’ve always loved learning.
Fantastic article, and I have the full book on hold at my library now :)
A lot of really good points on this, and I mostly agree. But I do go to university with a guy who is actively lazy: if there’s a choice of spending 10 minutes on a task to do it properly or 30 seconds on it to do it shittily, he’ll do the 30 second version every damned time because it’s “less effort”. He’s a nightmare on group projects. We don’t give him any tasks where it matters if the result is good anymore.
That sounds like a rough person to have to work with, but I think that’s more accurately described as a mismatch between values and priorities. He probably feels his time is more valuable than receiving a good grade. Well, either that or the idea of taking longer to create better quality is just undesirable to him for some reason.
I dunno. It’s weird. The guy’s absolutely convinced he’s going to walk into a job after graduation because he “looks the part”, like employers are just going to look at his hipster style and not care that his portfolio is a dumpster fire. He’s got the laziness of someone who was smart enough to coast through school without putting in any effort, and hasn’t woken up to the fact that a degree takes more than that.
Ah, yeah, privilege
And yet, shockingly, he’s not from a privileged background - he’s from a single parent family and his mother has spent her entire adult life on social security.
You don’t need to be privileged yourself to be drawn into it’s appeal. Surely it’ll be there for you, if you just do the right things! After all you’re not all that different, right?
I’m lazy as fuck.
love that for you
I just need time to go 10% as fast as it’s going now…
this post inspired me to request a very needed deadline extension for the first time
Thanks, this is a great article. It completely tallies with my experience teaching higher ed as well.
I wish I could give this person a hug. Every day feels like a struggle to fit into what I’m supposed to be. It’s exhausting for me, and I’m overall doing okay compared to many others. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for other people.
I wish more people were understanding, and society didn’t put so much strain on everyone.
Related podcast broadcast this week on Radio National Australia https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/is-free-will-an-illusion-/103702968
