That’s why you should meet them. There are probably conservatives in your friend group that are afraid to mention it, because they know it’ll make you think of them as people on the street corner throwing nazi salutes.
I’ve never seen even the slightest bit of negativity at the gym. Come to think of it, I’ve seen almost zero negativity between any strangers on the street in like 10 years.
Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.
I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.
It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.
It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.
Because most people, when they’re showing someone else that they’re wrong, choose to twist the knife about it. Onlookers add in jeers and snark, making the experience of admitting one was wrong into an unnecessarily-painful shaming event.
People don’t want to admit they’re wrong, because our culture punishes people who admit they were wrong.
In the cases when a person speaks to me as if I am someone capable of admitting I’m wrong, when they treat it like it’s no big deal I just happen to be wrong, I have no trouble admitting it.
For me what works is to show me without much emotion. Like pointing out to someone they’ve got a leaf in their hair or something. If someone comes at me, with proof that I’m wrong, in the manner of a helpful friend pointing out something I can’t see from my vantage point, it really doesn’t hurt.
But when people are calling me evil, stupid, toxic, etc, I just want to dig in my heels. I might see that I’m wrong, and at that point stop arguing my point, but I won’t actually come out and acknowledge it.
You have vivid dreams for a few days. It’s just a matter of your hormones equalizing, so it doesn’t take a really long time.
Similar timeframe to getting over nicotine withdrawal which is a few days to a week, which is basically the time it takes your brain to alter its calibration.
Yeah I sell cabinets and sometimes people are like “How much would a 24 inch cabinet cost?”
It could cost anything!
Then there are customers like “It’s the same if I just order them online right?” and I say “I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a lot of little details to figure out and our systems can be error probe anyway…” then a month later I’m dealing with an angry customer who ordered their stuff online and is now mad at me for stuff going wrong.
Toward the end of our (X) childhood, a number of major transitions in the handling of kids were being made:
Playgrounds were being transitioned into minimally-dangerous versions of themselves
Bullying was being cracked down on
Latchkey parenting was being recategorized as neglect and being cracked down on my CPS
This meant that Gen X kids had a lot of situations to deal with as kids where they had to develop physical skill as a means of staying safe.
For example by the age of 7 I could climb a tree and be pretty safe because I had developed upper, lower, and trunk body strength, awareness of how strong a branch is and how to test it for strength, how to detect when a contact point I was resting on was slipping, and how to control my mind enough to maintain enough focus to not slip up while climbing.
On playground equipment, I had to be ready for a fall onto concrete, and I had to know when wood was likely to produce enormous splinters (I actually got a huge splinter through my ass once. It went in below my butt cheek and came out above it), and I had to deal with the results of kids going crazy trying to spin the spinny thing as fast as they could. I went flying off that thing so many times.
Also, during the summer when I was 7, my friend was 8, and we had little bikes, and we would spend the entire day outside wandering the town. We often would find a stream and slowly work our way up the stream. This involved a lot of balancing on rocks and logs, catching small animals, even fighting my friend sometimes. We’d swim in muddy streams that were full of broken machinery and glass bottles, and it was up to us to know how to stay safe in that environment.
The world was just less safetyfied back then.
Now I see people of age 20 or so, and they walk like toddlers. I’m not talking about disabled people here. Just people who are able-bodied, but they move like they’ve been recently downloaded into a human body, like it’s unfamiliar to them.