idgaf
April 5th, 2025
I don't give a fuck.
I actually don't give a flying fuck. And I choose carefully where I care, and how much I care.
And I realize, a lot of things in life just aren't worth the emotional turmoil. Actually, what does it actually mean to care, and should you actually care about anything at all?
Does this require my care and attention? And I need to genuinely make that with my own care and context in mind. I realize that I haven't cared enough about myself in the past, and that is absolutely detrimental going forward. I need to figure out what needs my care and why.
I need to start caring for myself, because nobody else is going to. Nobody gives a flying fuck about me like I do for them, so why should I care?
I care for myself.
Challenging My Thought Processes: An exercise in critical thinking and a petition against dogma
Let's begin with a couple axioms about how the world of relationships works:
- Fundamentally, an entity's actions should be for its self-benefit.
- Interactions between two entities afford some positive, neutral, or negative affect instanced on each entity.
- The affect between two entities can be influenced by respective self-action.
So fundamentally, what I'm painting a picture here is some form of game theory. Ideally, both entities of a given interaction want to come away with positive affects. The question is - how do the entities themselves mould themselves to do this, and are there any negative affects to doing this?
And if so, why ever, would an entity forcibly cave an interaction to form a negative affect? I assume if we were to reference this, it's because the entity has learned wrong in how to engage and interact with other entities, so much that it is afraid of negative affects it caves and vies for a neutral affect. I'm talking about putting up emotional walls so that a person doesn't get hurt, but hurts the interactee instead.
There are a lot of choices to be had when two entities interact. Why not go fo the mutually beneficial interaction?
Perhaps because these interactions are contextual - no two entities are the same and acting a certain way doesn't always guarantee a beneficial exchange of affects. There are nice people who mould themselves to the other party and people-please to help the other party gain some positive affect. This is really good for building "networked relationships" and engaging with others. People-pleasers often "feel good" a little when other people feel good as well.
However, over time, a true and large positive affect is unable to be grafted from people-pleasers since they effectively cannot tell the truth. Additionally, people-pleasers often burnout from having to act and tend to other people's needs all the time. People-pleasers often are at odds with trying not to emotional exhaust themselves all of the time.
People-pleasing in the short-term is an effective strategy for maintaining shallow relationships - but in the long term they are a terrible strategy and represents poor usage of delayed gratification. However, people-pleasing isn't practiced out of sheerly this own rationale - they're built from interacting from entities where people-pleasing is absolutely necessary to not be played by a large negative affect. Some entities demand attention and affirmation and validation from smaller entities, so these entities eventually learn to people-please to survive.
In other words, disappointing and angering others is what the people-pleaser is trained to avoid at all costs.
Now that we understand though that in game theory terms, people-pleasing is initially (+1, +1) but eventually devolves into (-1 * x, -1 * x) whatever the x multiplicative factor is.
People-pleasing tries to solve the problem that every entity is a different story instead of accepting the idea that every entity is going to have different outcomes. It's difficult in trying to determine what entities go together, but to continue the path it's an absolute necessity to get a determining factor of what vibes with you.
Determining how to act around others is difficult - a shared culture oftentimes sets boundaries up front and determines proper engagement for positive reactions. There's no need to people-please if the default is to culture-please, since both entities are participating in the same acting and burnout effort of societal deference, the affects generally can remain positive. Additionally, always acting according to the societal rules means that the interactions can go on indefinitely and don't require a more deeper connection than what societal norms beg from both parties.
When in doubt, defer to the societal level of milquetoast interaction and easygoingness. I give this strategy (+1, +1). Though the downside of this is obvious - there will be no strong connection built from this relation - it's good for networking though. At worst, the interaction fizzles off and remains a (0, 0).
Be strong and connected to the society and culture you participate in - it means that you'll be able to interact and engage with everyone from that society. See: Benjamin Franklin in France.
The third strategy - walling people off. This one is not a good one, but effectively works if both parties wall themselves off. It's a neutral exchange - nobody gets hurt if both parties wall off, but if only one walls off and the other tries to engage then the relationship stales and breaks. The entity that tries to engage is hurt by the rejection, and effectively the result is (0, -1). Not ideal unless both parties are unavailable, then (0, 0).
The fourth strategy is to engage in pure honesty. However, doing so often creates situation of pure rejection. Being rejected to such an extent can often deal in pain - though the rejectee comes away with a neutral affect from playing the game (-1 * x, 0). Being honest for an individual oftentimes can be a painful experience. There is a grand benefit though, that with honesty individual entities can find relationships that are extraordinarily benfificial to both parties, and true friendship can form which brings the game to (+1 * x, +1 * x).
Though, the fifth strategy is to combine strategies two and four, which is to mix pure honesty with societal level agreement of interaction. Societal norms are an excellent way of syncing and tuning individuals, but the safety of keeping conversations within societally acceptable bounds and not veering to taboo let's exploration of how honest individuals can get.
Sometimes, no, most times individuals have things that they hide that are not societally acceptable. It's about being socially acceptable then slowly understanding and letting walls down. But remember, it's not guaranteed a match when meeting.
Values are very important to entities - it's what makes entities mix and match and decline one another. Getting to know each others values in a safe context means for interesting interactions and relations.
Of course, all strategies are valid given the correct circumstance - they maximize each individual entities safety and positive affect over the other in any given moment. To summarize the best and worst case scenario results:
- People-pleasing: (+1, +1), (-x, -x)
- Societal Norms: (+1, +1), (0, 0)
- Walling Off: (0, 0), (0, -x)
- Pure Honesty: (+x, +x), (-x, -x)
- Slow and Steady: (+x, +x)/(+1, +1)/(0, 0), (0, 0) - Note, depending on how honest can lead to more or less benefit of the relation.
Each relation and interaction calls for different responses and acting skills. It's up to the entity engaging to determine what the best approach is to determine the best outcome for themselves. Not every interaction needs to be completely honest or open, a dogmatic approach is entirely uncalled for in interacting entities.
We talk about two entities, but what about a group of entities interacting with one another? That adds an additional layer of complexity, but defaulting to the safest approach is likely the best.
Essentially, safety is the top concern when having conversation. Safe conversations are boring, but safe is what keeps society running, and it's important to keep that in mind when discussing things with other people. There are certain things people are comfortable talking about, and certain things that people do not wish to talk about.
(It's straightforward in a sense like that, I just never figured it out until I wrote it out in game theory.)
Balance in Nature
I realize now that a lot of important things take balance and are often at odds with one another. I'll name a few:
- Competence and Compassion
- Care and Composure
- Safety and Interest
- Approachability and Authority
- Frugality and Risk