5 ms·

Rejection is probably one of the strongest feelings for a normal person. For me two thoughts help keep my spirits up: - I was the same person before the rejec

• Razengan 5y ago
  > I was the same person before the rejection as I am after it. There is nothing changing in reality - only my own view, my own feelings. This is all mostly self-inflicted. The reality being that members of my own species choose not to be with me or work with me. I am unwelcome. Repeat that many times over many years.
  • bittercynic 5y ago
    _Some_ members. If every member of our species choose not to be with or work with you it would be a major problem, but probably not an insoluble one.
    • tnzm 5y ago
      Yep just kill him and then there's nobody to have that problem. /s
      • bittercynic 5y ago
        Damn, how about join a casual sports league or volunteer at Habitat or some kind of group sessions. Anything to get social experience.
        • tnzm 5y ago
          Damn, have you considered social experience could be the reason someone ended like that? It's a feedback loop and the less in control you are, the less in control you are. Until you hit rock bottom. Which might not happen, and where you might bounce off, or not.
          • bittercynic 5y ago
            Absolutely, I'm no stranger to having a string of bad social experiences leading to becoming (more) unpleasant and then receiving unpleasant feedback. I didn't mean to suggest it would be easy, and if you know a better way to start trying to turn things around I'd like to hear it.
            • tnzm 5y ago
              No, sadly mine is the case of "bouncing off rock bottom". But I believe that our society claims the responsibility of helping its most vulnerable members to their feet? If that's the case I'm pretty sure someone would come up with a better way to do that than "a miracle", if we'd just all put our minds to the question of how to help people regain self-control, rather than leaving them to figure it out all on their own. The first step would be coming to terms with just how much we all rely on each other's helplessness.
          • zentiggr 5y ago
            I'm in the long slow process of rebuilding parts of my life that were stunted in childhood, and learning how to feel and show honest emotions instead of fearing that I'll be rejected just for showing myself. It is hard, and runs over into all the usual self-help, but the one thing that has pointed me in the right direction is when I realized that I choose how, and what, I show to the rest of the world, and if I want a positive feedback loop, it starts with me. You are always in control of your end of the loop. Always. No matter how it feels otherwise, You Always Have The Choice. It took me a lot to learn that, and I'm still working on it.
            • tnzm 5y ago
              "You're always in control" means "others will always hold you responsible, no matter whether you're in control or not". This model is called "virtue ethics" and I consider it disconnected from reality. If you don't know you're in control, you're not in control. It's as simple as that. In my ideal world, one who has lost their self-control or self-awareness would be helped by one's community to regain them. In reality, when normal people see your self-control faltering, they will either try to protect themselves from you or to take advantage of you. Maybe not murder you outright, but definitely get rid of your presence, which is only going to amplify the disconnect. That is a positive feedback loop, in the pure physical sense: the more alienated you are, the more alienated you become. It's like pointing a microphone at a loudspeaker. Any system, including your emotional well-being, generally needs a negative feedback loop: when you get too much of something, you start getting less of it, and when you get too little of something, you start getting more of it. This is complicated by ideological hijack of the signifiers "positive" and "negative". When they say "positive", they mean "thanks for accepting our groupthink as self-evident, you will be favored". When they say "negative" they mean "you have no right to be critical, you will be disregarded". I consider this use of language untruthful and abusive. > I choose how, and what, I show to the rest of the world, and if I want a positive feedback loop, it starts with me. I can't even tell if this is supposed to be 1 or 2 insights, but I can tell you're right about running into the usual self-help territory. To me such sentences are quite intentionally devoid of meaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...), and following them to their logical conclusion would take one right back where one started, which is the ultimatum we're all born to: embrace the nonsense or perish.
    • gnarbarian 5y ago
      there's a saying for that. if everyone else is an asshole, you're the asshole.
  • zaphar 5y ago
    That is a depressing perspective. Your self-worth should not be dependent on someone else's image of you. It should be based on the facts of your own performance. You can't fix or improve other people. You can only improve your own performance. Focus on improving yourself and be satisfied with that. Anything else is a path to disappointment.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      You can focus on improving your own performance or you can focus on improving your relationships with a group; and the latter can often be more effective than the former, as your effectiveness and ability to change things is not solely determined by your own performance but often by social factors.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      I tried that game, it's a never ending race. At one point you'll have to interact with people and you're back to square one, your own view will have to collide with his/hers.
• bananasbandanas 5y ago
  I had an experience that drove the second point home for me. We were doing a white water kayak course. At this school it was tradition at the end of each day to paint one of our fingernails for each time you capsized. First day, our group was kind of smug about the fact that we only got maybe one or so each, while another group had basically both hands painted already. So we said something to that effect to our trainer, and he just says 'Yeah, because they are trying way harder to push their limits.'. He was right of course, and the next day we took way more risks as well. Made the whole thing even more fun, and it was definitely a good lesson.