I don't take it for granted. I think I brought up Dostoevsky because he portrays characters as representing two sides of the same coin: Those who keep at arm's

I don't take it for granted. I think I brought up Dostoevsky because he portrays characters as representing two sides of the same coin: Those who keep at arm's length from society and those who dive into the thick of it. What's interesting is that both types of characters do so for all sorts of like orthogonal personal reasons! Their motivation in both cases is to bolster their own sense of safety or ego or to be who they imagine they want to be. Thus my girlfriend, who's a bleeding heart bless her, took serious offense at my conversation with the homeless guy who thought he was Jesus. In her mind, the righteous thing would have been to hand him a dollar and say nothing, because he's merely a victim of his circumstances. She accused me of trying to humiliate him or make myseld better than him by asking him why he was dragging this misery around like a cross. She berated me for it, because in her view of herself, being a good person in society means something different than it does to me. I took it under consideration that maybe, the way I choose to immerse myself is too self-aggrandizing. I ran into the homeless guy a couple nights later and he asked for a cigarette. I apologized to him if I'd been intrusive or tried to judge him. He sat down and told me he didn't mind at all, he's trying to get off the street and off drugs and he doesn't have a lot of long conversations with people. Neither one of us was right, me or my girlfriend... and to your point, a lot of times I really do just want to keep society at arm's length. But then I don't filter myself when I want to say something potentially offensive, and suddenly I'm in the whirlwind of the lives around me. It really is two sides of the same coin, because the sicker you are of the world the more you either divorce from it or engage with it... and a lot of times you want to do both. I saved the story to read. Thanks for the genuine response to what I wrote.