You’re online, you bump into some portion of what someone wrote and you don’t like it.
What you do from here is today’s focus.
The first question to ask yourself is, “Am I reacting?”
If the answer is yes, why give up your personal power – your time – in some kneejerk response to someone? What do you have to prove and to whom? And if you have to prove something to someone, why are you in this arrangement with them? Does it give them power over you, given how you will rush to respond to something you don’t like – on their behalf?
Why are you living for someone else’s approval? Why do you need what they have? And if you are convinced you need what they have, is there a way you can get that without being in this power dynamic with them? If they make it impossible, why are you mentally triangulated with someone who ultimately stands in the way of what you want?
This one of the many reasons why valuing personal freedom, and perhaps even taking a bit of time to learn about it, can get you out of sticky situations before they even form.
Philosophy is about prevention.
Everyone is running full steam ahead.
If you can preclude the need for someone else’s approval, which is usually born out of not being guided toward independent opinion-making by your father, you won’t become somebody else’s online attack dog.
Then you can have real thoughts.
And someone is going to have an opinion you disagree with.
When you are working on behalf of your own sovereign self, you will tend to find that disagreement goes better already because what you say in objection isn’t jingoistic and therefore easily anticipated by someone who already thinks for themselves.
If you’re disagreeing with people who don’t think for themselves, you have to ask yourself, “Is this personal for me?”
Some people feel a need to defend their own reputation against Reply Guys but people who think for themselves don’t go reading the reply section for points-scored-against.
This is why I “let them talk”.
In fact, if I have a tweet that goes viral, I just mute it because 98% of people I’ve ever met don’t even exist philosophically. They are not ontological beings. They are programming. People can be a kick, though.
This one went KINDA viral. Always getting kneecapped on X, the military app.
If someone is actually real with me, they tend to be willing to go to my Telegram public chat – which is a really pleasant place, curated by yours truly. Or they write me an email, usually asking for a deeper conversation which I am happy to facilitate. Sometimes people DM me on X.
I don’t disagree with someone unless I want to be helpful to them.
If I disagree with someone and I don’t want to be helpful to them, I keep it to myself or I try to distill it into a universal so I can speak on errors that people make commonly. This way, the principle is extracted and others broadly can benefit.
If I want to be helpful to someone and I disagree with them, I reach out directly. But most people aren’t interested in being helped. I used to be surprised by this. Years and years of me offering a different point of view in a non-threatening manner and getting ignored. This is literally everyone I have ever interacted with in the “influencer space”. A couple of people actually accepted my help and entertained my different opinion, both of them retired from public and even private life many years ago. I miss them! A third one reached out to me and almost took my advice but didn’t. This would have saved the world a lot of pain. This is a person who is in the Oval Office every week. But that is a story for another time.
This experience in the last two paragraphs has largely shaped my view of the world. I try to base all knowledge and theories on empiricism. And I am quick to look at myself for any bias. This is what I have found.
This world is an extremely cruel place. The casual sociopathy is completely off the charts. The world and most people in it are Child Abuse Coded. It’s hard to unsee once you get to a certain level of sensitivity. This is part of what makes me so valuable and enduring as private counsel. I also just have tons of wisdom from having lived idealistically and philosophically for…20 years now. I try to be good in my private life, always make amends, and have valued my innocence since I was about 14 when I figured out that media was trying to steal it from me and my cohort, deliberately. Imagine being me at my 8th grade dance, seeing everyone go hedonist baboon mode to the latest hits while I had a head full of Gordon Lightfoot. Still, I found my own way of having fun and many people would follow me into it. They always have. I am a leader!
Given the cruel world, at some level, the going gets tough and the tough gotta get going. Always helps to have a capitalistic mindset.
But taking a moment once in a while to see if someone else will stop that full-steam-ahead train is an interesting and worthwhile experiment.
Humanity still has the brightest potential!
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