hihi24522

If it wasn’t clear, I’m well aware of the unlikelihood of the situation. But what’s the harm in believing such? I mean it’s not like either of them is going to come back from the dead and say: “Actually, we argued about the internal weight distribution from astronaut motion, how it would effect the natural frequency of the capsule, and if that effect would be significant enough to need accounting for, not racism.”

Fun fact, my grandfather was a leading engineer on the Saturn V and other aerospace projects, and according to my dad he apparently got into arguments with Von Braun. Considering the line of work and knowing some of my grandfather’s written down arguments from that time, it’s likely these arguments were more about random physics than anything else, but I like to think it was about von Braun being a Nazi piece of shit.

I do know my grandparents were very against segregation to the chagrin of their neighbors, so it’s not entirely unlikely right?

This is the second best benefit of my meds. I can keep lists now and actually just do things, so if I feel this way I just start making a list of all the major to-do things I can think of and a list of all the stuff I kind of feel like I should do. Just putting it into a list helps because I then feel more confident I know what needs to get done. Plus I can break down the big things into smaller steps now which is useful.

I definitely tried doing this kind of stuff before getting medicated but it didn’t work. Gotta love how every piece of advice for dealing with ADHD shit only is an option if you don’t have ADHD to begin with.

This is how my eyes are and how my family’s eyes are. Honestly our eyes mostly just look grayish blue/green unless you’re right next to us. It may be pretty up close, but it’s kinda bland from a distance.

“Why would Nixon, an awkward and unpleasant man, suddenly want to throw a party, one of the most social events imaginable? It’s a trap is why! Don’t go Bender! Nixon’s going to deactivate all the robots!”

“…”

“Why with the no gasping?”

“We all figured that out.”

“Oh.”

Technically this is Octal since each digit (continuous symbol) has 8 possible states before you reach the next digit. 🤓

Utah shouldn’t be in the lower category. People definitely drive cars and four wheelers out onto Fish Lake when it is frozen over.

Speaking of, I really miss walking on it when frozen and hearing all the fractures in the super thick ice go do-do-do-do as they echo across the lake.

To me, it feels like there is a big difference between not realizing you are harming others and purposefully causing that harm because you know it is harm.

Blindspots in empathy is like saying something that hurt someone because you didn’t know it hurt them. Sadism is saying something that hurts someone because you know it will hurt them.

There’s definitely a difference between the feeling of sadism and revenge too. One you do because it feels like justice, the other you do because feels like eating candy.

This kind of ties into the answer to “why would you care?” This is actually something I’ve thought about a lot (big suprise lol) and the conclusion I’ve come to is that morality and empathy are not directly correlated.

There is a difference between not stabbing someone because you’d feel that pain, and not stabbing someone because you don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s pain.

Another influence for perceived morality is the desire to be like other people. We’re a social species so lots of us have an innate desire to feel connected to others. Sure there is some desire to be unique but often times that is constrained by the desire to be accepted.

You can satisfy this feeling Patrick Bateman style like most of the psychopaths I’ve met, where you just put up a facade, doing good things only when you know you’re being watched. Or you can satisfy it by doing what I did—which come to find out is basically cognitive behavioral therapy—trying to make yourself want to do the things others think are good.

I’m pretty sure this choice is also based on internal drives where people in the former situation want the benefits that come with being a good person or fitting in, while people in the latter case directly want to fit in, we don’t want to act good, we want to be good.

Honestly that desire to be moral that is separate from empathy can be detrimental. People tend to say that “empathy without bounds is self destruction” but it’s been my experience that the moral obsession is more damaging.

For example, not eating because your roommates have friends over in the kitchen and you would feel rude to interrupt them, is unhealthy and while it is empathy that may make you think you’ll ruin the flow of their conversation, that pain is minimal compared to the pain of not eating. You don’t do it because the empathy hurts, you do it because violating your overactive moral compass hurts.

Anyway this is turning into a rant, so I should stop. I do agree with you that most people seem to lack empathy for others and this is largely because they don’t try to see things from other people’s/things’ perspectives. But I disagree with your hypothesis that empathy is what drove me to increase my capacity for empathy in the first place. I think it was driven by much more self centered drives like pride and the desire to be wanted.

“A working cartridge unit? Wow, you guys went obsolete years ago.”

[Cartridge unit pulls tape out of bag and inserts it]

“Your mother.”

Fun fact: I think I had to purposefully construct my sense of empathy.

I was literally like psychopath-sadist when I was really young. I didn’t really enact anything irl besides torturing bugs or imagining cartoon characters in pain, but around 4yo I started feeling like I was a bad person because other people didn’t seem to desire to do those things, in fact hero’s in movies purposefully avoided violence.

So the shame/guilt of feeling like I was a monster, a the desire to be like everyone else, lead me to try and make myself feel pain when I hurt other things. When my mother or sisters would tell me to come kill a spider I’d pinch myself or bite my tongue while doing so.

Then, being a curious kid, I started just trying to imagine the physical sensations of being in different bodies and having different injuries. This eventually spread to trying to imagine different emotions and by and by I didn’t have to force myself to feel it anymore. When I see someone/something get hurt, I don’t have to think about it now, I just feel it.

While I’ll admit it is possible that I’m correlating this purposeful imagination with some possible natural development of my brain creating empathy, considering that until recently I only really felt pain, negative emotions, and physical sensations through empathy, I’d say it seems most likely I built it myself.

Since realizing this a few years ago, I have started trying to feel happy/positive empathy too and it does seem like it’s been working. Though, it’s slow going because I’m hella antisocial lol.

Oh and just in case anyone is worried, I’m no longer sadistic at all. I literally can’t bring myself to kill spiders or other bugs, and there are some scenes in movies I can’t stand to watch. I can unfortunately still feel those old feelings and empathize with sadistic characters/actions, but the saccharine feeling of enjoying causing pain actually makes me physically sick now.

Because it’s not so secret that he’s turned on

This is the plot of 1984 by George Orwell lol