Search the Community

This morning I was triggered by something, which provoked much anxiety within me. I came very close to getting up and eating something to sooth myself, but decided to eat two bananas instead. I'm not overweight, in fact I'm quite slender and I exercise daily, but I have gained a bit of fat around the sides of my lower belly from not eating as I should. I'm worth a healthy and energetic body. When I eat junk I feel lethargic, guilty, and overall not good about myself. Sometimes, I overeat and go to bed on a full stomach, only to wake up the next day with a full stomach, which makes it difficult for me to get the most out of my morning workout. It isn't a pleasant way to start out the day. I don't want to keep sending this message to my unconscious that, "I don't deserve a good body". I want to commit to eating better, to love myself enough to stop eating junk. The short benefits of sugar and carbs are not worth the long term, or even the daily stress for that matter, of not getting getting the most out of this precious life, which we are all lucky to be a part of. I want to feel good. I want to look good. i want to live with integrity, so when I talk to people about serious issues, my words have more weight to them. I want that confidence, so I am making a commitment to eating better right now. Although, I am eager to understand how I ended up where I am today in terms of health. I use to be far more committed. I avoided sugar like the plague and I would always order the healthiest item on the menu when out with friends. I took health very seriously and regularly rejected food that was offered to me by others if it was unhealthy. Even if it was a family gathering or a friend’s family gathering, if their food was unhealthy, it didn’t matter how free, unique, or special it was, I refused to compromise my values. My health was more important than their traditions.Was I being too “Anal” about what I ate? This might sound like a disparaging and loaded question to ask myself, but I assure you that’s only because it is. And if you think it’s unfair for me to ask myself questions like that, I agree. What is even more disagreeable is that these are the kinds of questions I would get asked by people who claimed to be my friend. I’m feeling really angry right now thinking about it. I remember being asked this by an old friend while I was in the passenger seat of his car. This occurred shortly after we had both mentioned that we were hungry. Why would he ask a question like this? Control. He wanted to control me. A loaded question is by definition “a rhetorical tool that attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioners agenda.” So, what was his agenda? Well, he wanted to eat Popeye’s Fried Chicken and knew that I prefered to stay away from that kind of food. But, you see, he didn’t want to have to drive to the grocery store so I could purchase me some fresh produce. You see, that would involve extra driving and he wanted to get his food and go home. So, what he cleverly did was embed false premises in the question and frame it with a negative connotation attached to it. That way, I would be more likely to say no. “Are you feeling anal about food today?”, in other words translates to, “are you feeling your neurotic compulsion to annoyingly obsess over what you eat today and thus willing to become an inconvenience?”. It’s as subtle as it is cruel. And it’s as abusive as it is brilliant, which is why it’s always always worth slowing down and pointing this kind of stuff out. This undoubtedly qualifies as verbal abuse. It’s no wonder I felt so depressed and self loathing when I was around this guy. It really is astounding when you think about it. I wasn’t expressing anything nearly as emotional volatile and explosive as topics such as religion, the state, or family dysfunction. I was receiving this hostility because of my desire to eat plants instead of poultry. Admittedly, it probably does deeper than that. When a person grows and decides to make better, more challenging and rewarding choices in life, there becomes an implicit obligation for the people around him to change as well, if they want to remain friends. I mean, let’s face it, you either grow with or away from people. What this guy in the car was probably experiencing was that obligation. He felt anxious and tense, which is okay to feel. But, he did not take ownership for his feelings and instead interpreted this impetus to change as something that was being imposed upon him. He felt controlled, he did not acknowledged it, so he inflicted this feeling on me. It’s also worth mentioning that this guy was not religious or statist. Intellectually, he accepted that god doesn’t exist and that the state is an institution of violence. Yet, despite this intellectual understanding between us, we could not connect. The lesson that I take from this is that conclusions aren’t enough. Having the “same beliefs”, for a lack of better words, is not a stable foundation for an intimate relationship, nor does it entail that the other person has empathy. The reason I share is not to lecture, but to use my mistakes as a way to warn people away from making the assumptions I did. As surely as physics, in the absence of a strong foundation of honesty, empathy, and curiosity, there can be no sturdy relationship.I was going to give more examples of old friends and family rejecting me in similar ways because of my eating, but I think you get the point. What was originally going to be a list of examples for the purpose of venting, I think has transformed into something more. I’m becoming more aware on an emotional level of the importance of responsibility. Yes, it’s true these people made it very difficult for me to reach my goals by creating an association in my mind that, “committing to goals = the pain of rejection”(or something like that). Also, I think it’s true that we can only be as great as the people we choose to have around us let us be. And I chose to surround myself with these drag downers and to avoid being honest, even after intellectually understanding a number of books and podcasts I had listened to by Stefan Molyneux. I stress the importance of responsibility now, not as a way to castigate myself, but to empower myself and others to bring consciousness to the choices they make so that you can avoid suffering the consequences like I did. Prevention is always better than cure. In other words, remember to eat your bananas.As always, take care.- Joel

There's this idea I've been mulling over recently around the way that people respond to verbally abusive, trollish or overtly irrational people, and how it's often the case that people (myself included) will try and calmly and compassionately explain what is so wrong with what that person is saying. I often picture myself as a separate person and watch myself get into conversations with not so nice people, and what I think I've realized is that if I had a friend or a lover (or someone I was very fond of) getting into an argument where the other person started resorting to insulting, passive aggressive or otherwise offensive behavior that I would want to come in and say something to the effect of "who the hell do you think you are talking to [my friend] that way?" I think that everyone can relate to that. (The rest of this post is assuming you do). But for some reason many people do not hold themselves in the same regard, or do not act in the same way when it is themselves in that situation. We take the abuse and try and hold ourselves above it, try not to take it personally etc. I'm starting to think that actually this is a terrible thing we do to ourselves. Why would we expose ourselves to more abuse than the people we care about? Why would we not protect ourselves in the same way we would protect others? Unless of course that we do not care about ourselves that much. If we can hold others accountable for harming us, then why would we not hold ourselves equally accountable for doing the same thing? And so there is this sort of "let's be nice to abusive people" or some kind of NVC or other similar nonsense where the person doing the work is taking the abuse without expressing (righteous) anger. I'm starting to see that as a kind of terribly abusive, self destructive thing. This describes way too many peacemaker childhoods for me to believe that it is somehow going to change as soon as you are an adult. What does the youngest sibling do to avoid family conflict? He / she tries to make everyone agree on some level about something. It usually doesn't matter what that something is, the agreement is the important part. And if the parents hold much more power (as they naturally do) then that something is going to be much more in their favor, regardless of what is true and right. It's that thing that bad therapists do where a couple is fighting and the girlfriend is being abusive about some conflict they are having and the solution the therapist comes up with is to get the boyfriend to sympathize with her and that neglecting to take the trash out causes her "real" pain that he ought sympathize with... There is a kind of terrible superficiality in being nice to abusive people that I would desperately like to stop. The phrase that goes something like: "I understand that when I use a bold font face that it causes you to feel great distress and I really don't want you to feel distress, but there are reasons that I use the bold font face that I would like you to understand" A person who attacks you for using a bold font does not deserve your compassion and to talk to them as if they are a reasonable person is to misunderstand them on a very fundamental level. The only reasons that I've ever heard for why I should respond to people in this way come in two varieties: 1. If they are so unreasonable that they must be suffering in some way on the inside and thus deserve our compassion or 2. being compassionate to abusive people makes them much more receptive to your ideas. I'll first address the second. I do not doubt at all that this does result in some short term gains. (Only the most insane person would respond to a non aggressive person with rage). But I would argue that is not going to have a lasting effect on them. I can't count the number of times where I had argued a case with sensitivity and compassion where the person left saying something like "yea, there is something to what you are saying for sure" and then the next time I see them it's like nothing ever happened. They will put forward their position like our conversation had never taken place. I would argue that words don't mean shit if your actions aren't consistent with them. So when you are saying that if you support the threat of violence against me for smoking herb, and I emotionally connect only on the level that we are talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream or something, then that is not going to be (or come across) as authentic. That person is going to behave as if it were a flavor of icecream kind of conversation, and as they should, you trained them to! The fact that hitting your children is abusive has certain implications. Implications of cowardice, abuse, pettiness and conformism. Those are serious implications and pretending that they aren't there doesn't make them go away. And the first excuse for this niceness to abuse is equally as absurd. We absolutely do not owe petty vindictive people our compassion simply because they must suffer on the inside in order to behave that way. People make the decisions that they do. It's a toxic brand of determinism that excuses them on such a ridiculously flimsy basis. You absolutely and completely insult them by making it out like they had no control in the situation. Certainly that is not helpful to them. There is a certain amount of ignorance that I can totally excuse and sympathize with, but that's very rare actually. The overwhelming case seems to be that people act as if they do not believe a single word of what they are saying. For instance a person who believes in god is not praying for that god to grow back their amputated limb. A subjectivist isn't saying "I feel silly saying this, but I think that you are wrong, and I have no certainty at all that the basis of my objection has anything to do with truth". A determinist doesn't try and use a particular configuration of words to program your mind into accepting their conclusions, they argue their position. You get the point. Likewise the people who react with hostility, passive aggression, wanton irrationality know (at least on some level) that they are full of shit. Their suffering is to a significant degree self inflicted. The consequences of this may be severe. The first thing is of course that it's a continuation of past abuses, reproducing that peacemaker defense we developed responding to petty parents, teachers etc. We lock ourselves deeper into this self abuse and raise complacent children with low self worth. The other problem is that it makes compassion into a virtue rather than a natural bi-product of the actions that elicit it, making anger, annoyance, irritation into lesser experiences that only get in the way of this (ostensibly) mature and enlightened compassion. The emotional response becomes a pretense, insincere, unreal, toxic. Maybe it's the case that being nice is a good tactic, but I think it's important to be absolutely certain that it's not just a way of denying yourself (or somebody else) your honest experience. You may be doing far more harm than good. Anyway, what do you think?