Real talk: I’ve had this happen a couple of times, and know of many other people who either went through this or believed the same nonsense, with all types and permutations of identities and Southern plumbing between them. And all I’m left with after trying to wrap my head around this thing is a question: can we really blame the people who are doing stuff like this considering Mass Media’s been force-feeding us this nonsense from the beginning?
I’m not saying this should imply forgiving the behaviour, not in a million years! I’m just questioning where our collective frustration should be directed.
Genitalia. Meaning the genders and sexualitiesb of the people are not what determines their behaviour
Ah, thank you. Of course. I was confused by “between them”, thinking it only referred to the southern plumbing.
I don’t think its too much of an ask for my partner to be aware of and avoid brainrot.
If an idiot like me can, they can too.
Again, it is well within your prerogative to not accept such behaviour! I honestly view it as yet another traumatic maladaptation and treat it as such - even though it’s causally not their fault that they believe/behave thusly, it is their responsibility to keep it in check.
But I’ll be straight with you, I think you may be underestimating yourself and overestimating the average person. Critical Thinking really isn’t innate, it’s a skill. A skill which a lot (I’d even go as far as to say a large majority) of people thoroughly lack, because it is a skill which needs training from very early on, as it builds upon itself. I don’t think there’s a general educational schema on Earth at the moment which in any way truly encourages Critical Thinking, if there ever has been one. From what I’ve seen, it tends to come into play way later and in very specific fields of study, which means there’s a lot of catching up to do by that point, so the horizon it affects tends to remain narrow.
Not to mention the utterly insidious and imperceptible nature of ideological corruption. It’s incredibly hard to see the brainwashing if one’s been going through it since before one started forming coherent throughts. It permeates even the subconscious.
I’m not trying to play the perfect being over here, I’ve seen myself being as dumb as a rock at times and I know that I have a llllot of learning left in front of me. But realistically speaking, just because we’re dumb doesn’t mean others aren’t even dumber…
Only valuing a relationship for the momentary bliss of being close to someone new is a problem of emotional immaturity.
The problem arises when we consider the facts that a person’s emotional development depends on parenting, and people tend to partner with others of similar emotional maturity. If you’ve got one immature parent, you’ve more than likely got two. It takes extra work to shed that baggage and start being your genuine self.
It’s definitely a cultural ill, but I can’t credit the notion that our emotional development comes from our media. We need to be teaching people what emotional maturity is, how to get there, and how to heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Emotional immaturity is so pervasive at this point you’d need to put this stuff in the curriculum of every school and have that initiative succeed for multiple decades to change the culture.
My belief is that emotional immaturity is the natural state of humanity. Without guidance, some wise people will reach maturity, but that’s really a small subset of the population, and the vast majority of people will not make this growth.
The vast majority of people do things because that’s what they’ve always known; it takes special effort to question why you do what you do. Saying that these people are emotionally immature may be true, but I don’t think that the cause is that people have emotionally immature parents. People have to be specifically taught to value rationality and wisdom over vibes and feelings, and without this concerted effort, most people will simply be emotionally immature.
I don’t think humanity has a “natural state” so much as a rock bottom - and I’m not even convinced it has one of those. It’s not really a state of being we should promote or excuse.
You speak of guidance as if it comes from some unknown external source - the source is other people. That’s exactly why I said we should teach about emotional maturity in schools, to give kids necessary guidance.
That’s a big subject, so I’m just going to recommend my favourite book about it:
Seems a lot of people get addicted to the drama, continuous stimulation, emotional rollercoasters, cheap thrills and quick validation. Social media made it a lot worse. It gets to the point people can’t live anymore without the drama and go in withdrawal to seek out new thrills. It’s the opposite of a stable relationship.
I get what you mean, stress for the cortisol, anxiety for the adrenaline type deal. And, yeah, I do agree that such a temperament/character/neurochemical inclination seeks these situations for different reasons.
But I’ve also seen plenty of cases where it was just based on a belief, they were convinced that a relationship reached a breaking point once the chemical ecstasy started to die down. The people holding it were obviously suffering because of it (though not fully aware of this causation) and genuinely wanted to find a fix. Unfortunately, they went from disappointment to disappointment when the inevitable kept happening.
It’s also why I only have questions, there are layers upon layers of nuance with subjects like this…
