Insufficient Compassion Redux
I know of some of the limits of my empathy, I know where it is hard for me to adopt an experience. This post is pandemic focused, human behavior focused, it's my attempt to grapple with the frustration that arises when I look at my fellow man* uncomprehending of their behavior.
*or an impression of my fellow man, while trying to make sense of the data, yes, numbers can make me angry at humanity.
It's a redux because I've looked at this before in my attitudes toward the anxious in one of my unexplained most popular posts I've ever written, which itself was a follow up to another inexplicably popular post.
Who I struggle to identify with, and thus feel compassion for are people I've lived my whole life around and never understood, such that I don't even have a name for them. An inadequate shorthand might be 'extroverts', but I am really referring to a kind of social contact addict. Emphasis addict, in terms of a compulsive behavior, a need to socialize.
I think I am in part finding myself deficient in empathy, sympathy and compassion because I am encouraged not to be. What I notice about myself, is that if say, I saw two people in a pandemic lock down greet each other on the street and then exchange some crystal meth for cash hand to hand, while I wouldn't think it was great, I would understand: here is a person so compelled by meth, they will risk all to get it.
But seeing Joan and Susan walking along a trail together gossiping fills me with rage. In my rage I probably ask myself the exact question that I need to, albeit I treat it as a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: 'can't you forego an opportunity to exchange trivial gossip about your mediocre existences?' noting how condescendingly judgmental this is, the key part of that question is the 'can't you forego' part and the question becomes rhetorical because the answer is probably 'no they can't.'
Thinking of middle aged women's need to find a way in person to discuss the exact same shit they can discuss over the phone (are you noting how little I can control my expressions of antipathy? because I am) as in the same category as people whose dependence on substances, or behavioral addictions (like gambling or porn) that generally break up marriages, result in bankruptcy and homelessness, correlate with crime and criminal records and shave decades off peoples lives, is probably alien.
But until the advent of a respiratory pandemic, there was nothing to really challenge a notion of 'I can quit whenever I want' regarding catching up with friends and family. Indeed compared to the addictive behaviors that leave somebody alone and in the dark like video games and gambling, regular human contact was really held up as the yardstick by which mental health is measured.
To be clear, while I feel I cope with isolation well, what this generally translates to is that it sometimes takes me months to notice the negative effects of prolonged social isolation cost me. I can also surprise myself with how much I enjoy social contact. This is why I would specify if I could some unknown subset of people that have to see people even though they know it's wrong.
Maybe they don't know it's wrong, perhaps some upbeat denial is at play where some circuit in the brain fires and they say 'well when the Premier says we are in lock-down, he doesn't mean the traditional Sunday family dinner is cancelled.' I don't know.
What I do know is what it feels like to try and quit something you are addicted to and immediately find your mind rationalizing ways to get that. I'm aware of the extinction burst that comes with a change in behavior. I know it's hard, I just don't identify with the set of compulsive social behaviors.
The temptation of course is to view the behavior as selfish, malicious. To an objective degree, the breaches are selfish and malicious, the gains are enjoyed by the individuals making the breach and the consequences of outbreaks inflicted on other more numerous people. But the explicit conscious maliciousness is an easy bad assumption to suspend.
Harder for me to comprehend is having a different personality for example. Author Adam Grant for example has a book called 'Give and Take' where he breaks people into three categories of 'Giver' 'Taker' and 'Matcher' but in an interview he did with Sam Harris he raised the interesting idea that personality research may be considering adding 'Selfishness' to the Big-5 or OCEAN model - presumably to become the Big-6 or OCEANS. (If you enjoy taking mechanically transparent self-assessments, you can assess your own giver-taker-matcher preference here.)
What is interesting to me, is the idea that some people are actually wired not to think of others. This I see more in the attitudes expressed typically in the form of 'these restrictions are an infringement on my human rights!' you know, the universal human right to kill your parents, my parents, grandparents etc. This person can't comprehend what quarantine, isolation, restrictions on movement and least significantly mask-wearing, are all for; all that is apparent is the immediate imposition on them.
Running counter to this is the variation in context. It appears easier in this context to be selfish if you are young, but living out in the affluent Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne during this pandemic, I'm not sure this holds. There's plenty of examples of people in the high-risk age categories being selfish if they happen to have a holiday house down the coast, or if they have legal training, or if they need their hair highlights done because they can't stand to look at their grey hairs in the mirror.
It also presumably takes two. For every selfish person that leaves a lock down area, under the assumption they are probably okay, there's the friends or relatives, or perhaps even clients, waiting to great them on the other side. This isn't a situation where some dude who knows he is HIV+ but just doesn't do condoms has unprotected sex with a bunch of unwitting partners also into bare back. These are connections between two parties both consciously rolling the dice.
It's also data I just don't have. Tasmania's outbreak earlier in the year could attribute some 80 cases to one wedding. Early in Victoria's second and most major wave the public got anecdotes that large family gatherings were in play. Since Victoria's outbreak we see other states around Australia lowering their restrictions on gatherings from 50 back down to 10.
Both my impression and feeling is, that outdoor gatherings will wash out to be an almost non-factor in the spread of the virus. The BLM protests do not appear to have substantially contributed to spikes in transmission, workplaces and schools on the other hand have been.
Which gives you another huge context that appears to be the more significant factor - economic insecurity, and it's possibly no small coincidence that Melbourne's community transmissions took off almost in lock-step with the federal government's clawing back the welfare allowances they'd made at the outset of the global pandemic. When somebody get's tested, and goes to work in defiance of instructions to self-isolate, and even when people test-positive and go to work, I can be totally empathetic to the mindset that is doing that - this is a person under extreme financial duress.
Where I have the crucial insufficient compassion though, is the people that aren't doing it for financial duress.
It's these people that are the alien lizard people to me. I keep thinking about this party I was at, where I only really knew the host, and I was trying to get to know strangers, find someone interesting to talk to. This guy in the group I was standing in started talking about some pub he drove past on the way back from the great ocean road and when he saw it he knew that one day he wanted to stop and have a drink there. Conversation turned to dream pubs along the great ocean road to stop and have a beer at, and I walked away because I couldn't handle it. I'm to date, not ready for that to be my life, even though most days my primary occupation is trying to decide what to eat for lunch.
There are people it seems, that this is their reason for being. They work hard, in order to accomplish the mundane. (Curiously I get more furious at people who work hard to do the mundane in a foreign destination, more so than the people who want to head down to Robe or Port Fairy on weekends, the pandemic has at least relieved me of this rage.)
Then there's the people I do from time to time remind myself to think about, which are those that depend on dating aps, and dating. Plenty of people use them, but usually the objective is to get off them as quick as possible. In my own collisions with dating apps I myself was conscious of the psychological drawbacks of apps like Tinder, but I did meet one person that was using it genuinely to just meet interesting people, like socially over romantically.
I know people though for whom the dating scene is some form of self-medication, their behavior describes more to me an addiction than an enthusiasm. While I've shared many of the perpetually dating's frustrations with the romantic market, it's still outside my experience to just date anyway. I'm very all or nothing, preferring my own company to bad company. That probably hits the nail on the head, I have insufficient compassion for people who cannot abide their own company.
In my own case, if left alone and without contact it can get pretty dark. There was a 3-month period in my early twenties I spent bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, city to city, country to country where I had to force myself to leave my room and actually explore the countries I had put on my itinerary to visit. It wasn't until I hit Europe and started staying in hostels that I realized it was the effects of prolonged loneliness that had killed me. But I have to use that experience to imagine someone who goes that dark from two days, or a week of solitude not months.
A stark example for me, of the struggle to cross an empathy divide was this opinion piece plugged by a queer radio show I've been following on social media for like a decade and keeps me in touch with a culture that appears completely out-of-touch with me. I don't think 'Coronogamy' is going to go viral as a meme, and I'll brazenly confess I read it out of a morbid fascination as it's likely that the author is aware but I don't infer just how many heterosexual people out there struggle to find a partner and how tone deaf complaining about being confined to one partner comes across. (it's in the top-three most annoying things about people in open relationships). And it's worth noting the author is doing the right thing, they are just exhibiting without irony a complaint about a contraction of privileges as equivalent to some form of oppression.
Are there elderly people with diabetes that just can't help but see their grandchild who attends a school shut down for an outbreak? I don't know, these are the human stories behind the numbers that are missing. It may well be, that the people cheating in order to visit a partner, or have casual sex, or host an Air BnB party, contribute close to fuck all of the community transmissions.
And yeah, there's people who only turn 18 once, and that is happening in 2020, and people who turn 21, and people who are turning 90 which takes 90 years to achieve and could be dead before they see their family in the flesh again. These the sympathy and compassion comes more readily. Even teenagers that are getting that cocktail of hormones and physical and brain development that tells them it is time to fuck, I feel compassion for. I didn't have to contend with a pandemic at my sexual peak, and I don't see fucking as a human right nor did I really get around back then, but to be denied access to flirting? Yeah that would have sucked, like being sent to an all boys Catholic school would and does suck.
So it just boils down to that subset of extroverts or whatever, that just have to get out and see somebody. These are the people I have insufficient compassion for. it's life long as far as I can tell. The thing is, I don't even know. I don't know what it feels like to need to throw a street party with five households meeting in a driveway for drinks. Is it obliviousness or is it a deeper itch? Am I looking at them the way they look at me when I pull my mask down to eat nuts on my way back from the shops, and the way they don't look at me when I have no mask at all and am running around the streets?
It's interesting times, I can see why 'may you live in interesting times' is a curse. I try to practice stoicism and I see it all as analogous as getting pissed off that today is also not the day everyone learns how to drive properly. Where I'm really being tested is that each transmission both prolongs the existing measures and threatens harsher ones.
*or an impression of my fellow man, while trying to make sense of the data, yes, numbers can make me angry at humanity.
It's a redux because I've looked at this before in my attitudes toward the anxious in one of my unexplained most popular posts I've ever written, which itself was a follow up to another inexplicably popular post.
Who I struggle to identify with, and thus feel compassion for are people I've lived my whole life around and never understood, such that I don't even have a name for them. An inadequate shorthand might be 'extroverts', but I am really referring to a kind of social contact addict. Emphasis addict, in terms of a compulsive behavior, a need to socialize.
I think I am in part finding myself deficient in empathy, sympathy and compassion because I am encouraged not to be. What I notice about myself, is that if say, I saw two people in a pandemic lock down greet each other on the street and then exchange some crystal meth for cash hand to hand, while I wouldn't think it was great, I would understand: here is a person so compelled by meth, they will risk all to get it.
But seeing Joan and Susan walking along a trail together gossiping fills me with rage. In my rage I probably ask myself the exact question that I need to, albeit I treat it as a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: 'can't you forego an opportunity to exchange trivial gossip about your mediocre existences?' noting how condescendingly judgmental this is, the key part of that question is the 'can't you forego' part and the question becomes rhetorical because the answer is probably 'no they can't.'
Thinking of middle aged women's need to find a way in person to discuss the exact same shit they can discuss over the phone (are you noting how little I can control my expressions of antipathy? because I am) as in the same category as people whose dependence on substances, or behavioral addictions (like gambling or porn) that generally break up marriages, result in bankruptcy and homelessness, correlate with crime and criminal records and shave decades off peoples lives, is probably alien.
But until the advent of a respiratory pandemic, there was nothing to really challenge a notion of 'I can quit whenever I want' regarding catching up with friends and family. Indeed compared to the addictive behaviors that leave somebody alone and in the dark like video games and gambling, regular human contact was really held up as the yardstick by which mental health is measured.
To be clear, while I feel I cope with isolation well, what this generally translates to is that it sometimes takes me months to notice the negative effects of prolonged social isolation cost me. I can also surprise myself with how much I enjoy social contact. This is why I would specify if I could some unknown subset of people that have to see people even though they know it's wrong.
Maybe they don't know it's wrong, perhaps some upbeat denial is at play where some circuit in the brain fires and they say 'well when the Premier says we are in lock-down, he doesn't mean the traditional Sunday family dinner is cancelled.' I don't know.
What I do know is what it feels like to try and quit something you are addicted to and immediately find your mind rationalizing ways to get that. I'm aware of the extinction burst that comes with a change in behavior. I know it's hard, I just don't identify with the set of compulsive social behaviors.
The temptation of course is to view the behavior as selfish, malicious. To an objective degree, the breaches are selfish and malicious, the gains are enjoyed by the individuals making the breach and the consequences of outbreaks inflicted on other more numerous people. But the explicit conscious maliciousness is an easy bad assumption to suspend.
Harder for me to comprehend is having a different personality for example. Author Adam Grant for example has a book called 'Give and Take' where he breaks people into three categories of 'Giver' 'Taker' and 'Matcher' but in an interview he did with Sam Harris he raised the interesting idea that personality research may be considering adding 'Selfishness' to the Big-5 or OCEAN model - presumably to become the Big-6 or OCEANS. (If you enjoy taking mechanically transparent self-assessments, you can assess your own giver-taker-matcher preference here.)
What is interesting to me, is the idea that some people are actually wired not to think of others. This I see more in the attitudes expressed typically in the form of 'these restrictions are an infringement on my human rights!' you know, the universal human right to kill your parents, my parents, grandparents etc. This person can't comprehend what quarantine, isolation, restrictions on movement and least significantly mask-wearing, are all for; all that is apparent is the immediate imposition on them.
Running counter to this is the variation in context. It appears easier in this context to be selfish if you are young, but living out in the affluent Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne during this pandemic, I'm not sure this holds. There's plenty of examples of people in the high-risk age categories being selfish if they happen to have a holiday house down the coast, or if they have legal training, or if they need their hair highlights done because they can't stand to look at their grey hairs in the mirror.
It also presumably takes two. For every selfish person that leaves a lock down area, under the assumption they are probably okay, there's the friends or relatives, or perhaps even clients, waiting to great them on the other side. This isn't a situation where some dude who knows he is HIV+ but just doesn't do condoms has unprotected sex with a bunch of unwitting partners also into bare back. These are connections between two parties both consciously rolling the dice.
It's also data I just don't have. Tasmania's outbreak earlier in the year could attribute some 80 cases to one wedding. Early in Victoria's second and most major wave the public got anecdotes that large family gatherings were in play. Since Victoria's outbreak we see other states around Australia lowering their restrictions on gatherings from 50 back down to 10.
Both my impression and feeling is, that outdoor gatherings will wash out to be an almost non-factor in the spread of the virus. The BLM protests do not appear to have substantially contributed to spikes in transmission, workplaces and schools on the other hand have been.
Which gives you another huge context that appears to be the more significant factor - economic insecurity, and it's possibly no small coincidence that Melbourne's community transmissions took off almost in lock-step with the federal government's clawing back the welfare allowances they'd made at the outset of the global pandemic. When somebody get's tested, and goes to work in defiance of instructions to self-isolate, and even when people test-positive and go to work, I can be totally empathetic to the mindset that is doing that - this is a person under extreme financial duress.
Where I have the crucial insufficient compassion though, is the people that aren't doing it for financial duress.
It's these people that are the alien lizard people to me. I keep thinking about this party I was at, where I only really knew the host, and I was trying to get to know strangers, find someone interesting to talk to. This guy in the group I was standing in started talking about some pub he drove past on the way back from the great ocean road and when he saw it he knew that one day he wanted to stop and have a drink there. Conversation turned to dream pubs along the great ocean road to stop and have a beer at, and I walked away because I couldn't handle it. I'm to date, not ready for that to be my life, even though most days my primary occupation is trying to decide what to eat for lunch.
There are people it seems, that this is their reason for being. They work hard, in order to accomplish the mundane. (Curiously I get more furious at people who work hard to do the mundane in a foreign destination, more so than the people who want to head down to Robe or Port Fairy on weekends, the pandemic has at least relieved me of this rage.)
Then there's the people I do from time to time remind myself to think about, which are those that depend on dating aps, and dating. Plenty of people use them, but usually the objective is to get off them as quick as possible. In my own collisions with dating apps I myself was conscious of the psychological drawbacks of apps like Tinder, but I did meet one person that was using it genuinely to just meet interesting people, like socially over romantically.
I know people though for whom the dating scene is some form of self-medication, their behavior describes more to me an addiction than an enthusiasm. While I've shared many of the perpetually dating's frustrations with the romantic market, it's still outside my experience to just date anyway. I'm very all or nothing, preferring my own company to bad company. That probably hits the nail on the head, I have insufficient compassion for people who cannot abide their own company.
In my own case, if left alone and without contact it can get pretty dark. There was a 3-month period in my early twenties I spent bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, city to city, country to country where I had to force myself to leave my room and actually explore the countries I had put on my itinerary to visit. It wasn't until I hit Europe and started staying in hostels that I realized it was the effects of prolonged loneliness that had killed me. But I have to use that experience to imagine someone who goes that dark from two days, or a week of solitude not months.
A stark example for me, of the struggle to cross an empathy divide was this opinion piece plugged by a queer radio show I've been following on social media for like a decade and keeps me in touch with a culture that appears completely out-of-touch with me. I don't think 'Coronogamy' is going to go viral as a meme, and I'll brazenly confess I read it out of a morbid fascination as it's likely that the author is aware but I don't infer just how many heterosexual people out there struggle to find a partner and how tone deaf complaining about being confined to one partner comes across. (it's in the top-three most annoying things about people in open relationships). And it's worth noting the author is doing the right thing, they are just exhibiting without irony a complaint about a contraction of privileges as equivalent to some form of oppression.
Are there elderly people with diabetes that just can't help but see their grandchild who attends a school shut down for an outbreak? I don't know, these are the human stories behind the numbers that are missing. It may well be, that the people cheating in order to visit a partner, or have casual sex, or host an Air BnB party, contribute close to fuck all of the community transmissions.
And yeah, there's people who only turn 18 once, and that is happening in 2020, and people who turn 21, and people who are turning 90 which takes 90 years to achieve and could be dead before they see their family in the flesh again. These the sympathy and compassion comes more readily. Even teenagers that are getting that cocktail of hormones and physical and brain development that tells them it is time to fuck, I feel compassion for. I didn't have to contend with a pandemic at my sexual peak, and I don't see fucking as a human right nor did I really get around back then, but to be denied access to flirting? Yeah that would have sucked, like being sent to an all boys Catholic school would and does suck.
So it just boils down to that subset of extroverts or whatever, that just have to get out and see somebody. These are the people I have insufficient compassion for. it's life long as far as I can tell. The thing is, I don't even know. I don't know what it feels like to need to throw a street party with five households meeting in a driveway for drinks. Is it obliviousness or is it a deeper itch? Am I looking at them the way they look at me when I pull my mask down to eat nuts on my way back from the shops, and the way they don't look at me when I have no mask at all and am running around the streets?
It's interesting times, I can see why 'may you live in interesting times' is a curse. I try to practice stoicism and I see it all as analogous as getting pissed off that today is also not the day everyone learns how to drive properly. Where I'm really being tested is that each transmission both prolongs the existing measures and threatens harsher ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment