2024-05-27

• Gooooood morning! Have to go to a new coffee shop today. A friend mentioned that the one I was going to “does child slavery,” which I do not approve of. Pretty surprising! I thought we had all agreed that slavery is bad. I guess this is what happens in Joe Biden’s America. Anyways, time to find a new store. Fortunately, there is one just down the street that seems nice. Fingers crossed that they share my opposition to slavery of all kinds.
  
• A thing I’m noticing as a change in interpersonal relationships. I’m shifting away from grounding my preferences in objectivity and shifting towards subjectivity. In the past, when navigating preference differences between myself and others, I’d reach for “objective” concepts to navigate handling of the situation. Stuff like “what do most people seem to think about this question?” Or “if we always made X choice in this situation, would that be optimal according to some expected value assessment?” These questions are an effort to step outside of personal subjectivity (what do I specifically want) and use a notion of objectivity (general principles about the world or human relationships) to make decisions. In many ways it is a “systems” approach to these problems. I think that approach certainly has merit. I have not abandoned it entirely. But I notice in myself that these days, I reach more often for subjective evaluations of a situation. I think things like “forget if this specific situation is part of some generalized, platonic ideal of something, and instead look at the specific person across from you and their preferences, and the specific place you are at, and see if you can work with this specific person on their own terms to come up with a solution.” A situation becomes more of a snowflake, and less of a widget. I think this is mostly good. For one, it places less of a burden on myself and others to justify a lived experience, at least by default. And two I think it is helpful in making me more comfortable in who I am at a given point and in the face of social challenges. There’s less self doubt because I accept that there is some amount of self that is really showing up, and that self is less constrained by striving to be some platonic ideal of a self that fits into some general self-justifying system. Of course, it’s important to recognize that this shift does not make preference differences disappear. The challenge is still there. It’s still hard to navigate preference differences regardless of the lens/frame/approach. The “objective”/“systems thinking”/“generalized” lens is also still good to consider, and I think the subjective one is a better starting point in most cases.
  
• A meta-note about these changes. I don’t think my change here is particularly uncommon or weird. People try new stuff all the time or grow into or out of ideas regularly. But I note that this kind of stuff can easily lead to friction when folks aren’t updated on these changes. And it’s hard to keep people updated! Like, another part of the change above is that I now find it quite grating when people try to apply some objective style to a difference of opinion/preference on a thing. Like recently a friend sent me a video from instagram related to a disagreement we had. And, of course, the video was of some random person supporting my friend’s view on the issue. This is an attempt to engage with the difference on an “objective” basis (the argument being “see, other people feel like me, it’s quite common, and should be viewed as the objective default perspective”). In the past, I would have engaged with the objective style approach, maybe sending a response video from some other random person that confirms my own view. But now I find this whole thing quite silly. Just tell me how you feel/think about a thing. I’ll try to accommodate it. I don’t really care what other randos would or wouldn’t do about it, in most cases. Of course, this friend has been close with me for quite some time. They know me mostly in the old model, the “systems thinking”, “statistical modeling”, “objective” approach person. And it’s hard to explain this shift to them in real time. Hell most of the time, the grating part starts quite a bit before I can even describe the shift itself. It presents a real challenge for maintaining close relationships. People change. And in ways that are hard to communicate in the moment. Tough problem.
  
• I found the Nikki Glaser special (Someday You’ll Die) to be “just ok”

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