The Elite Forum
Nonsense Time => FFA => Topic started by: RWG on March 11, 2017, 09:03:04 am
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adamswierczynski 1 day ago (edited)
Hi RWhiteGoose, I would like to talk a moment about the way your discussion of #1 on your list is kind of a catch 22. Does your commenting help him become more self aware and stop, or fuel his
avoidance of reality.
His long tirades about enlightenment and truth are largely projection. He has some awareness of his own shortcomings and accuses external entities of these flaws because these entities remind him of his own. I would say that this person is living in a giant hell in their own mind. This behavior could be a cry for help. His focus is too much on the problem without having a solution.
I, too, have seen this truth contest site and something was inexplicably off-putting about it. It is not even that there is something wrong with the ideas there, but the mental paradox one can become trapped into by challenging their mind with abstraction for too long.
Kind of like the saying "Too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good."
This person has been "infected" (to borrow his own words) with an idea. This idea is highly memetic, in the sense of how it takes hold of the mind more so than the colloquial use of memes we use to describe entertaining image macros. It uses abstraction to point out something so very obvious and taken for granted, but because it is only abstraction it offers no tangible meaning or benefit. It is merely a means of keeping the mind occupied like a recursive feedback loop.
This offers great distraction from something like severe depression, while at the same time fueling it with an unreachable goal. This leads to abandonment of the tangible things in life that could be used for healthy coping, and the gap between current self and ideal self widens - also fueling depression. This becomes very entrapping when the escape from this depression is a momentary flight of "enlightenment" resulting from the abstraction.
Abstraction becomes the retreat for this person in times of adversity. Yet when the self is the largest source of adversity, these moments of "enlightenment" and "attainment" become addicting. The self-awareness is born out of a confusion (the main goal of abstraction in this circumstance) where the mind tries to reorient itself. The confusion is its own retreat, and the most basic and obvious truths seem to reveal themselves as hidden information to a mind lost within itself.
When he returns from these periods of confusion, he becomes aware of how he is now further from the place he left. The cycle repeats itself as the depressing reality must now be escaped.
To someone who suffers this much by their own design, the illusion is that other "unenlightened" people are holding him back in some way. He will magnify the flaws in others through his cognitive biases to confirm that his suffering is not by his own design. Using anger, an emotion that is usually a "get shit done" emotion, to attempt to motivate others to improve his life because he feels so lost and helpless.
The problem is that he cannot effectively communicate this thought-prison he has erected to contain his depression. The end result of his anger is that he alienated other people. He really does need help, badly.
If you really wanted his anger to stop, the kind of attention this video provides is counterproductive to solving that problem.
As people like MrHyruleGamer and Apollo Legend have alluded to and sometimes discussed, there is a lot of dysfunction in the speedrunning community. People turn to videogames to cope. They try to find a community supportive of an almost antisocial hobby - playing single player games over and over.
You and the others have mentioned how there needs to be better content in this community and some leadership. Some of these people do need support, and any leadership that steps up needs to be able to give them that support.
I understand where you are coming from. In healthy people, inferiority will inspire a path to superiority. Healthy people are also inspired to superiority by competitive social interactions as well. These tactics are harmful to the many broken who turn to this community because every other community has failed them.
If you want to cover issues like this in more detail, please let me know. I would love to help.
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Tl;dr marc is retard