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i want to try articulating something on the edge of my brain: the TAs of this class just seem toā¦ be good people? like they're good to people in front of them and they really care about the sovereignty things they're fighting for https://t.co/GOe86kGfFu
im in a class called "Tribal Food Systems", and honestly, for a class young STEM me would have dismissed, they intuitively and deeply get some of the things about relationality i would struggle to communicate to philosophers or psychologists over 5 years
it's like skipped the part where they're trying to prove themselves and have the fancy houses or exit a fancy startup before they think about how to really help society they feel real. i can't explain it, but they feel real
it reminds me of my forest rewilding class, which is also very full of american indigenous people. that project thereāit's barely a classāit feels real https://t.co/nl01j9KFu7
my rewilding class is so different from all my other classes all my other classes try to make us "collaborate", but itās such a joke. itās a veneer of collaboration in a fundamentally individual, competitive system the garden classā¦ weāre actually creating something together
it's like when the forest bathing people "try to do forest bathing". they feel so out of touch in a way that's so hard to explain i have to ask: how did it look so similar? how it go so wrong? https://t.co/Jq7zJTIgAs
the ppl who talk about "forest bathing" feel entirely alien to me. like upper class ppl romanticising the slum life, wearing its aesthetic, never truly knowing it. secretly vicious, ready to pounce on me. or perhaps i am the vicious one, judging and resenting them. i don't know https://t.co/1ZQ3ffbvOF
the spiritual and political goodness of the TA students feels like it immediately and directly translates to this basic automatic warmth and respect they afford to people around them it's not being nice, it's not to show off
it's just genuinely feeling care for people and this feeling of it's right for people to care about each other it's like they got into the mud of caring and being cared for by people, whereas all the other "upper class" students are doing the forest bathing equivalent of caring about the world
the other students, theyāre so high status, STEM people, you know, very sincere people. they say they want to work on things that positively impact the world, and i try to I donāt have anything negative to say about them
it's like they understand what Steve Irwin got, which is that the world is real. and you really can help it https://t.co/2FtuR1VX1k
ive looked at people the way this women looks at Steve Irwin i could practically kiss them in that moment. people with a cause are endearing, engendering of love, so knit into the fabric of the universe; they experience their actions tugging on real, external, meaningful things https://t.co/86XOgLQiYU
(gosh, im tearing up now. because i know it's like to look like the woman at someone. just love, pride, feeling humbled. feeling safe, inspired, in league, in bed, in the forest of dangers and wonders with someone. with someone else! an alive person)
with the other students, it's like impact is this posited, far away, almost hypothetical concept it's like helping the person in front of them isn't real to them. or like it's made of a different sort of stuff than their impact drive
they'll help the person in front of them because they're nice and generous and decent people, but there's not a sense of it's spiritual and sacred in the same way "impact" is. it's made of two different things. impact isn't real to them
i felt that way for the longest time. it's only now that im like "yeah, people are real. this moment is real. my agency in this world, *today*, *right now*, is real. my agency is none other than that agency, the one i have in this moment" https://t.co/tXbDnyaQ09
it means im equally willing to call bullshit on a VC as much as to respond to a stranger who needs help as much as to change my life direction or sit down to plan a long complicated optimisation process to get more money for a project free. of the prestige track
and so having felt that way, it's really fucking weird to come back to stanford, where things don't work that way. instead like's likeā¦ elite prestige and impact theatre it's like "other people and impact are theoretical"
>directly translates to this basic automatic warmth and respect they afford to people around them Itās somehow like other students' desire to go good doesn't manifest in how they're showing up in this moment? i don't know
like they could make a spreadsheet and calculate the best choice and choose, but like they don't just choose to wake up and look and respond to suffering they see and respond to it morally they don't feel alive or capable of making independent moral decisions that way
they feel like elite educated people that can circulate between non-profits or startups and stay in high-prestige, "positive impact" jobs, but like there's a constraint there they are part of the delegation. their firstmost commitment is to staying within the status bubble
wait, the O.C. is a perfect example of what im talking about. the dad protagonist is a quintessential example of someone who feels like a "live moral actor" https://t.co/42qx5y68Sk
he's a public defense lawyer who gets himself in trouble, but everyone knows, including his wife, he seems to care about the world and do unusual, self-discerned things in it the rest of the people in the town don't
it feels like he's connected to the remnants of a good relationality, a village relationality, no one else is i talk about memories a lot. it's like he retains a memory of that rich, tribal good (screenshot from Junger's Tribe) https://t.co/eh9x0396pL https://t.co/sGYrGHtlxg
caring about other people isn't an extra moral/cognised thing to him. it just is something that happens. there's no thought to it https://t.co/KQsoAXj964
it stressed me out to make critiques because i don't like making critiques, and i don't want to be prescriptive on anyone but i do want to make sense of this feeling i get/got around certain people, that feels so different from the feeling i mostly got from this school
i can trust them without using my head not trust them for everything, but just trust that what i see mostly correlated to what's them https://t.co/SUc9eL56yK
maybe this thread is a long way to say some people feel good in an embodied way, and some people don't and it's not that the latter people are bad, but i certainly don't feel their goodness as viscerally shine through in every interaction, and they feel constrained by status
@visakanv i know it's a long winding thread on some projections/internal reactions and you had a distaste for the bay area stuff, but it did help me write about that, and hear your thoughts on it, and curious here also what you'd ask next
@AskYatharth I think one of the blessings of being a Singaporean for me (tiny island city state) is that Iāve never been confused about any of this. Like I have a personal direct stake/involvement in my own nationās sovereignty for eg. So for me witnessing other people figure this stuff out-
@AskYatharth and prior to this understanding there are layers of jank likeā¦ imagine if someone didnāt know how to use their hand, and so theyā¦ make an app to mechanically move their hand, and then so much of the conversations everyone has is about the problems with the app
@AskYatharth remixing Christopher Alexander we find out that we already know how to move our hands / relate to people, but the power has been frozen in us, that we have it but are afraid to use it, are crippled by our fears, n by the methods n images (app) which we use to overcome the fears https://t.co/6qEQoXHwLB
so I take a break from heavy reading about how I need to face my fears and let go of assumptions... to do some light reading about how to build things... and here too I have to face my fears & let go of assumptions??? fucking hell šš this book is "the courage to make stuff" https://t.co/pFkwg2wBHn
@AskYatharth the open secret of relationality is that itās self evident from the direct experience of the wholeness of the self, which people break into pieces, ostracizing the shadow (conceal donāt feel / we donāt talk about Bruno), and then the kingdom freezes and the house loses its magic
@AskYatharth Thinking about it more Singapore has a version of ~relationality problems too (of course). rhymes a lot with the classic immigrant grindset https://t.co/04t2tum6Wu
note to write about how hilarious/bleak the Social Development Unit was/is ā very emblematic of Singapore, I think. To overwork people, wonder why theyāre not dating, and then come up with yet another new initiative to try and get people to do what theyād do naturally if rested