The limits of empathy

I am agreeable to a fault. I have a strong need to be liked, and so am affable and self-deprecating when at times the world would be better served by my being more of an asshole.

Reams of self-help advise us to stop worrying about what other people think of us, and while I've internalized some of that advice with regards to the generation of nonsense, I've got a long way to go with the more global not giving a shit about the feelings of others.

Because while caring about the feelings of others can be a very useful and constructive skill, there are also times when what we imagine other people are feeling stops us from doing something we want to or should. Situations when, in fact, we have no actual idea if the other person cares at all about what we are doing.

I think of this most often domestically, when I want to go to my cave and write or otherwise play and yet I either stop myself or end up spending my time psychically conflicted imagining Smith wants me to be doing something 'productive' - even on days when she's not actually expressed an opinion either way.

This is where if you want to make time for creativity you have to stake your ground. For yourself first, and for those around you as well -- what's trite in all this for students of self-help is that it's repeating a fairly basal level of advice - but as with all the fruits of experience there is a world of difference between reading or hearing about the benefits of planting some fruit trees, and actually biting the fruit from the trees you have planted. In other words - there's knowing the path and walking the path.

And the reason as best as I can tell is the gap between what we know consciously and what we've internalized unconsciously, or emotionally. We can know that exercise or setting aside time for creativity with no distractions are the tried and tested methods of achieving health or productive goals, but until we've trained our limbic systems to actually perform these tasks, until we've put the idea into practice, and then repeated it until our neurons map the performance of the task with experiencing the reward, it's a hell of a hill to climb on the day to actually walk the walk.

It's exactly like riding a bike, or any of the millions of other tasks we have to learn that are really hard to perform consciously, but, once learned, we hardly ever have to think of again. And it's down this road - of practice practice practice, that flow becomes possible. Being in a state of high performance with little to no involvement of the conscious mind.

Which is as best as I can tell, one of the major gateways to happiness. And leads to comfy.