Tag: philosophy

On Responsibility

Empathy and compassion are truly important traits. To understand others emotions is powerful, to care about them though difficult is even more so.

Have you tried to understand someone you disagree with?

I don’t mean in the logical exercise of determining whether you think they are right or wrong but to deconstruct how they arrived where they did.

It’s difficult in a purely logical sense at times to take those steps. Sure it’s enough that we are confident that we are right what’s it matter how someone else is wrong.

Yet there’s more to this then just determining truth. As people we can’t unwind the emotionality of our thoughts and someone who disagrees with you also had emotions baked into their thoughts.

We have a responsibility to understand those around us.

I often find because I am in a different social situation the most people that empathy and understanding are critical because it’s not often that someone understands my perspective. So I have the responsibility of bridging that gap.

It’s not a matter of fairness but a matter of maturity, to be the best we can be does not usually leave room for the privilege of equality. To understand someone who disagrees with you or perhaps even hates you is hard.

Social circumstances often put trans people in a power disadvantage. Thus learning early and learning well the responsibility of understanding can be a matter of sanity let alone serenity.

There is a time to fight and a time to listen. It’s hard to want to listen to someone as they stab you. The pain of your cuts and wounds can overpower your reason and close you off from your compassion.

It is not an easy road we walk, but mercy and compassion for those less fortunate to have the strength gifted you by your experiences can help still the conflict in your heart.

People can be selfish, mean, and cruel. it’s not enough to expect people to unlearn through they must be shown the way.

I’ve often been called an old soul. Or mature beyond my years and I don’t think it has anything to do with the nature of my consciousness but the trauma it’s experienced. It takes a lot of care and concern to unwind the pain that is caused to a young trans kid. The pressure of adulthood is rarely a safe place to deal with that trauma.

It’s why it’s even more important to be kind to others. Care about those who are more fortunate than yourself. There’s no cost to kindness. But there’s a fee for cruelty.

As all people we have a responsibility to be caring and understanding of others but I think trans people have a special insight into how to model that compassion and kindness. I know I once truly hated myself and it took me a very long time to see the other side of that argument and embrace the idea of loving myself. That is a lesson we have to gift to the world so long as we care to give it.

On Purpose

We like to find meaning in what we’re currently doing. Abdicating the responsibility of determining purpose and intent to the situation we’re in. It’s why some are comfortable to stay in a job they hate for far to long, while others are happily moving from company to company with no particular concern. Both can be carried by inertia, but their intention is different.

In the first example, why would you stay in a job you hate, well that assumes that the purpose of your employment is to enjoy it. If no job would satisfy you and you only work for your life outside of it, then your purpose would be the maintenance of your material needs. The nourishment of your desires is your purpose and as such any job is acceptable so long as it does so. A job that pays you enough and is undemanding enough suits your purpose. That you hate it is irrelevant.

The latter example is a little trickier, why move from a job you love and makes you happy? For so many that seems like a dream but again, if your purpose is to achieve something different, or to have more, or be somewhere else than no matter how happy a job makes you it can’t satisfy you.

Which is where we come to the point of it. Our purpose is to achieve our own satisfaction, to attain happiness. Yet we’re also terribly designed to do so. Happiness is such an undefinable concept, and applies so hap haphazardly across us all that it’s attainment is a chaotic mess. Should we even be so fortunate as to know what we want it isn’t usually a material matter in how to acquire it.

Happiness falls within our own minds, as much as any other emotion, so using it as a meter stick for measuring our external accomplishments is folly. Purpose is derived within our selves, and confusing it with external desires is disruptive to achieving it.

Discerning your intentions and desires, to see what you want and need is good. It can help you uncover why you want what you want and understand the nature of purpose that you are employing. Rather then measuring based on titles, accomplishments, or wealth instead look at how you act and what directions you push yourself into. Often our mind pushes us towards what we need and if we don’t understand that then we’re haplessly following a shrouded path.

It’s not enough to want, want can lead you down dark paths. To bring light you must uncover your purpose, not let it be a by-product of your actions. Understand your desires so that you may fulfill them if they’re healthy, or deal with them if you’re not. Simply believing you can conquer your every whim is impossible, find common ground with your intention and strike purpose into your intent.

Focusing on Why

I struggle at times, I’m not sure where it came from, I don’t know it it’s some remnant of a life spent asking myself every other question. I have a hard time not knowing why.

Not in any particular way, but in a very general sense, I want to know why something works the way it does. I did a test the other day. it was meant to determine one’s bias towards associating men and women with family and career. Rather then focusing on the test, which was basically a word association game. I couldn’t help but focus on how it worked, Until I understood how it worked, and why it did what it did. I figured it out while I was writing the test, but likely skewed my results because of the brainpower I put into figuring out the game.

For those that are curious it compared the time it took you to respond in different scenarios to different word associations. If I had of known it was going to explain that to me at the end, I wouldn’t have needed to think it through.

Which comes to my point, I struggle when I don’t know why something is the way that it is. I want to know how to works, I want to know why someone made it. I like knowing the who, the what, even the where and when can be interesting, how is usually important to breaking something down, but I need to know why. I need a purpose, I need a goal. I need to understand why someone put the effort into something in the first place.

Which is a struggle for me at times, because I don’t often have a ready answer. It challenges me in the workplace, because I want to very much to ascribe some grand plan, or well executed thought to an action of a co-worker or boss. Yet often there isn’t one. I’m not a fan of something happening because of apathy or lack of attention. It means that there is no reason something happened, there is no why.

I’ve been talking about motivation a lot lately, and it often comes down to why. If I don’t feel like my purpose, and the purpose of others are in alignment I struggle. I need to know that there’s more to something then inertia. The worst answer I can ever hear to a question is that “it is because it is.”

I’ve put a lot of effort in my life into knowing myself, and I’m not particularly good at it, but it’s a lifelong goal, and part of knowing yourself is why you do what you do, and we live in a social world, nothing is an effort of one. Knowing the why around you helps you understand yourself.

 

Finding Motivation Pt. 3

In continuation of my discussion around finding motivation, finding purpose, finding meaning. I find myself itching to discuss this when my motivation is at it’s lowest. In August I talked about this topic specifically, if you’d like to read them they’re linked below.

Finding Motivation

Finding Motivation Pt. 2

So I talked there about finding purpose and meaning and ultimately motivation beyond the prescribed methods. Material fulfillment is limited in a world that legitimizes discrimination in many different and subtle ways. Social fulfillment can be fleeting or difficult to grasp when confronted with the fact that your presence makes people uncomfortable, not because of anything you’ve done but what you represent to them. Spiritual fulfillment can be almost impossible when your existence challenges the basis of most modern religions.

Without a lot of external support, we’re left with only what we muster ourselves. I’ve said this before, but finding motivation has come down to what I can put forward for myself. There’s very little pushing me to succeed, what I mean is that there’s little expectation to succeed, and when I fail there’s a general acceptance that I shouldn’t have expected any different. Nobody goes, ‘well I think you should have done better, let’s see what went wrong and see if we can help you next time.’ instead I’ve come to expect ‘what did you think would happen?’

It’s amazing how pervasive the expectation of failure can be, it infects me at times. So if my earlier writing was about finding motivation, I guess I just need to elaborate that it’s not a one and done solution, you don’t find motivation and then you’re good forever, finding meaning and substance to what you’re doing. Finding a reason to do what you do, is a process that never stops. When no one expects you to do well, then you’ve got to fight everyday to not believe them. It’s hard, it’s tiring, but it’s the most important thing you’ll do.

A life of contemplation, a life of purpose, a life of meaning, a life of substance. A life worth living.

 

On Conforming

I’ve touched on this topic without ever directly discussing it.

The concept of conformity, of yielding to the group is one that I struggle intimately with.

My very existence sets me apart, my experiences are different then the majority of peoples, my perception of events is changed by my experiences and thus I interpret the world a little differently then the majority of people I interact with.

Yet, I am always acutely aware that it is their world. We live in a cis-centric heteronormative world. No matter how hard I try I can’t escape the fact that I am different, that my life is not the same as most people’s, and as such my experiences and opinions are different and at times difficult and inherently confrontational.

I am challenged at times to keep my opinions to myself, when problems arise that are so gendered in nature that I want to scream “it doesn’t matter” but I have to stop myself, I have to conform to the environment I’m in and understand that the way I perceive the world differs from others. Problems that I see as a result of a specific way of thinking are traditional values passed down generations that can be painful to challenge for others.

I’m sure there are many ways that my opinions and ideas challenge the orthodoxy of others. The fact that I and others like me exist inherently challenges rigid and defined gender roles, ideas of gender, and the role that gender has in our lives.

So conforming is both something I am pushed to, upholding feminine roles and ideals, not challenging sexism, and confining myself to a more narrow few of femininity then I truly believe because the alternative is transphobia. Yet conforming is also somethign I loathe and wish desperately to break free from, because it’s unilateral about appeasing an external world that still won’t like me, while also infringing on my own internal liberty.

Forcing conformity onto those that are different is evidence of a sick and disillusioned people, enamored with an ideal that can’t exist and afraid of a reality that forces them to acknowledge hard truths.