No fun stuff today, I have something to get off my chest.
There are two things true of Psychology:
1) That you can probably accurately guess a boatload of somebody's personality traits and past within a short amount of time, with enough experience.
2) That you should never actually state these assumptions out loud, because even if they're true, breaching somebody's darkest depths without easing them into doing it themselves is like yanking somebody's guts out and showing them to them. It's traumatic. People generally aren't ready to gaze into the void of how their minds work, and weaponizing their flaws like that is a good way of making sure they double down and try not to fix them. Doing what my character did in this comic is a terrible idea, because it'll just make the other person angry and less receptive.
Which is what makes it so frustrating to deal with people who insist that other people need "tough love"– they're all about the tough, and have no interest in the love. If you truly want somebody to improve their life, you have to spend some real emotional labor getting them there, and that's hard. There is no shortcut where you stand high up in your high tower, shouting down life advice and deciding that anyone who doesn't follow it just... couldn't be helped for whatever reason.
The irony is, Learned Helplessness is a thing, but it's usually the result of someone being abused, told they're lazy, told they're worthless, told their attempts to find joy are endemic of a problem they have, a lack of character that they display. So filling them up with more Personal Responsibility Politics is nothing more than a self-serving way of telling yourself and others you helped without doing the work. That's right. It's Virtue Signaling.
So the next time you think you've got somebody's number, just... take a second and think about why you're about to say something. Is it that you really want to help? Or do you just want to hurt somebody?
Keywords
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1,122,044,
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bear
45,578,
skunk
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gwendolyn mason
102,
political comic
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discourse
5
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Published:
1 month, 2 weeks ago
01 Apr 2024 10:59 CEST
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