(no subject)

[flamingsword]

Hank Green was wondering about his relentless drive to be productive / his fears about being unproductive in the Nerdfighter newsletter. (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/p/mini-newsletter-does-anyone-else-feel-like-this)

I have some Thoughts, so here they are:

So a lot of the therapy-adjacent Nerdfighters are probably twitching right now, and writing you a set of reasonably similar letters. So I’m going to go in a weirder direction, to make sure that we have explored as much space of the idea-space as we can reach.

To me there’s a question of internal or external locus of control (what efficacy do you have, and how do you decide whether you are the captain of your own soul? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control ) versus what I would call an internal or external locus of _identity_ (what value do you have and who decides that?). So you kind of have a Johari Window of four options: internal control & internal identity, internal control & external identity, external control & internal identity, and external control & external identity. (I wish I could draw in my email app, but sadly it’s not to be.)

If your locus of control is internal but your locus of identity is external, then you would be part of the subset of people who believes that we shape the world through our decisions but simultaneously believes that we don’t get to decide what those decisions and efforts _mean about us_. We don’t get to decide our own value, so we’re constantly racing the clock trying to make accomplishments and be productive according to some idea we have of other’s expectations and judgments about us. I felt that way about my life for a long time; it was not fun.

A Native American acquaintance of mine says that outlook on the world is a very white Westerner thing, and that her culture believes that people and animals exist to exist - that we exist for our own purposes (we’re here because we’re here) and we decide what that means. That sounds like an internal locus of identity and internal control to me. It makes me wonder where other cultures and people fall into this heuristic, whether Calvinist predestination is as externally a locus of identity as it has an external locus of control, since they would be relying on the supposed judgments of god for both their worth and as the only form of efficacy in the world.

It’s something to think about anyway. Y’all have a good night!

Comments

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[minoanmiss]

If your locus of control is internal but your locus of identity is external, then you would be part of the subset of people who believes that we shape the world through our decisions but simultaneously believes that we don’t get to decide what those decisions and efforts mean about us. We don’t get to decide our own value, so we’re constantly racing the clock trying to make accomplishments and be productive according to some idea we have of other’s expectations and judgments about us. I felt that way about my life for a long time; it was not fun.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

(Guess who was raised in a Calvinist church.)

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[flamingsword]

If you were raised Calvinist, then good on you for getting out of the mindset of feeling like your decisions don’t matter. I hope you feel less judged and less like those external judgments matter to your value than you grew up with as well.

As long as we’re here saying true stuff: even if there’s not much hope for your folks turning their heads around about you, I think you are living your life with the kind of painful hope that comes from not armoring yourself against the world, not numbing yourself to be less sensitive to it’s dire and terrible ways, but doing what you can to feed yourself and others a diet of beauty and the connection that makes life worthwhile in the face of oppression. That is a legitimate form of bravery, and it is absolutely a choice, even if you are making it reflexively, at the emotional level. Unconscious choices are still choices. For the sake of accuracy, please add “brave” to your own evaluations of yourself.

Re: *

[minoanmiss]

I have been thinking about this for days. hugs you gratefully

Re: *

[flamingsword]

You are always welcome to the truth as I see it.

[house_wren]

Ooh - thank you for this! It did provoke me to think.

[flamingsword]

If I had a family crest then the motto would be “Provoco” (“I provoke” in Latin). It’s gratifying to take the time to think deeply and differently about things. I should do it more often.

[extraarcha]

While it's sometimes fun to overthink things, the reality is that the Johari Window has only one window: internal control & internal identity.

One can haphazardly or intentionally choose to give away either or both, but that's just pretending and it's your active choice to do so, even if one is raised to think otherwise.

It's amazing to me that those who've tried to foist giving up either and both are the self-same people who have given them up. Misery loves company is all i can think it to be.

Living actively with internal control & internal identity isn't the "easy" choice, but it's actually the only choice - because doing otherwise is going to be at least as unpleasant, if not more so. "Shallow" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Yup, i make mistakes, but i own them and learn from them. Maybe in the next couple of hundred years, i might get in sight of "wise" from all i'm learning from my mistakes.
LMAO! !!

[flamingsword]

I don’t think it’s fair to say that something is an active choice to give up power and control when you have, for instance, been raised with abuse that has given you learned helplessness from before the age of reason. I know some folks like that, and you probably do, too. Once you have it explained to you, you can train yourself out of it … eventually. But until that point, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize something as being a choice.

-Heidi

[extraarcha]

I'm not saying the choice was made from a knowing frame of mind, but a choice is made each and every time one goes along with the status quo. This is why the law is supposed to recognize the so-called "age of consent". A child only knows the conditions around them.
My 70 year old brother in law acts like an entitled child. He has no excuse at this time of his life. Nobody "owes" him the best of everything and he's no longer able to claim his mama (missing father, step dad) is to blame for his repeated choices to demand special treatment. He thinks he's smarter than people around him and they don't recognize his camouflaged baby behavior. (Examples if you want them.)
I've raised several kids and worked with a goodly number of others. Children most often behave as well as they're expected to. (Ok, make that 'allowed to'?)
Caveat: I'm mostly hard-case on myself and don't take a hard line with others, specially with children. This discussion is about things i think about often.

[silk_dragon_zen]

I know this post was from a week ago but we're only now catching up with DW after transitioning to a new computer and then the holidays followed by recovering from the holidays. Anyway, just read the intro to the Wikipedia article about the concept of locus of control — as well as some of the Wikipedia article about core self-evaluations — and, *sighs* call this hella neurodivergent person unimpressed, yet again, with Western psychology's insistence that they know stuff about the way people work. Personality is constantly changing because *everything* is subject to change. Such changes might not be highly noticeable in many people (especially in neurotypicals), but there's no such thing as a stable personality trait. That's just silly!

Okay, with that out of the way, it occurred to me that a sense of external locus of control might have a tonne to do with how well one's cognitive and physical capacities match societal expectations. I.e.: if you were born disabled on several fronts all at once, you might not have much say in how your life goes if you are constantly being expected to be something your body just doesn't support and then being punished for things you literally can't do anything to fix. This is especially true if you were raised in an environment where the dominant belief is that the few things you do have some talent in (in our case magic/psi) don't exist.

The result of this dynamic in our life has been that we went from being an ontological materialist who experienced an external locus of control in nearly all areas of life (except maybe gender and neurotypal identity), to becoming an ontological idealist (someone who believes that reality is rooted in Mind/Consciousness) who now experiences an internal locus of control that we're slowly learning to master.

Without recognizing our magical nature (and the notion that reality is essentially a dream rooted in Universal Consciousness), I don't think we SilkDragons would ever have been able to conceive of the possibility of us having true internal resources to draw upon that could affect our experience of reality.

Thanks for standing up for those of us who never gave away our internal power and identity but were simply brainwashed from never having thought about it (because we were too little and those concepts had not yet occurred to us) to believing (wrongly as it turned out) in the external nature of things. I know your friend sees things differently, and I don't doubt that's their experience. I just wish they would acknowledge that we don't all have the same experience: it's not true for everyone that we ever — even unwittingly — gave away our power. Some of us just needed the right help to find our power in the first place, and alas in our case it wasn't till several decades into adulthood that we finally found some wise and kind Buddhist teachers who have never insisted on blaming the victim.

— Sage

[flamingsword]

Indeed, people can have some personality traits that stay the same for decades … but then they change. And if people think that they don’t change that means they don’t notice when that happens. They represent themselves as being a way that they are not anymore out of a kind of false consciousness.

And yeah; that kind of ableist abuse of disabled children was one of the things I was thinking of when I was mentioning learned helplessness. It’s insidious stuff. I’m glad extraarcha does not have firsthand experience with being systematically denied the opportunity to be a person, but he could stand to admit that his experience is not universal.