<aside> 💡 Attention this is ELI5 post. If you are smarter than five year old you may not be able to find value in it
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About: this is a little silly ELI5 technique. It’s like my cognition is tinted with some weights and by switching to one of the modes proposed here helps me change weights on a lot of vectors at once. It helps my imagination take quickly a different perspective, and draw new conclusions or calibrate to something more effectively.
Seeing humans as… humans.
Ok, this is silly, but will proof helpful a little later. This is a default mode that is sort of seeing humans as in an enlightenment mode. That is humans as intelligent, rational agents, intelligent, not biased, not groupish thinkers, destiny of evolution. Here being a human is desired, glamorous proud.
Seeing humans as ants. That is who are into work, work, work.
That is being blinded by work, being not here and now, but in what’s next. Being mostly unfulfilled. Focused on imaginary next thing. Being sad if they are not productive.
Sorry, I may be stereotyping ants. I am actually not sure if ants actually work more than other creatures. This is just a silly metaphor of an ant carrying something humongous in relation to their body size. Plus this feeling, a mindless, hiveish attitude towards work, work is our life, work is valued almost above other things. Some automatic, zombie aspect of it, one is gonna be possessed by work .
Wait, are you trying to slide a degrowth?
No, growth alleviated a lot of suffering in our world. See Setven Pinker, Hans Rosling etc.
Blind growth
I sometimes have an internal opposition to this force. Do I need to grow and be productive to feel satisfied? Feels arbitrary somehow. It sometimes almost feel that there is an internal evaluator, who values work and but the direction of the work almost doesn’t matter to them. And this seem crucial. The internal evaluator will be happy if some arbitrary work happens. If there was a stack of bricks and I would move it by one meter it would be satisfied. If its big its good, while a direction of it matter less. Success of a career, success in money thing seem like an important evaluation metric to human-ants.
This is probably a large chunk of what it means to people when they use word “capitalism”.
There are so many people that spend their life work on stuff they don’t care about. There is also quite quite large amount of people who don’t find it meaningful, albeit smaller because people probably find meaning seeing work as a mean to do other thigns (rising kids, having home, meetings with friends)
Cute growth
But I also do like growing. When one substract the blind-growth there is aspect of it that feels right. May this be something more universal, like that life wants to grow. Maybe it’s just a note to myself that whenever I feel a certain dislike of work I just need to substract the blind work?
Seeing humans as monkeys
Sorry, I may be stereotyping monkeys here!
This is stands as directionally opposite to seeing humans as humans (see above). And then seeing them as groupish thinkers, very biased, biased in a sense that is silly and predictable, eg. motivated by climbing hierarchies. Focused on me me me. That is this theory is mine so its better. (confirmation bias, my-side bias). Signaling kindess and altruism but really being selfish.
Whenever one is feeling tension, a little stress, intimidetion by humans (that is humans as humans, see above). That is humans in a measured, intelligent, desirable being. Imagine some distinguished group of deliberating experts. It’s fun to substitute it to monkeys. When I use that I often see a lot of things are revealed. I find it as helpful shortcut to spot our faulty reasoning or as a good descriptions of human behaviours
Example
I am on a website and there are this blissful idealistic frames of humans, everybody is smiling, captured exactly at their best angle, wearing their best clothes. And I am like this are sensible humans why they are showing this one take of human experience. Will there be social norms that en mass this is harmful for humanity and may be consider cringe? Maybe, but I am just a monkey with low-resolution imagination, with a heavy availability bias, look right here these dudes are smiling. It must be good.