What are your unique takes on life?

Apparently, very few people share my views on music. I try to look at every genre of music as its own pure art form, and judge it based on those rules, forsaking the idea of "preferece of styles" so I can judge it all fairly. I've started a thread in reddit detailing this to help with alt-country, but for whatever reason people keep downvoting it. So, I don't know. I guess they just see my view as weird. I treat movies and books the same way.


What about you? What are your odd viewpoints of different things throughout the world? Things that most people don't really grasp?

I'm not sure what other's 'grasp' or not? I suppose what I 'grasp' might be way off base. So I'd like to answer but I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, except that you did talk about your own music taste as being different...So, I'll say as far as music goes I don't listen to it almost ever. I use to listen to the radio when I drove alone or was doing the treadmill, but these days I rarely here any music unless it's in a movie or playing in the background in the grocery store. Maybe that's odd?

Comic books.

Oh dear.

How to put it in a neutral way. I believe that there's two kinds of people, those who love to like, those who love to hate. We do all have reasons to love and reasons to hate (legitimate ones, I mean), but we're different in terms of which ones we treat as good news or bad news. Some people are way too eager to jump right to the conclusions or interpretations or simplifications that justify oh-so-righteous wrath and hatred. Way too disappointed if there's a reason to reduce it a bit. And the thing is... this is independent from the underlying values. It's a thing where either good causes or bad causes can be instrumentalized as excuses all the same. It's an attitude that you can see both on the "good side" and on the "bad side" (however you define them). And that's terrible.

It's antagonistic, it's polarizing, and deliberately so. Because of the glee of charging heroically at a defined monster. And the internet -twitter summaries, social network bubbles, emotional clickbaits- has made us terrible junkies in that respect. And wherever I am, whatever the ideology that surrounds me, whether I agree with it or oppose it, I always, always end up a monstrous baddie for showing too lukewarm, too cautious about our perceptions of life complexities, about our limited knowledge of actual situations, about the multiplicity of the layers that get collapsed into ready-made narratives. For taking new cases as their own complex life mysteries instead of going "hah, I knew it I knew it, it's always like that !" half-through the headline. And so, I always become a suspicious accomplice of The Other Side. No matter my actual values.

And, this makes me very, very pessimistic about us, about the future of our societies.

And, in particular, I expected "my side" to show the way, when it comes to a healthy relationship with truth, fairness and complexity. And... nope, all sides are the same in that respect. And that's heartbreaking to me. Because it deprives the best values of their best tools : objectivity, curiosity, exhaustivity, and proximity to reality. And the humility of judgement suspension when data is lacking or too contradictory. Because, no matter what the internet tells us : we are not supposed to be able to pass fair judgement on everything we remotely hear about. It's not our sum of big opinions that makes us better.

But oh the emotional delight of "the impression of having understood", at the minimal cognitive cost. It will kill us. It will make us kill each others.

So. There's my viewpoint. Probably sounding very noble to everyone, at that level. But when it comes to practical applications... *shudder*

I judge each song that way.

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https://www.youtube.com/c/LoyalOpposition

Hmmm, i have to honestly say there's little about me that's unique but me as a whole. Everything in my life was learned in some way or another.



I hear you about your complex criteria. I try to use the internet to comfort myself due to lack of social interaction and lack of usefulness to anyone but my pets and mom but whenever i cross that line (it's a different line in every online forum...but sometimes i can feel it intuitively) i get banned or warned or something.I'd like to think of myself as someone with decent social skills whose kinda intelligent but I have to admit that I'm wrong.


I guess I'm just another internet troll or deviant.

They often say you only have one life so you ought to try everything. I vehemently disagree with this materialistic carpe diem approach. Things we do not do define us as much as things we do. Deliberately rejecting a set of things empowers us as human beings. The fact you can do something does not mean you should do it. A set of strong moral principles is a must for every well-rounded person.

Rejecting the notion of maturity will not keep you perpetually immature. However, you can reject some aspects largely associated with maturity to keep things many would connect with immaturity. The fact maturity may be full of grace does not mean it always is. Quite contrary, it's most often just plain ugly. By combining what's best about maturity and immaturity you arrive at a point at which you are immaturely mature and maturely immature - a perfect being if there ever was one.

Your salvation is just an egoistic thing of sorts. Be as egoistic as you want, but if you decide to take a step back in the forest and pick up the baby, then bring the baby next to a fireplace and sing a lullaby, lulling it to sleep, you just added a brick to the wall of salvation. Do not try to just save your own soul. Try saving others' souls, too. This has nothing to do with religion.

A set of high standards is a must for an individual in the contemporary world. Be healthily discriminatory when things concern only you and full of mercy when others are involved.

Ignore everybody who thinks Nolan is the best director.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I mind my own damn business.

Adulthood (as the varnish that age spreads over immaturity) and maturity (what different subcultures choose to define as reasonable) are fascinating topics. I'm generally on the anti-adults side of the war, along with many of my favorite artists and authors, from Jacques Brel ("finally it took us a lot of talent to become old without becoming adults") to Chuck Jones (unfortunately I only have the french edition of Jones' "Chuck Amuck", so I can't quote it here, but it features a wonderful letter he wrote to a friend of his, explaining how a horse's death made him loathe grownups forever, and how his friend turned out to be one of the very few adults he could tolerate).

On the other hand, I'm also prone to denounce the immaturity of grownups (such as some dangerously childish politicians or voters), so I'm not extremely coherent with these concepts. Experience itself is a double edged sword, as it can be both fruitful or misleading depending on circumstances. It's hard to make blanket judgments on these things.

So indeed, breaking these concepts down to smaller components, sorting out what is worthy or toxic within "maturity" itself, instead of trying to evaluate "maturity" as a whole, may be a more productive approach than mine.

Experience creates knowledge. Knowledge is harmful when the individual thinks that's there knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge, doesn't belong to anyone. A young child is deprived of experience and therefore deprived of knowledge. Experience and knowledge is created by the past, is memory. We're dependable of decisions and those decisions are based on knowledge and therefore past, past remembrance, past pain, past pleasure, and the decision making is attributed to will. Will is the accumulated concentrated form of desire, but we call it will. So, we're all conditioned in every decision we make. If you read carefully you'll see clearly the major difference between a child and a mature men. You'll see how and why a child is not conditioned. We see a tree, a flower, we give it a name, and we pass it by. A child is not conditioned by experience and knowledge, decisions are not based on record and therefore desire but on curiosity, that's why seeing the world trough the eyes of a child is so appealing, because it's fresh, it's unconditioned. Knowledge is indispensable in our world. The question that one can ask is: Is it possible to make a decision not based on will? Is it possible not to record, not to build an image based on record? That's a question of who is recording and why it's recording.

Life is like a shi t sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shi t you have to eat.

Large groups of people are basically never wrong about there being a problem.

They can be wrong about the source of the problem, or its exact nature, and God knows they can be very, very wrong about the solution to it, but I take it as a given that any time millions of people are really upset, it's because there's something actually wrong, regardless of whether or not they can understand or articulate what it is.

Were you thinking about a specific 'problem'? I'm just curious, as I could think of a lot of beliefs that millions have...and millions are wrong about.

I can, too, but I'm making a distinction between "beliefs" and problem detection. The caveats above are a crucial part of the idea:

They can be wrong about the source of the problem, or its exact nature, and God knows they can be very, very wrong about the solution to it

I think lots of people are wrong about lots of specific things, but I think when millions of people are aggrieved, they are essentially never inventing a problem. They may be laying the blame in the wrong place or have absurd ideas about how to fix it, but I almost never accept any brush-off which suggests they're riled up over nothing.

I don't have any specific thing in mind, really, although my mind goes to lots of recent controversies to pattern-match, of course. One of the reasons I like this thought is because it does not cut cleanly across existing political fault lines, too.

But framing something as a problem depends on beliefs. Often, on traditions (and relationship to traditions). All arbitrary cultural codes imply the "problem" of their transgression. Numerous people see homosexuality as a problem. Numerous people see skin color variation as a problem. Numerous people see religious heresy as a problem. Numerous people see their country's border not matching their ancient empire's borders as a problem. More or less anything can be framed as a problem, in fact it's one major tool of political manipulation. "Invent a problem, present a solution". Aaaand that's a problem. I swear. Vote for me.

"Witchcraft" was not a problem. Whatever you do with "witches". Propaganda and random beliefs can easily stem dissatisfaction about a thing that doesn't have to be a bother. The dissatisfaction becomes real (in a way, a problem in itself), but grounded on nothing.

I have to again quote myself, this time adding emphasis, because I think I addressed a lot of that preemptively:

They can be wrong about the source of the problem, or its exact nature, and God knows they can be very, very wrong about the solution to it

Fervor over "witches" is an example of misidentifying the source, not inventing a problem. For example: our crops are ruined! Witches did it! Wrong about the witches, right about there being a problem with crops.

My personal take on life is that humans by nature are often prone to makeup their own narratives, I.E. 'truths'.

Often these self-constructed 'truths' are comfort blankets for a deeply embedded need to: mistrust and demonize ideas, peoples & belief systems, that present uncomfortable truths to the individual. When presented with ideas that are foreign to their emotional wishes & needs, people will then often make up a complex narrative on why such-and-such isn't true and is actually 'the enemy'.

I agree more with Citizen Rules and Flickr, that people are subject to delusions. However, i do agree that an entire large group having a grievance about something is strong evidence that there is a problem. People overall don't have a problem with "skin color variation", but they don't like people with those specific skin colors, and in some countries it has little to do with skin color but religion or some other type of group. However, Yoda is correct in the since that when people display bigotry of that behavior, they are pointing to possibly a real problem (like un-happiness with the arrangements of their country), but of course they are always wrong about it being attributed to a certain out group.



Here's another thing too: so many things simply don't exist. For example: the public. I don't care what you say but there's no such thing, when people say that word it implies some sort of hierarchy. Funny, it has more of a real implication when talking about movies and art...

Yeah, some of these ideas are not really mutually exclusive. In fact, the distinction between individuals and groups is pretty important: "none of us are as smart as all of us," and all that. On an individual level people are obviously very prone to delusion, and even in aggregate I'm allowing for delusion in many ways: source of problem, nature of problem, solution to problem. Just not "is there any kind of problem to begin with?"

I also care less about whether this is literally always true, or just a really good rubric. I'm more confident of the latter. And I particularly like it because it never allows anyone to dismiss an entire group or party's grievance out of hand.

Definitely agree with this. I have similar feelings when people talk about which political views are "mainstream." I've yet to meet any person who was not a public figure of some sort (and therefore had incentive to specifically alter or mask their views to be unobjectionable) who did not have at least one belief or position that was not considered kooky by most other people. There is no "mainstream voter," because "mainstream" just means "currently occupying the plurality of the overlapping Venn diagrams of thought that means most people don't object to it too strenuously." But in the end, it's all individuals, and any abstraction we use to try to codify them as a group ("the public") will inevitably remove a lot of important detail and, if we're not careful to remember it is an abstraction, ultimately reduce our understanding.

If I did have a truly unique take, there would probably be something wrong with me.