Opt Out of Cynicism

How is being a media personality failing to comply with group norms?

It's exactly the kind of professional career non-conformity that musicians are (literally) famous for.

Someone who was genuinely disinterested in group norms would disappear and do whatever they wanted to do in anonymous seclusion.

It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.)

I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance.

I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude.

All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what!

The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since.

No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.

> I suppose you were there with Frankl and can tell us all about it and how you managed to survive.

I wasn't around for the US Civil war either but I can still tell you that the idea that it was about states' rights is nonsense.

> or did you have a superior strategy for survival?

Frankl already had a superior strategy. He made himself useful to the Nazis running the camps and was treated better than his fellow inmates.

> Your comment is a vacuous, bald assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick"

Do you really want me to explain why the idea that people died in concentration camps because they had bad attitudes is nonsensical?

Your question is big. The answer I've landed on is little. We're just little furry wiggly wombly tubes struggling against the inevitable pressures of entropy. This is true down to the most basic molecule than can replicate.

Objective moral truths stem from that. The unending dance with entropy. To be the belle of the ball, we also harness that entropic randomness and turn it into dances that are even more powerful.

I feel the urge to thrive and grow and improve. I find myself sympathetic to the expressions of that drive from all life. That is a priori, that emergent empathy that many of us are capable of. I see a neighbor crying, a homeless man sleeping rough, a fearful stranger, and I say to myself, "There but for the grace of God, go I." But I don't stop there, because I see my puppy, I see a bird in the sky, I see a crushed mollusk, a writhing worm, "There but for the grace of God, go I." We're many faces, but still, we're all dancing with the entropy.

Next is the question, "Will this action increase or decrease the entropy in the universe? To the many faces, is this the action of an ally or an enemy?"

Finally, we realize we could superheat everything into crystals and reduce entropy that way. The last vital factor is the synthesis of order and disorder: complexity. These are the fun dances. Art. Learning. Creation.

So, to find objective moral truths, our sieve consists of The Golden Rule, "Am I fucking things up more?" and "Am I making things more awesome?"

Frankl suggests that the people who perished in Nazi concentration camps could have survived if they had a better attitude. This is intellectually dishonest and morally repugnant. It is akin to suggesting that people who suffer from depression should just try not being sad, only much much worse.

I will hazard a guess and say that nothing you have seen played out time and time again compares to the horrors of the Holocaust.