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The electric fence stopped working years ago

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Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#61

Post by d4mi3n »

protonbob wrote: post #49

> The fence isn't there. It never was. It's just the memory of some childhood rejection, some social rule someone made up, some fear that caring more makes you matter less. Chesterton's Fence would say that maybe there is a reason and you should tread carefully. Sometimes a relationship died because it should have. Maybe you feel uncomfortable messaging someone because they have given nonverbals that they don't like…

This can sometimes be the case, but barring something tangibly dangerous or concerning, talking is cheap and communication is hard. If someone really is a problem, I'd rather know and consciously decide to not associate with them than I would risk losing a potential great relationship because I was nervous about something I couldn't quantify.

YMMV. It'd be a learning experience either way.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#62

Post by inglor_cz »

logifail wrote: post #54
lordnacho wrote: post #8

This is right. People ask my how on earth I know what every one of my high school classmates is up to, when we were the last class of the millennium. Along with a number of old teachers and other randoms from years ago. I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message. The message doesn't have any warnings on it like "oh I know it's been a while" or "you might not remember me". I wri…

> I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message This. I'm spending the week in my hometown with my 9-year old daughter to give her the chance of some time with her grandparents. We live hundreds of miles (and several countries) away. While walking along I mentioned to her that an old college friend of mine also lived in this town along with her husband and their daughter. For pers…

I would tell you to do the same, and I am freshly 47...

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#63

Post by nuancebydefault »

stroz wrote: post #4
btilly wrote: post #3

For most of us, certainly including me, a lot of those electric fences are alive and well. They are powered by thoughts associated with pain. Anything that triggers those thoughts, triggers that pain. We are not even aware of how our thinking has been constrained. We just avoid the possibility of triggering the thought. A person constrained by such a fence is very obvious from the outside. We see the irrational ratio…

You're right, we see everyone else's fences perfectly while blind to our own. Here's what helped me most, when I hit a painful thought, I try to think about it as, "What are you protecting me from?" Usually it's something that happened once, often years ago. Next time you feel that electric fence, just notice it. Then take one tiny step towards it (Joe Hudson talks about this as emotional fluency). The fence will bee…

I recently realized that I had lingering old pains and those were triggered by someone going through a similar experience and I literally felt their pain. It took me a lot of digging in my mind, peeling off layers, to understand even what the root pains are.

Sending a message to someone and potentially not getting any (meaningful) back is something I find very hard to accept, though I know not responding is often not on purpose.

For me, it is not so much about an electric fence, more about a feeling of rejection or abandonment that seems really hard to eradicate.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#64

Post by inglor_cz »

layer8 wrote: post #40

> Think about it, when was the last time you were annoyed that someone reached out to check in? When did you ever think less of someone for being the one to text you? Never. Apparently the author doesn’t know a certain kind of obnoxious people. ;)

I was never annoyed by people checking in for innocent reasons.

I was, though, when they immediately started asking for money or invited me to join some MLM scheme. Fortunately, that happened just three times or so.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#65

Post by tshaddox »

barbazoo wrote: post #14
tshaddox wrote: post #13

Funny enough, an alleged Chesterton's fence is very likely to be one of these derelict electric fences. People who advocate the "Chesterton's fence" argument (which is similar to and equally misguided as the precautionary principle) are essentially saying "whoever built this fence either didn't understand why they built the fence, or didn't manage to explain their reasoning to other people affected by the fence, and…

Chesterton’s fence isn’t “respect it forever” or “spend infinite resources”. It’s “don’t tear it down until you understand why it’s there”. The whole point is to avoid breaking something whose purpose you haven’t yet understood, because the original builders might have had a good reason that isn’t obvious to you. Once you’ve understood it, you’re free to remove it if that reason no longer applies.

> Chesterton’s fence isn’t “respect it forever” or “spend infinite resources”. It’s “don’t tear it down until you understand why it’s there”.

You contradict yourself by describing exactly what I described, which is a requirement to spend an unbounded (I didn't say infinite) amount of resources trying to understand the reason the fence was built. What you just said is that if you cannot understand why it was built, you can never tear it down. This is precisely my criticism of the concept.

Of course, sometimes it might be easy to discover why the fence was built. But the problem with Chesterton's fence is that, if it were adhered to generally, it applies selective pressure for obscuring the reason fences are built.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#66

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stroz wrote: post #50
davvilla wrote: post #21

Loved the write up but it all canceled out when I realized it’s a blog for an app that’s “your social operating system”

Fair point! The irony isn't lost on me, writing about breaking free from systems while building another one. Sometimes we need training wheels before we can ride free. The goal is shifting the mindset, and ultimately making the systems unnecessary eventually.

I suspect the app is a labor of love, and the article was from the heart.

It does get dicey, when what we do is mixed with who we are.

I have an app that is very useful to a lot of folks, but I don't really spend much time, talking about it, because it's frequently met with suspicion. I'm trying to figure out how to work around that.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#67

Post by Karsteski »

Beautiful article. I've started reaching out to friends from university or even secondary school that I lost contact with. Sometimes it works out and we eventually meet up, but other times it just fizzles out. I've only ever regretted not reaching out to people. It's scary to do every time but I want to keep at it. Perhaps I'm too sentimental but I genuinely miss some people, and from what I've experienced, sometimes they missed me too.

One of my fondest memories from only a few years ago was when a friend that I was reasonably close with but hadn't seen in a long while messaged me on birthday. Probably didn't mean much to her but it still means a lot to me to this day. I should text her.

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#68

Post by kelnos »

fnord77 wrote: post #52
blindriver wrote: post #23

I never had this fake sense of shame or embarrassment when it came to contacting people. Some people will keep tabs on when someone last contacted them, and hold it against them. I don't. Just last month I had lunch with middle school friends I hadn't seen in 40 years. I literally hadn't seen once since Grade 8. I friended them on Facebook years previous but didn't really have anything to chat about, but when I was i…

> I never had this fake sense of shame or embarrassment It's not fake. Just because you don't experience it doesn't mean it isn't real

Replace "fake" with "pointless", then. Or if that sounds harsh, "unproductive".

Re: The electric fence stopped working years ago

#69

Post by kelnos »

protonbob wrote: post #49

> The fence isn't there. It never was. It's just the memory of some childhood rejection, some social rule someone made up, some fear that caring more makes you matter less. Chesterton's Fence would say that maybe there is a reason and you should tread carefully. Sometimes a relationship died because it should have. Maybe you feel uncomfortable messaging someone because they have given nonverbals that they don't like…

That's true, but absent psychological manipulation or something truly devious and nefarious, a short text message is low risk, and is unlikely to open up a painful can of worms.

And I don't think the point of that statement was that you should be contacting anyone and everyone, just because they entered your mind. It's not saying you should get in touch to say hello to that abusive ex just because you thought about them. But firing off a quick text to someone you found interesting but lost touch with is pretty much always going to be harmless.

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