On Consensus Trance, Essence, and Mislove

This post is just going to be really raw thoughts, haven't had the time to really think about it between staffing, classes, and SBS audition season. There's been a lot on my mind, but I'm kind of delirious, so I'll defer some of it to a later post. Who knows, I might wake up and realize nothing here makes sense.

This quarter, I'm taking a class called Valuescience, and it's been incredible. In particular, one of the readings explored something the author called "consensus trance" and its interplay with "essence." Basically, consensus trance is the form of brainwashing that is more commonly known as enculturation. From a young age, we are conditioned into a particular set of norms by our parents and the rest of the society that surrounds us alike, and most people grow up taking cultural habits for granted when, in reality, there is a huge element of relativity behind most cultural norms. Essence, on the other hand, is the set of values, beliefs, and temperaments inherent to our individual genetic code. To illustrate these distinctions as it pertains to my life, I've drawn up this Venn diagram.

Circle ADEG: Chinese/Taiwanese culture, as exposed to/relevant to me
Circle BDFG: American culture, as exposed to/relevant to me.
Circle CEFG: My essence
Universal region (A-H): All possible values and beliefs in the world

So, some oversimplified examples of things that fall into each region
A: Buddhism, use of physical force for discipline, lack of value in arts or humanities
B: Party culture, masculinity stemming from physical aptitude, "American dream" and individualism
C: Hopeless romanticism, harmony and altruism over economic self-interest
D: Recognition of engineering, medicine, law, etc. as valuable career areas
E: Speaking Chinese, emphasis on academic achievement
F: Recognition of humanities and arts as valuable career areas
G: Compassion, respect towards parents, care for family
H: Cannibalism, belief in Allah

In an ideal world of perfect cultural sensitivity and understanding, all cultures would completely overlap such that regions A, B, E, F are empty for any two cultures (complete circles). There might still be universally agreed upon wrongs (i.e. region H, e.g. unprovoked murder), but anything that one culture deems valuable every other culture would accept (i.e. region D and G is all-encompassing besides H) Within this ideal world, your essence would be a subset of that all-encompassing region (i.e. region C is empty).

Obviously, the world is not ideal. The challenge, therefore, is to find a culture or subculture that has the greatest overlap with your essence, and then move to and live in that culture. Doing so is contingent upon having an understanding of what your essence is, and that is remarkably difficult because of the consensus trance. It is hard to distinguish between what is of your essence, and what has merely been instilled in you and taught to you as valuable.

I think that is the answer to what it means to be emotionally mature, a question I struggled with in my previous post. Being emotionally mature entails consciously knowing what your essence is, and escaping the consensus trance that society sets you up to fall into (and to no fault of society and without malicious intent, because consensus trance is something that propagates through generations). Similarly, building effective relationships with other people is contingent upon understanding their essence, and being able to divorce the influences of their essence and their enculturation when thinking about their behavior and empathizing. And while I don't think it is ever possible to fully get clarity on any one person's essence, including your own, I do believe some people are closer than others.

Unfortunately, in many ways--as a friend or RA, as a once lover, as a son--I am realizing I am perpetually fighting the consensus trance. Mislove occurs when one individual tries to enculturate (used loosely, could be something as innocuous and unintentional as a microexpression frown of disapproval or a slight change in tone of voice) someone else without fully understanding their essence because of prejudices established by the consensus trance. Usually, this happens without bad intention; the individual was only acting on what he or she had in turn been enculturated as "right" or "good." I am guilty of having misloved E-, N-, A-, both of my parents, and I'm sure many others that don't come to mind immediately. Similarly, I've been on the receiving end of mislove as well. It's inevitable.

Some people will never develop a deep enough understanding of their own essence and, more importantly, others' essence to build the relationship that "could have been." The tragedy of this entire thing is that there are potential relationships (between almost lovers, between family members, between nations) that would be downright magical if both sides understood each other's essences, but it never gets to that point, and so that potential relationship never reaches fruition. You can only ever work on escaping the consensus trance and improving your own understanding of your essence and their essence, put that understanding in the open and hope, pray that the other side reaches the same understanding. Sometimes they don't, and what could have been never becomes what is.

Convergence

"College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance." -William Deresiewicz, in Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

While the merits of the article is a totally different conversation, that line itself is among the most profound framings of what college is for that I've heard. It doesn't excuse irresponsible behavior, but it also doesn't advocate any one course of action as the responsible course of action.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means for behavior to be considered emotionally mature. There are many people I consider emotionally mature, but their behavior vary so widely that it really doesn't narrow anything down. For instance, I have a lot of respect for both A- and R- because they both seem to have a remarkably keen level of self-awareness and it seems so effortless on their part (which I understand it might not actually be). However, what they actually do are so vastly different--how do I reconcile that for some people, [responsibly and intelligently] indulging in parties and hookup culture is very consistent with what emotional maturity is for them, while for others staying in and introspecting or reading or having long, meaningful conversations is their manifestation of emotional maturity? Which is it for me?

On the other hand, there are people whose lives are more or less "figured out" by common standards such as income and job security, but honestly seem so juvenile to me. My dad for instance--I feel decades older and wiser than him. The way he handles conflict and confrontation makes me want to go up to him, shake him, and tell him to grow up. I talked to my sister in a heartfelt way for the first time ever (which was incredible and uplifting). She told me about how her relationships were going, how her work was going, and her aspirations after college, even though it was honestly mostly quite bland and stuff I already knew from observing at a distance. In addition, she said that when my dad took her out to dinner for our birthday, he tried to secretly take pictures to send to our grandparents because he didn't want to ask because he was afraid of being turned down.

That's so painful to hear. Thanks to E-, I've gotten to a point where I can see past what my dad did wrong and realize that he's actually just awful at dealing with and confronting emotions, but as his son I'm in no position to try to initiate corrective action. He'd be too prideful to do anything about it now that he's in so deep (i.e. divorced). I wish I could've empathized with him sooner, and maybe communicate that I (and the rest of my family, at least at the time) cared about him. Now, it might be too late. I look forward to the day where I've accomplished something in my life that gives me credibility in how to live, and I can actually go up to him, shake him, and help him grow up. Until then, each conversation with him is a frustrating conversation in which I see things I don't want to be, and it simultaneously helps me avoid his behavior and scares me to death because I share half my biology with him, all the while feeling powerless to help him.

When I think about what it means to be liberated from the constraints of family and the pragmatics of the real world a la the quote above, it certainly doesn't mean act impulsively with no regard to consequences. Instead, it basically means screw up, but only if with a purpose. This is the time during which all of my relationship and career choices leads to low-inertia trajectories, or as if on ice: even the smallest disruptions/decisions will be amplified into significant motion in that particular direction, but can also be easily shifted by further disruptions.

Unfortunately, when I bring this back to the emotional maturity piece, it is at odds with my goals in that regard. I feel that, as a consequence of various circumstances in my life, I've been privy to variety, both in facets of myself and of other people around me. While I don't claim to even come close to having dealt with some of the shit that some people I know have dealt with (K- from Tetris comes to mind), I feel like I've had a non-negligible exposure to assholes and found qualities in myself that disgust me such that I can start to develop heuristics to help me converge on behavior I want to see in myself and people I want to let into my life permanently.

In this sense, I feel old or adult. I feel like I've already gone through the low-inertia stages, but simply not temporally aligned with my college career. As the quote would suggest, everything about the low-inertia nature of young adult life trajectory leads to oscillation away from convergence. This brings me to the next thing I've been thinking about a lot: where my preferences are on the affective circumplex, and what that means about the kinds of interactions I seek with people that occupy different roles in my life.

The affective circumplex         

Before I actually delve into where I currently lie on the circumplex, I feel like there are two obvious but important things to note based on my observations. First, each axis is different for each individual. For one person, biking without a helmet might be a high arousal activity, while for another anything shy of offroad trick biking is low arousal. Secondly, where you lie on the circumplex is not static--it will change throughout life. In general, as people age they tend towards LAP (low arousal positive) over HAP, consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory (SES theory), which states that as people's perceived time horizon shrinks, they narrow the breadth (oscillation) of their social interactions in favor of depth (convergence). Less variation leads to more arousal habituation. But within age cohorts there are large variations, and decay also differs from person to person. Instead, more immediately, life circumstances can have a large bearing on your preference. If you grow up in a shady neighborhood rampant with crime, you will be conditioned to relatively higher levels of arousal.

What remains consistent across all people though, regardless of relative intensities of each axis, is that HAP, whatever it means for them, is not sustainable. By nature of conditioning, repeated instances of the same intensity of stimuli becomes decreasingly less arousing. Just ask any horror movie director.

So where does that leave me, college students, and people in general?

For one, SES theory can be expanded beyond a lifetime as a frame of reference. I've come to realize that, in a sort of fractal-esque behavior, observing smaller phases of one's life reveals similar trends to general aging. There is general change to greater LAP:HAP ratio relative to the initial ratio at the start of that life phase. This includes well-defined and relatively rigid life intervals such as high school and college, but also more fluid intervals such as relationships, job positions, etc. Just as with old age in a lifetime, within particular frames of reference there is a gradual decay in HAP preference, and in transitory periods there is a renewal of HAP preference.

Honestly, I feel like I'm figuring out the things that people generally figure out during a midlife crisis. In both a career and interpersonal relationships realm, I'm thinking critically about what they want at the endpoint of everything (when everything converges), rather than employing a greedy algorithm as I go through day-to-day life. When it comes to career, I've discovered that I don't need a fast-paced work environment the same way a canonical Millenial does. Similarly, the relationships I've had with people in LAP-oriented stages of their lives have deepened, while I've had a (relative) falling out with people who seem far more HAP-seeking.

Why is that exactly? For me, I think it has something to do with the nature of LAP and HAP activities. LAP activities are inherently unsexy compared to HAP activities. Independently reading books quietly with someone or brushing teeth together (without any I'm-rubbing-toothpaste-playfully-on-your-face shenanigans, ahem romcoms) is far less of a Kodak moment than is a surprise scavenger hunt or a tropical getaway vacation. The number of people I have the desire to (which often translates to patience for, as awful as that sounds) share LAP moments with is far fewer than the number of people I want to engage in HAP activities with. The causes or companies I'm willing to do mundane work for because I so completely believe in the cause or company is fewer than the number of companies who have sexy, exciting new products.

In that sense, convergent routine is incredibly counter-intuitive. What I've come to realize all too late, and what my dad failed to understand, is that the absence of the rainbows-and-butterflies of HAP is not a sign that the magic is gone. A job or a relationship is unhealthy when the only present quadrants are LAN, HAN, and HAP. Contrarily, if you can find LAP, hang on and never let go. The desire and willingness to be together even if it is "only" LAP is the magic! I wish I knew this earlier, but even so I anticipate this being invaluable going forward in my relationship and career endeavors.

To answer a question A- posed to me while in SF this weekend on my birthday, by the end of my college career I want to know the types of work and find the people with whom there's a symbiotic, mutual desire to share LAP, and then make sure they know it. In fact, if I achieve this ever, even if it takes another two decades (or eight more), I'll consider my life well-lived. But apparently from others' perspective, there's an element of the-sooner-the-better; maybe that's where my flavor of emotional maturity is pushing me. I was watching a video from a friend of mine, and in S-'s words as she saw how I was reacting: "There are some people who you see the way they respond to kids and you think 'You need to have children right now.' You're one of them. They'd make you so happy." While I've certainly entertained thoughts like 'what kind of father do I want to be?', a more generalized interpretation of S-'s statement is consistent with something I've realized: that I can comfortably join in on conversations about marriage with my late-20s through mid-30s coworkers and project forward my imagination and empathize with a parent delighting in his toddler to the point that a statement like S-'s would be made means I've been incredibly lucky to have had the people and environments, for better or worse, in my life that's led to the relative clarity I [seem to] have about my life.

The key words of the previous paragraph is, as the boldface suggests, making sure they (people, job) knows that they occupy a place in your life of such depth and importance. Unlike HAP, the inherently mundane, routine, unsexy nature of LAP means that is not a beacon that broadcasts easily detectable emotions. If you look at the circumplex, which emotion is easier to detect, serene or excited? Clearly excited, but serene is more positive! The detectability of positive (and negative) emotions isn't necessarily correlated with their magnitude of positivity (and negativity)!

For two entities to realize their willingness, even eagerness to share LAP activities together, that requires taking a pretty big risk to say so and even more effort to make sure the true weight of it is heard. There certainly isn't a guarantee that the risk and effort will pay off--chances are, it won't. In every realm, be it family, or career, or friendship, or romance, for every person with a wild success story there must be dozens more with only-partial successes, but even then it's a success! Intent matters! When it comes down to it, the risk and effort pales in comparison to guaranteed failure. Don't be left with the pain of thinking it, meaning it with all your heart, and never truly showing it, because you might not get another chance to, and it won't matter how much you continue to mean it with all your heart. That shit hurts.

Still have work to do on empathy

Disclaimer: I took a couple shots so I'm a little past tipsy. Didn't really help me not feel terrible.

Last night there was a huge wasp flying around the house, and after a while, my housemates and I got fed up with it and they told me I should go handle it. I took a paper cup and caught it against the floor, and intended to bring it outside without killing it (the usual procedure for spiders, other pests, etcetc). However, I was exhausted and ended up going to bed and forgetting to bring it outside, and so it stayed there under the cup.

When I got up this morning, I saw the cup a couple of times passing by, but had various other things on my mind (how desperately I needed to use the restroom, going out for a run, laundry) and I didn't get around to taking care of the bug situation and bringing it outside. As I was getting ready for bed (now 22 or so hours after I first caught it in the cup) I realized it was still there and went to go bring it outside. By this time, it was already dead.

I feel like shit. Of all of the ways I could handle the bug, mine was the most cruel. I subjected it to the bug equivalent of death by starvation or something. Just killing it flat out, which I try not to do on moral grounds, would've been more humane. How can I claim to excel at empathy when my brain lets by acts of cruelty like this without thinking twice (albeit for a bug)? It makes me wonder to what extent what I've considered a high level of empathy is actually true empathy, or just a better, cognitive and conscious understanding of which emotions are evoked given certain stimuli. I hope it's true empathy. I feel like shit.

Loneliness

A couple days ago, someone posed the question: "Are ENFJs lonely?"

Just the very existence of that question makes me realize that I am lot more lonely than I try to let myself feel.  Of course, you could argue that you aren't lonely if you don't let yourself feel lonely, but I don't think that's how it works.

This response to that question was by far one of the best-articulated self-reflection I've seen from anyone:

At a certain point every ENFJ stops, and wonders, and becomes deeply saddened by the realization that they are trying to be the one selfless person for everyone in their life, and that maybe there never will be somebody to give that genuine selfless impulsive love to them. We dont boast unless people allow us the moment to, but we recognize the love we give, we know how much effort we put into it, our dream is to see somebody have that passion for us. Im kinda sad thinking about it now to be honest. It feels a bit like martyrdom. We will never ask for this, we simply dream of a day where this amazing dreamperson waltzes into our lives like we do other people. 

Yes, we wholeheartedly and to our very core, appreciate people. It is our love, acceptance and appreciation for other HUMAN BEINGS that drives us to be givers. Because... Encompassing ENFJ Quote Incoming: "Everybody deserves it."

There are only a few people who we will truly open up to, and whether we choose you or not is not personal at all. We simply know who have the capacity to understand the complex love-melancholy duality we share with life. We like many NFs, have the desire to be understood. 

Yes, we feel lonely, its a strange detached lonely... let me explain. We will be there for a lonely friend, and at the end of the day we feel less lonely because that person is less lonely. In the big picture the world just became less lonely and thus we feel as such. In reality we did nothing for ourselves to actually deal with our own loneliness, we know this, but somehow we are still content. Understanding this rationale is difficult even for us.

I wholeheartedly agree with just about all of it. I don't think the first paragraph quite does justice to non-ENFJs (I absolutely think other types can be selfless too), but other than that, I am awestruck at how much I relate to this raw piece of writing.

Even though I feel like I have many people to surround myself with, my feelings of loneliness become magnified in social situations because the quality of interpersonal interactions become reduced. I thrive on intimate, one-on-one relationships. My emotional sustenance comes from empathizing with other people, not merely talking to or being in close physical proximity of others. I can feel closer to someone quietly minding my own business in a serene, peaceful room meters apart than grinding up against someone at a dance or party.

I'll have to chew this over in my head more, but I've definitely felt just so distant to so many people recently. Of the maybe 5 or so people I feel closest to right now, only one of them are among the 5 people I felt closest to at the start of the quarter.

Every day

Pretty much every day.

Something not very everyday happened to me today, and I want to be sure I don't forget it. I can't remember the last time something made me smile so hard.

For three weeks, D- has been trying to talk to me. All I knew was that it was on an awkward conversation topic, so admittedly I hadn't exactly been actively trying to have that conversation with her. She finally caught me after school yesterday.

I've been acquainted with D- since 8th grade, but would actually have considered us friends only starting last year. She changed a lot in those 3ish years, becoming a lot more cynical and dubious, far less trusting and sunny and bubbly. Over the past year, she's said a lot of things that have stung quite a bit, but it made me kind of really determined to crack her shell. Especially one email she'd sent me that really struck me, in which she scathingly berated me for being too idealistic, having my head stuck in the clouds, and naive.

Today, the conversation actually happened. By happened I mean D-'s friend who knew what's up pretty much dragged her to me and was like GO TALK and she had no choice. There were a few other people tagging along that didn't know what was going on so we left them for a remote staircase away from all other life forms.

I realized over the course of the conversation that I'm absolutely horrible at accepting gratitude? Not really the right phrasing, but I dunno I'm horrible at taking compliments or the like. I found it prudent to poke fun at D- while she was telling me everything and I'm pretty sure I came across as rude and insensitive, because it was pretty easy to tell that the conversation was difficult for her. In fact, she gave me a nice long hug, which is totally out of character for her, and I was totally taken aback. I just ended up quoting Sheldon, in all his awkward glory: "there there." Go me...

The gist of the conversation was about how she was sorry for being really bitchy to me in the past few months to a yearish, and how she's going to miss me once I graduate because there's nobody in her class like me. This made me feel so wonderful asdj;foiaw;eo. She also used a funny metaphor about how there'll be a "big larry-shaped hole" in her life, which of course I haaaad to point the oxymoron and I think I embarrassed her more UGH and I don't think she thought I was taking her seriously.

I realized that despite our love-hate relationship and all our jibes at each other, D-'s among the people I'm going to miss most once I graduate. And it's sad, because a lot of the people in my grade I've had classes with for nearing 7 years now, and I'm not going to miss them nearly as much.

I also feel privileged. Maybe that's just me being self-centered, but I feel like I got to glimpse a side of D- that she doesn't show to many people (or anyone?). If we didn't have that conversation, I'd be pretty damn convinced she's just cynical of everything and everyone (goes back to that email), but now I feel rather victorious. I've heard things from her friends about how she was like years ago, but the years haven't seen to have done her faith in humanity any good. I'm so glad I didn't graduate with a misconstrued impression of who she is.

Speaking of everyday activities, I like this quote. I used a similar notion in one of my college essays, and it really resonates with what I value in a relationship, romantic or platonic.

[Re]Open Your Eyes

For the past 5 days, I was in Salt Lake City for the 2012 International Career Development Conference for DECA, competing in Accounting Applications. As far as the competition goes, nothing too exciting happened. I made it to the finals (Top 16) but performed poorly on the final role play. We saw the Jabbawockeez perform live, though I believe it was their B team; still really cool nonetheless, especially the Kiss the Girl and Single Ladies segments.

The more memorable part was definitely the experience shared with the people there. I got to know a few students with whom I've been classmates with for 7 years now way better, and I'm glad I got to see this side of them before graduating with any misconceptions about them as people. Not really misconceptions--they still are who they are when they behave as they do at school--but just another side of them, a sensitive side that they try to hide.

In the meantime, I also bonded a lot more with people I hadn't known until this year. I kind of wish I learned more about them, and I feel like I kind of dominated the conversation perhaps, getting carried away with things and people in my life. Hopefully, I don't come across at self-centered. Even more hopefully, we'll still keep in touch after I graduate, because if in just 8 short months they've become among the close friends who I trust the most, who knows what could happen with years more? There's no doubt in my mind that I'll miss two of these albeit relatively new friends of mine way more than others I have known for about half my conscious life.

I was thinking about what made me click with them. What made me so comfortable sharing some of the thoughts I usually tuck away for personal introspection? I don't really know. For sure, it seems that I can really connect with people like me. Not to let my life be dominated by MBTI or anything, but of the 6 people I trust most, 4 are ENFJs (the other three are ENTP, ISTJ).

Furthermore, it seems that at some point, we always have a conversation about my past. It can be really embarrassing depending on the details we delve into, but it always leaves me rather melancholy. Yet, I enjoy talking about it a lot. Why? I'm not a masochist in any way.

This is where this post was going. The phrase "open your eyes" is used almost to the point of cliched-ness. But talking to new people about my past--people with some level of maturity, open-mindedness, and capacity for empathy anyway--reopens my eyes. There are a lot of little things in my life that I'd hate to forget, and I have a tendency to regurgitate those when I talk about what has made me me (not at the superficial level, but at a deep level that I care to talk about only when my conversational partner exhibits genuine interest or concern). I'd like to emphasize that parenthetical statement, because I have pretty high standards, I feel, about when to trust people and tell people stuff, but it's also always based on a gut feeling; I don't open up to everyone, but when I do I always do it with utmost confidence that what I tell them will not fall upon deaf ears, and will be respected. Anyway, whenever I revisit these memories with new people, I feel like I see things ever so slightly differently, but end up learning more about myself when I reflect on the conversations.

In the meantime, I read an article on a fantastic new product concept: http://www.fashioningtech.com/profiles/blogs/touchy-the-human-camera

It is literally a physical manifestation of someone else "opening your eyes." I absolutely love the whole concept, and I feel like it would really enhance social interaction or relationships (not necessarily just romantic ones). Especially for me, recalling that my dominant love language is physical touch followed closely by quality time, this is an invention I really need to have. The pictures it stores seems a perfect way to capture the little things, not the grand big things. I like that.

Failure of Empathy

Read "Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway and "Tricks" by Thomas Cooper. I enjoyed them both: I liked the hotel keeper in Cat, and I enjoyed [what I believed to be] the happy ending in Tricks.

As far as discussion went, there was a lot of focus on the woman from Cat and the girl in Tricks, both of which I thought was undue. Neither relationship issues nor mental handicaps are the focus of the respective poems. Instead, both are focused on the failure of empathy, and how detrimental it can be to relationships both romantic and familial.

An acquaintance I know asked me a while ago what I thought of people with no empathy: How do you react to them? Can you even begin to comprehend them? What are your thoughts on them?

Usually, I can see where they're coming from, but I don't really accept their mindset. Complete objectivity is almost inhumane. I can't stand it.

Personally, I've struggled communicating the basis of my choices or decisions to others. I place great emphasis on emotion in my decision-making, and often I know a choice I'm going to make far before I can justify it. I trust my gut feelings. Unfortunately, intuition is poor justification for a decision, and I have to scramble to back up my decisions with logic-based reasoning in group environments.

I have yet to decide whether intuition-oriented thinking is a boon or an inhibition.

[Repost from Tumblr]