This is pure speculation with no scientific backups whatsoever.
Such a thought has been on my mind for a while, and it pretty much applies to anyone, though what's interesting to me is when I realised that the average joe seem to be much worse at it co
pared to me, and I actually used to think that I'm really terrible at this.
One can apply this to literally anything that can somewhat be conceptualised, say you currently dislike something, in theory one should be able to just make themselves like it if circumstances makes them so, like a life or death situation, but the more observation there is the less that is the case.
One thought I have is that if one truly wants to be happy, they are going to be happy no matter what reality throws at them, but that (obviously) is not the case, in fact to most people if they were happy but you go and punch them they'll no longer be happy.
And the reason to that is because of rationality and common sense.
Being rational is perhaps the most human thing that seperates them from animals, and common sense is what makes humans as a species as social creatures understand a lot of social situations. As a result it seems as if people are mostly inherently going to actively be rational and have common sense.
But then how good are people at abandoning them?
It should also be obvious that most people are extremely capable of being delusional, but that's different from having a placebo effect, as a placebo effect can very well be put in place even when the "objective reality" is being put at your face.
So the naive conclusion to that most of the time people who are naturally less rational are able to use it more effectively than others, but only when they actually felt the need to do such a thing, even if it may ended up making them even more miserable than they already are because those are also often the people who somewhat *wants* to make themselves feel miserable, which is thwir own choice after all.
But then what about the people who are decently rational, or may even be considered as highly rational?
This is where things gets interesting to me, because most of the time they do want to be rational, being rational to them is the de facto "right thing to do", and in conjunction it makes them think with common sense.
Except common sense actually isn't common, it's only common enough so that the person can survive just fine in a social setting that they are in, that's as far as the commonality goes, anything beyond that it's hard for them to understand, because they already think that they are being rational, so as a result anything that doesn't fit within their rationality simply makes no sense to them, and that makes it so that everything else simply does not make any sense.
So we go back to the "less rational" people, and it would also appear that they hold the same sentiment as the "rationals" in that anyone else who thinks differently from them makes no sense at all. That's because even though the "less rational" people does make use of the placebo effect more, they are still keeping their core values in tact, and just as the "rationals" it is very hard for them to interact with people who thinks differently with them.
And now the question becomes, what about the people who can somewhat do that?
Or so I say, it's hard to answer this as I have yet to see anyone who is actually able to do this to any meaningful enough degree, so perhaps the better questuon would be, how much does it take for most people to abandon any of their values, even just for a moment?
This is where it gets tricky, because no matter what your position is, you are going to care about something by default even if it may have literally nothing to do with you, and for some reason people really, really dislike just throwing it away even if it may be used to accomplish more on what they do care about?
Say you wanna earn more money, for whatever reason most people only ever thinks of earning more money or spending less money, but rarely to spend money to earn more money. Like not saying that gambling isn't bad for your pocket it is going to be bad for it, but it is the idea that people rarely thinks of taking such risks that confuses me a lot, even in aspects with much less stakes in tact like gaming (without using any money) where for some reason you think it is bad to understand the opposition even though you literally said that you want to play the game by messing up the opposition, and that it isn't even a consideration.
And even if we look at the generally open minded people, for whatever reason if it conflicts with the way think about something they are unable to understand anything that the person has said to them, and it gets much worse when it abandons what happened to be the common sense.
Maybe I'm actually decent at this just because I've been subconciously understanding what other people think while I clearly know that I think most of the time people are just saying what I think is bullshit, but I guess the original question is irrelevant when people are naturally going to care more about having things in common over having differences.
Even those that claims to accept differences of others are basically them just saying "I am here to pretend that I have anything in common with you so you can feel more accepted that way" instead of "there is no way I feel what you feel but I am actively trying to understand you for the better even though I'm terrible at this".
Being with people would be more nice if people actually understands that I don't actually want to be relatable or represented and that all the times I've been trying to do this is just me giving myself the placebo effect, it did work for a decent amount of time, but it's now clear that it's since been long gone, because there appears to be nobody who is able to put in anything close to such an effort, such that they can finally understand others, by losing themselves, even just for a moment.
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