| 
Let me first say that I've read your entire post. Let me also say that I am pleasantly surprised at your honesty and acute observational skills, especially of yourself.
I relate to mostly everything you have said. I have always sought to be socially close to people the way I feel it should be yet have never been able to compromise my morality to achieve this. As a result, I have entered various different social organizations similar to you, yet drifted eventually out of it and even whilst in it, I never fully felt secure in my position.
Although one difference between me and you is that I have experienced being "the popular one". I had certain abilities such as the ability to dance and was also attractive when I was younger so when I joined a dance group at the age of 14 I became quite popular within it, even though I was entirely rejected in my own high school.
I believe the important question that you must be trying to solve is, what differentiates you from those around you. In essence, why does it seem that others do not share the apparent social dysfunctions that you do.
When you express your concerns to people, they will tell you that everyone is like that (including themselves) and that they also feel out of place most of the time. However, they are not like you, and you feel this because all such conversations are temporary and afterwards they fit in and you don't.
And the inherent difference, I would theorize, is this:
Guilt is the most powerful destructive force in human psychology. At its extreme, people will kill others or even themselves to avoid feeling guilty. This concept of guilt is important because it relates to ninety-nine out of one hundred people that you will encounter.
A majority of the people that exist on this planet exist in a state of dual personality. They have their sub-conscious personality, and then they have their conscious personality. Typically (and erroneously), their conscious personality is quite different than their sub-conscious personality and this contradiction can be observed and "felt" through tiny personality traits.
It's important to understand this concept without blurring it with an attempt to deconstruct every person you think of. This is because it is hard to imagine most people feeling guilty, yet we are all capable of it as children hence those that seem less likely to feel guilty are probably more representative of this dual personality phenomena than others.
But, in a general sense, let us conclude that every person with this dual personality has been made to feel unreasonably guilty for some reason in their past. They either did not understand why and could not receive clarification, or felt it was unfair and could not fight back (both of which are almost the same thing).
When this state occurs (typically as children by their parents) the person, like a rape or abuse victim, reaches a threshold of "abuse" they can suffer. They then begin to "numb" themselves to it as a method of survival. This is the initial stage of the creation of a new conscious personality.
If you think about it for a moment, you can easily see how if this continued on a prolonged basis any such individual would begin to interact with the world using this new personality more than the internal one.
Over time, the internal one in essence does not evolve. It stays in a retarded childlike state yet the conscious mind continues to grow and condition itself with habits, thereby creating this shallow personality.
Now we briefly comment on the relationship between the sub-conscious and the conscious mind: The sub-conscious works as a backend processing server for the conscious mind, which is the front-end. In essence, the conscious mind is supposed to feed information to the sub-conscious, and the sub-conscious is supposed to process this data and return the correct result to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is almost always completely unaware of the processing method.
YET, it is the conscious mind (over time) that develops the computing ability of the sub-conscious. Similar to habits such as playing basketball, one consciously tries to aim better and better using various techniques. After a prolonged period of time (and as any skilful sports person will admit) they no longer think about the shot but just shoot. In fact, involving the conscious mind actually detracts from the accuracy of the sub-conscious. Most often, once the sub-conscious is programmed it is better to not think consciously and just let the sub-conscious cope with it.
Hence, the sub-conscious is a highly valuable commodity. Without it, we are restricted to processing in the conscious realm which is infinitely less efficient and also linear.
So, if we come back to our dual personality people we see that their sub-conscious mind is no longer being programmed by the conscious mind. It shut off long ago due to an overdose of guilt and as a result it stays in a seemingly suspended state. Hence, any conversations or interactions with such people result in what you perceive to be "shallow", for they are using their conscious pesonality while you are using both your sub-conscious and conscious. They, therefore, have very little depth.
Yet, on occasion you may discuss some topic that relates to the individual where their conscious personality is in line with their sub-conscious. On these rare occasions the person will almost suddenly have immense depth and even passion in their speech. They will be able to think in a non-linear way and begin to grasp ideas quickly and efficiently. However, these instances are usually short lived and temporary as it is a small crevice of unison in a grand chasm of miss-aligned thought patterns.
Sometimes, it can be hoped that such an outburst can cause intrigue within the dual personality individual themselves and they may seek to find out why it is that their passions are not always firing, and why they don't always think so clearly.
You would be a person who through luck or will, chose to keep your sub-conscious in line with your conscious mind. This means that given whatever abuses others placed on you, you were capable of rejecting them through logic or simply ignoring them and therefore were able to keep your "gears" churning together.
Gears are a good metaphor for this explanation. At a young age when the gears are still weak if someone throws a wrench in it they will seperate and so the thought patterns that connected the sub-conscious and conscious minds are disjointed. And rather than work to remove the wrench they simply let the deeper gears run out of tune, whilst the shallow gears kept turning. And people are less able to throw wrenches into a simple gear system with no depth.
So, the solution for most of these people is to deconstruct and find the original wrenches, work their way out of it (which will be no easier now than it was in the past) and then slowly re-align their gears so they work in tune.
This metaphor relates to relationships too. If two individuals meet, their gears attempt to merge together as they think and discuss together. If one person has shallow gears and the other has shallow and deep gears working in tune, the conversation will always be unstatisfying for the person who is in tune for their sub-conscious is not learning or evolving in any way.
I would say that these explanations adequately explain your alienation from your environment and provide you a new way of observing those you interact with to not only avoid judging those that cannot think as deeply as you, but also to find those that do. Your problem is not re-capturing youth but an unfulfilled timeline of life behind you. And the solution, I suppose, would be to fulfill yourself as much in the present and future.
"Hating everyone protects me from elitism."
|
