Are we sure it's not about me?
Know out why old people talk like that, in one-sentence aphorisms, "There's more fish in the sea," or "In a hundred years, who'll know?" As you get decades of adult experience behind you, you begin to see very large patterns, to get the feel of the statistical likelihood of certain kinds of events, from the simple weight of several hundred thousand examples. The problem with these realizations is that you are generalizing over so many events, that when you try to verbalize it, you have to go more and more general so that it becomes almost meaningless, a blah rule of thumb.
I've gotten in the habit of asking people on their birthday, "So, from this lofty vantage point in your life, what wisdom can you give me? Any sage advice?" You get lots of that kind of terribly general summing up sentence this way. Well, there was that one guy whose advice was, "Don't break your neck!" He meant literally, he himself having cracked a cervical vertebra, to be careful about your neck.
I have one: It's Not About Me.
It isn't. As a rule of thumb, when I am about to get personally butthurt about something, when I am feeling particularly pleased with myself because of something someone said or did, if I step back from it, it occurs to me that it ain't about me 95+ percent of the time. The offender is not trying to hurt me, he is wound up in whatever craziness in is his head, because what's in his head is way more important to him than I am, or than my feelings are. Similarly, when people compliment me, it can be for a dozen(1) reasons, many of which are not truly about The Reality of My Wonderfulness. Well, drat.
Even worse, It Is Not About Me In A Cosmic Sense. It's the sister of "In a hundred years, who'll know?" From a few light years out, heck, from a few feet out, nothing is about an individual. Not how he or she voted, how well they treated their family, whether they missed the bus that day sd they took the car, and got in a wreck that broke their neck and led to a year of rehab, job loss, and a spouse who no longer cares. It was a series of things that happened; they just happened to that one person. Not a cosmic tragedy or triumph, just a series of events.
A few days ago some nut with an AR-15 opened up in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Killed 49 people; shot em dead. It was a stupid preventable event, sure. The families of the dead are suffering, sure. But it has no cosmic significance, and no long term effects. No one is going to ban assault rifles for this, but say they did - at some future point all the people who have ever or will ever live will be dead, some by bullets, but all dead. If a ban changes the mix of how many died from bullets, they all still die, and some will have died horribly and sloooowly from cancer at 47 because they did not briefly bleed out from a lunatic's shooting spree at 23. I'm not being morbid here, I am stepping back one step, then another, and the view changes as you retreat.
In general, the individual is not important, and the camera focus, having to choose among so many focal lengths, so many possible things to capture, arbitrarily picks the "important" parts. How about this reformulation:
There Are No Privileged Points of View
This removes me, thee, anyone who got killed by loonies with guns, from the equation, as well as any emo implications about meaning that drag us into a scene from Camus about shooting an Arab on the beach. It sounds vaguely science-y, too.
It also sounds less like those cross-stitch-style sayings such as "In a hundred years, who'll know."
(1) Such as genuinely noting something about me that pleases them, and mentioning it; or trying to make a connection; or reflexively complimenting people because that's what nice people do; because the other person is higher status; because the compliment-giver wants a favor from the compliment-ee; because the complimenter feels a long-term need for the cooperation of the compliment-ee, and thinks the odd compliment will keep them on their side; trying to gain the other person's trust; because they think the other person is vain, and compliments are what they crave most; because they wish they had that characteristic, so they notice it in others, etc., etc., etc.
I've gotten in the habit of asking people on their birthday, "So, from this lofty vantage point in your life, what wisdom can you give me? Any sage advice?" You get lots of that kind of terribly general summing up sentence this way. Well, there was that one guy whose advice was, "Don't break your neck!" He meant literally, he himself having cracked a cervical vertebra, to be careful about your neck.
I have one: It's Not About Me.
It isn't. As a rule of thumb, when I am about to get personally butthurt about something, when I am feeling particularly pleased with myself because of something someone said or did, if I step back from it, it occurs to me that it ain't about me 95+ percent of the time. The offender is not trying to hurt me, he is wound up in whatever craziness in is his head, because what's in his head is way more important to him than I am, or than my feelings are. Similarly, when people compliment me, it can be for a dozen(1) reasons, many of which are not truly about The Reality of My Wonderfulness. Well, drat.
Even worse, It Is Not About Me In A Cosmic Sense. It's the sister of "In a hundred years, who'll know?" From a few light years out, heck, from a few feet out, nothing is about an individual. Not how he or she voted, how well they treated their family, whether they missed the bus that day sd they took the car, and got in a wreck that broke their neck and led to a year of rehab, job loss, and a spouse who no longer cares. It was a series of things that happened; they just happened to that one person. Not a cosmic tragedy or triumph, just a series of events.
A few days ago some nut with an AR-15 opened up in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Killed 49 people; shot em dead. It was a stupid preventable event, sure. The families of the dead are suffering, sure. But it has no cosmic significance, and no long term effects. No one is going to ban assault rifles for this, but say they did - at some future point all the people who have ever or will ever live will be dead, some by bullets, but all dead. If a ban changes the mix of how many died from bullets, they all still die, and some will have died horribly and sloooowly from cancer at 47 because they did not briefly bleed out from a lunatic's shooting spree at 23. I'm not being morbid here, I am stepping back one step, then another, and the view changes as you retreat.
In general, the individual is not important, and the camera focus, having to choose among so many focal lengths, so many possible things to capture, arbitrarily picks the "important" parts. How about this reformulation:
There Are No Privileged Points of View
This removes me, thee, anyone who got killed by loonies with guns, from the equation, as well as any emo implications about meaning that drag us into a scene from Camus about shooting an Arab on the beach. It sounds vaguely science-y, too.
It also sounds less like those cross-stitch-style sayings such as "In a hundred years, who'll know."
(1) Such as genuinely noting something about me that pleases them, and mentioning it; or trying to make a connection; or reflexively complimenting people because that's what nice people do; because the other person is higher status; because the compliment-giver wants a favor from the compliment-ee; because the complimenter feels a long-term need for the cooperation of the compliment-ee, and thinks the odd compliment will keep them on their side; trying to gain the other person's trust; because they think the other person is vain, and compliments are what they crave most; because they wish they had that characteristic, so they notice it in others, etc., etc., etc.