reminder to engage with society

I am generally comfortable with my role in society as one who studies it. Every now and then I am uncomfortably reminded that people do not want to know how dumb they are. Many do not think of

- conscious experience as a quantifiable manifold

- emotional experience as an analytic category

- personal identity as a trivial commodity 

- the physics of their kinesthesia

- the chemistry of their nutrition

- the informatics of their nervous and endocrinal systems

- the engineering of their social relations 

- the structure of law and governments

So, I can only tell myself, shut up about plebs as much as possible. Observe them without communication. However, I do think it is civil to engage with plebs, in as much as that is what is required for education of individuals and societies in the long run. 

friendship among fools

From 1999 to 2000, I had the misfortune to have no peers nearby. I didn't actively engage with uninteresting people as peers, I just focused on myself.

From 2001 onwards, I decided that even if there were no interesting people around me, I could socially engage with communities and individuals who might benefit from my involvement. This heuristic has guided most of my social life since - and my commercial life too, since I regard commerce as a variety of society. 

Of course, I want to get paid too, but it's called social enterprise for a reason : I need to know what makes you happy, then we can talk shop.

Every now and then, one of my friends realises that I don't actually regard them as objectively interesting, but simply as the local society that happens to be easiest to engage with. Sometimes this has interesting consequences. Most of the time, it comes to nothing, as generally people don't think so highly of themselves that they believe themselves to be objectively interesting. 

dissatisfaction and its discontents

Conscious conceptual appreciation, that others will not always do what you want, is merely the beginning of reeducation. 

Beyond this, one has to modify the subconscious expectation, whose disappointment results in conscious dissatisfaction with undesirable behaviour as a whole. 

That is to say, you will always be bothered by other people, until you expect them them to be irritating. Then they will simply be boring. And if they still bother you, it simply means you still entertain too many unmodified subconscious expectations.