view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
What waste of time? Are we not just discussing here? Is that what you would've said to me if we were talking face to face?
Yes, depending on the tone, I would either confront the perceived slight or avoid talking to you all together.
The last bit about the post, no, I would not say that out loud but would internalize that the group I am in has incompatible abstractive thinking scope for such a casual conceptual subject of interest to me.
So what you're really asking is. Do I have the capability of looking back at the person that I was 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago and empathising with who I was as being a different person at an abstract level?
Yes, but it is likely far less pronounced if you've had a reasonably stable life.
I've had the experience of relocating thousands of miles away multiple times in my life, halved my weight, abandoned the dogmatic tribal mythos of my birth, and have been disabled from a broken neck and back due to the gross ineptitude of a terrible driver. That last one forced me to completely reinvent myself.
One of the hardest relevant experiences was relocating long distance then returning some years later. Nothing will be the same upon return. It will feel just as foreign as moving away to the new place did. Such an experience reveals just how much we all evolve with time and how we are a product of our environment.
Something as simple as living on a hilltop versus on a flat floodplain may have a major impact on how you exercise regularly, and that may shape or come to define you in profound ways. Such changes are essentially a different person. Your hormones, interactions, mood, interests, and sleep patterns are collectively what defines you on a fundamental layer.
That person may have made regretful mistakes. Those mistakes may be very different than who you have become and how you might handle them now. The question here in this post is really about how you perceive those regrets or mistakes now. Are they just a regrettable weight on you, perhaps motivational through the negative feedback of self shame? Or, are you empathetic towards that person, trusting that they did their best at the time, in the environment, given the same pressures and constraints; acknowledging the complexities involved well enough to admit you do not know you would be able to do things better now, even after age and experience? In other words, do you see past the fallacy of dichotomous oversimplification of hindsight to see yourself as a real human? There is room for empathy in that reflective abstract perspective.