Highly specific question, I know.
When people compliment me, I genuinely don’t know what to do. It feels like they’ve given me a physical object, and I’m just standing there holding it awkwardly, but I don’t know what to do with it.
Complements and praise does nothing for me emotionally, so I just say “thank you”; in the same way you thank a kid that handed you a rock they found on the ground.
Like, I appreciate the sentiment — as in, I know they’re trying to be nice or something, so it doesn’t bother me. It’s just one of many small things that makes social stuff a bit harder. For example, I probably don’t give out any complements to other people, because it doesn’t occur to me as an important thing to do. I’m sure this has many effects in my life I’m not aware of.
Yeah exactly. It really confuses me, and a lot of the time they want something from me.
Like salesmen or “complement sandwich” or buttering me up for a favour or trying to manipulate. It happens a lot where someone is extremely confused why I refuse to buy something or do a favour, just because they complemented me. And then I’m confused about what they want from me, and only realise it later when I ask my friendly neighbourhood neurotypical for an explanation. I’m basically immune to salespeople by accident though which is helpful. I have the nickname “The Car Paladin” among friends and family because every time I interact with a car salesman it’s apparently hilarious. Akin to the DnD paladin memes.
But also sometimes I think people are just trying to be nice. It still doesn’t land for me regardless, but I believe at least some of the time it’s genuine. I struggle to tell the difference though, but I’m the type to try to believe the best in people.
It’s funny you mention gift giving actually, because that’s how I interpret it. People keep gifting me something that doesn’t run on my operating system, so I thank them for the gesture haha. I treat gift giving as a game, trying to guess what they like. I’m either extremely bad at it and people hate my gift, or it’s like the best gift they’ve ever gotten, with no inbetween. But I don’t take it too personally, to me it’s just an interesting game I don’t understand the rules to.
[… worth noting, what may be colouring my comments here, is that I’ve been watching a lot of videos on narcissism and dark tetrads etc recently]
Reminds me of advertising or marketing… how there’s being enticed by the psyop front label and its [whatever] advertising lies [they can get away with], and there’s the rudimentary detective work of looking at the ingredients. … And how there’s a similar thing going on with people, and there have been too many fakes and lies poisoning the trust and choking the flow between all people. … And people do not come with ingredients lists.
I sometimes wonder (in my more wide-open daydreaming ponderings) if many of us are “future born” [<- a silly term, means like we’re souls from the future, or had our past lives in the future, or something like that, and came back], to seed satya yuga with our honesty paradigm and such… and that’s why it feels so out of place for so many of us, back here in kali yuga, where people are ignorant, and they lie, and cheat, and are inauthentic and manipulative, and even kill to maintain their delusions.
… Heh, sorry, that’s a somewhat dark place to have taken this to… it was just about difficulty knowing how to handle praise… now there are killers!? XD
… But such is the paranoia(?) from having been burned too many times. Like you say, many are likely well meaning, but still the gift/praise fails to land well. I hear there are cultures that sway more one way or another on this… Some heap the praise on, as a cultural expectaion, even to deranged levels, even totalitarianised in many characteristics. Some see praise like charm. And “charm is lube for evil” [-- Roisin Connaty].
… My distrust of gifts goes way back, always getting the inferior gifts to my brother’s gifts, seeing how a narcissistic mother would use gifts to praise her golden child, punish her little truth teller (me), and feign total benevolence and innocence, and do all kinds of deflections and red-herrings, and love-bombing hoovering distractions, gaslighting, darvo, devaluing, and on and on manipulation upon manipulation.
[So that’s likely lending to the weight and leanings I have on the matter too, aside from the content I’ve been watching recently]
That’s super interesting, I don’t know much about Hinduism so it was cool to Google those terms and see what they mean. Bummer that things don’t get better for another 426,873 years, though. I was hoping to see improvements in my lifetime.
I have noticed a dark trend in society lately. People are masking up and withdrawing inwards, and judging each other more harshly, and good deeds are rarer than ever. I even noticed it in myself; when a stranger asks for help, the first thing I do is check if it’s a trick or trap to prey on my goodwill. It’s unfortunately necessary nowadays.
I have also noticed that the newest generation of young kids are quite cynical already (~8 year olds). They’re keenly aware of the way society works and make fun of it, but pretend to play along. Hopefully they’re able to change things to be more honest again.
Oh it’s not all or nothing. Lots of improvements in our lifetime. Many a different interpretation of timings exist, with many a mistranslation of duration measurements confound interpretations. But still… it’s not a spectator sport. If we merely watch, we let the tragedies of the commons fall foul of deceivers’ exacerbated races to the bottom into worsening kakistarchy. Like the Chicago experiment showed, meditators can really shift the goodness meter. [… Goodness meter? LOL. That’d be a better metric than the already-wrong-then-corrupted GDP meter.]
Much bystander effect to overcome, in the vast population densities. Especially in this [fake] economy that holds us all under duress of manufactured scarcities, and disempowers us to keep us separately dependent upon the centralised hoard of illegitimate power and wealth. Very impressive when one finds ways to not let the parasites turn one into a parasite too, despite these pressures. Higher wisdom beckons us out of the desperate shortloop that’s contributing to the degeneracy that worsens these pressures. Some see the only way out as accelerating the worsening of the situation, to get it so bad it has to bounce to something better. Risky. I’d rather mend, than to break worse faster in faith someone else will clean up the externality. It’s a fine narrow path, to retain the prudence in danger, and not succumb to habituating there.
That’s quite encouraging in several ways. The line I’ve heard attributed to Aristotle, something like “show me the child of 7 years old and I shall show you the man”, springs to mind. If they’ve [all, or just majority] already got it, … good sign for one of those fractal iterations of satya yuga. “Darkest before the dawn” done enough, we see the arc change better? Remains to be seen, how well the insight of youth survives and persists through the residual pressures of the psychopathic circle-jerk that malformed civilisation.
… And many more ponderings about the psychology, the sociology, the availability of information, of energy, and their censorship and suppression, and agnotological awareness able to increase despite the agnotological abuses… but, I’ll curtail my verbosity here. :)