I've noticed that it's easy to unintentionally inflict harm in emotional conversations, especially when you're upset. I'm sure there are a lot of different reasons, but one in particular that stands out is what I like to call the steel robot effect. We always keenly perceive our own vulnerability and our own emotions, but in other people it's easy to assume their actions aren't motivated by that same humanity. So we see ourselves as weak fleshy humans, and others as mighty steel robots.
There are a couple of ways that can cause issues. The first is that if you're upset at a steel robot, you won't feel particularly sensitive to that robot's emotions and are likely to go too far in your reaction. Maybe even deliberately so because you feel like you have to work harder to break through its metallic exterior. The second way is that if a steel robot is critical or angry, you won't think to question or analyse the emotions behind its actions. Presumably if a robot is mad at you it must be motivated entirely by pure robotic logic.
Now, if you put those two failures together: seeing each other as cold and invincible, reacting to actions without considering the hurt emotions underneath, and lashing out disproportionately in return against the shiny metallic visage that seems so unflinching compared to your seething internal state. And, of course, that cycle just keeps building until something gives and you suddenly realise that it wasn't a robot at all, just a child in a robot suit. And you've hurt them badly.
It is something of a guilty relief, at that point, to discover that you're both hurt. To realise that you're just people after all. But it would be a lot easier if we could avoid believing in steel robots in the first place and engage innocently, weak fleshy human to weak fleshy human.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with to-do lists. The concept is beautifully simple and they have the potential to be very effective, but they have never worked well for me in the general case. I've previously written about to-do blocks, an attempt to modify the to-do list concept to be more visual and better for project-level work. I think there are a lot of other interesting ways to modify to-do lists, and I'd like to start with the why-do list.
A why-do list is essentially the same as a to-do list, except that after each task you write why you want to do it. One failure mode of regular to-do lists is that they get clogged up with tasks you don't really want to do. It's easy to think of all the stuff you have been putting off and make that into a list, as if it will motivate you, but it usually doesn't. However, if you use such a list as a way to focus on and remind yourself of the motivation behind the task, it could be made into something useful.
Obviously there are a lot of things that could be classed as a "why", from "because it benefits my long-term goals" all the way to "because it causes a biochemical reaction in my brain that I perceive as pleasure". My instinct on that subject is to write the why that would be most appealing to you at the moment you'd be deciding whether to do it. The very abstract long-term goals may not be very motivating at the time, so reframing them as short-term feely benefits like "feeling responsible and organised" or "satisfaction at having completed it" would be more likely to work.
I've also been keeping the entries positive, rather than using whys like "so I don't starve to death alone and unloved". Those may be very motivating, but I think they would be just as likely to motivate you not to look at the list. I haven't experimented with doing any kind of conditional rewards like "if I finish this project I'll buy myself an ice cream", but those might work well in conjunction for the more motivationally challenging tasks.
Anyway, that's the why-do list. I think it might be particularly useful as a place to dump those tasks that really give you trouble, or to parlay negative, obligation-laden shouldy motivations into positive ones that help you actually want to do the things on your list.
In my post about backwards verbs I noticed that many of our emotional verbs – like "inspire" or "upset" – have the person feeling the emotion as the object, rather than the subject. That is, you're not feeling the emotion about someone, rather someone else is makefeeling you. But today I found a fun opportunity to run that transformation the other way: the word should.
In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, "should" is considered a pathological word; it doesn't express anything about the actual goals or requirements motivating you to do the thing, rather it is just a judgement, or a way of inducing guilt. Instead of saying "I should work out more", CBT encourages you to turn that into something like "I want to work out more", which is a similar idea without the judgement.
But I think it would also be interesting to do some verb-reversing to it. What if, instead, you should a person? That is, you give them the feeling that there is some obligation that they aren't meeting. For example, telling someone "you should smile more" is actually you shoulding them. With this form of the verb, the person attempting to create the obligation is the subject, rather than the object. It is usually considered pretty rude to should someone.
Shoulding also provides you with an interesting framework for breaking down "I should..." type statements. After you think "I should exercise", you could follow that up with the realisation that "exercise is shoulding me". Or, perhaps more accurately, "I am shoulding myself about exercise". Separately to analysing your actual motivations for the exercise, you could also consider why this particular activity has caused shoulding.
I don't want to should you by saying you shouldn't should, but this new form of the verb has the benefit of separating your motivations from obligations so you can deal with them both individually.
An interesting idea that came to me today in a conversation: what about a search engine that queries people instead of the web? There are certain kinds of queries that you could answer better with people's opinions than with simple data. Some examples are matters of opinion, like "what is the best Frank Sinatra album?", or require a certain level of empathy or human-level understanding to answer, like "I'm feeling down, what should I do?"
When you visit the site, you'd get a people query box, as well as a live feed of current queries. Any query you have an opinion about you can click on to answer, with the caveat that questions expire after some very brief time, on the order of 15 seconds. So any answer you have needs to be brief - it's not a detailed Q&A site like Stack Overflow. When you answer a question, you can see (and rate) other people's answers which changes the order that they appear.
The experience would then be something fairly similar to a traditional search engine: enter the query, hit the button, results appear. The only difference is that instead of your query hitting a big database, it hits the collective opinions of all the other people using the site.
In some programming languages, not least of which my personal albatross of Javascript, there is a concept of a Null. Null is fascinating because it's kind of an un-value, it's not "yes", not "no", but more like "I disagree with your question". If someone asks "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?", the only correct answer is Null. Buddhism has the concept of Mu, which is a similar philosophical un-value.
But we can't stop at one Null - not at all! Because the problem is, once you have a Null, you can ask questions to which the actual answer is Null. An example: imagine a function, first, which returns the first element in a list, or Null if there is no first element. So if you pass first an empty list, you will get Null. But what if you pass it a list containing exactly one element: a Null?
Not to worry, because Javascript has undefined! So if you ask for the first element of an empty list in javascript, you get undefined. And if you ask for the first element of a list whose first element is undefined? Then you still get undefined. Oops.
One answer to this is Exceptions, which are the equivalent of when someone asks if you've stopped beating your wife, saying "don't ask me that" and bailing out of the conversation entirely. Probably a sensible response! But this is a fairly brittle approach, because your conversations can change flow unpredictably and you have to be aware of every kind of question that you can't answer.
But I think the most elegant answer of all comes from functional programming. Instead of having Nulls, they have a special Maybe value. Maybe is a way of explicitly saying "I will give you an answer, or a not-an-answer". So a Maybe Boolean is either Just True, Just False, or Nothing. So it's not meaningful to say "answer yes or no: have you stopped beating your wife?", but you could say "Maybe answer yes or no: have you stopped beating your wife?"
Why is this better? Well, unlike Javascript's ugly null and undefined values, you can have a Maybe of a Maybe. The answer to "what is the first element of an empty list?" is Nothing. The answer to "what is the first element of a list which only contains Nothing?" is Just Nothing. If you put that in a list and get the first element, it's Just Just Nothing. And so on. There's an infinite tower of Nulls, each un-answering more than the last.
I wonder if eastern philosophy has any notion of a meta-Mu?