here's the thing: everyone complains about late capitalism and how alienated and isolated we all are. everyone acknowledges this, and reassures each other of this, alone.

you need to get out of yourself, and your head, and your small bubble of one, and you need to go see old friends, or former friends, or people in your social circle who are just meh, or your annoying roommates, or your co-workers, or your former co-workers, or your lame family members, or your lame and bigoted family members, or strangers at a bar, or whomever, and party. meeting people is praxis, strengthening relationships is praxis, making yourself seen and vulnerable to another is praxis. please, guys, go out.

this, here, now, is a facsimile, mediated through a thousand screens. go kiss, go get kissed, go reject a kiss, go be denied a kiss. go out.

https://hexbear.net/post/242580

  • WithoutFurtherBelay
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Well, no

    If you have a resistance to going outside, it’s for a reason, and probably one a bit deeper than “just being lazy” or whatever strange Protestant work ethic reason we give for people not doing things

    It implies an actual issue that needs to be solved, then going outside spontaneously will be much easier, and there would be no resistance

    In fact, the people who are resisting are probably the ones least able to benefit from this post- The ones that actually benefit are those who would have made plans, but forgot to. Those people likely wouldn’t have much resistance at all to it.

    People who are resistant to it are socially anxious, have some form of physical issue which makes it maybe not impossible, but likely exhausting and painful, or are simply introverted and find social interaction extremely costly, even if fulfilling.

    You can’t “just bootstraps” any of those things. In fact, I think our tendency to respond to these issues by simply telling people to “just bootstraps” is deeply simplistic and harmful. Why do we make strange, unhinged rants, telling people to do things they likely already want to do, when we could be asking what stops them, and helping them with that? Why do we assume others are fundamentally different from us or merely didn’t consider the possibility that we are doing the superior thing, rather than wanting the same things as us and meeting obstacles?

    If we can’t overcome that attitude, how can we trust any analysis or beliefs we have about the rest of the material world? Why do we abandon the social perspective the moment it challenges our already ingrained beliefs about personal success and hard work?