this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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For me, I came to terms with this by learning more about human nature and behavior and realizing that, in essence, we're incredibly flawed beings with only a minimum of accidental rationality. That it's absolutely not natural for us to "make sense" in a logical way, that truth doesn't matter to us, that we are all incredibly selfish.
And that working against this nature to a "better" (in quotation marks on purpose, who really knows what's better) state of mind and behavior requires massive amounts of dedication, conviction and constant effort, which most people simply don't understand or can't be bothered to do.
That humans/I have a natural desire within them/me to band together for survival purposes. This includes loyalty to family and feeling bad about being estranged to them.
That our emotions are just motivators making us do things that were/are useful for survival.
That we also have a great capacity for adaptation, which also helped us to survive.
And finally, to put it all together, that I can use my skills of adaptation to change my feelings about things after understanding them and deeming them not beneficial to me. So in other words, I use mindfulness techniques, my natural propensity for rationalizations, training/practice through repetition, my selfishness, etc, etc, to change my behavior/thoughts/feelings to a state I'd like to be in.
This is imo only possible with serious study of all these interactions and years of reprogramming yourself, which you have to decide how worth it is for you. In my opinion, it's ultimately worth it for everyone, because I went from a state of deep unhappiness to a state of deep happiness/content, which is a massive quality of life improvement.
However, I also realize that because of all of this, I myself could just be talking bullshit and be just as or even more flawed than anyone else, so you can probably safely disregard any advice I give or things I say :D
Edit: oh yeah, and to give a superficial answer: fuck family/people, stupid people are not worth having around and making your life worse just because of some arbitrary tradition/feeling of loyalty/peer pressure. My dad is nowhere as bad as yours and I still don't really care about interacting with him, and I like it that way.
Thank you very much, this helps a lot.
Very well said, and the story sounds very familiar. Mindfulness and reprogramming yourself to essentially react with positivity rather than negativity is a good way to describe what worked for me too.
And if that sounds like a good approach to anybody else, I found a lot that stuck with me in the philosophy of stoics and buddhists.
To be in control of your state of mind โ by working with your brain and body and not against it btw โ is to be in control of your quality of life, within reason.