The webs of fear we weave

I have been trying to get into bed earlier the last week or two and last night I made it into bed around midnight, before my daughter woke up for some reason or another at 2 am and it took me til about 330 to get her back to sleep. Suffice to say, it wasn't a great nights sleep. I hope tonight goes better.

I have been crawling along a bit lately and that includes on Steem where due to me travel and work schedules as well as my family responsibilities and needs on top, getting the chance to Steem has been increasingly difficult, but I have been managing. As always I try to shorten my posts in order to save everyone some time but I tend to ramble a bit and that ends up running the word count past where I initially planned.

I am not much of a list creator and I have a pretty strong belief that when it comes to learning something well to the point where one understands, lists are rarely the way to go as they end up being followed without questioning what is actually happening. These can be handy when used for troubleshooting, but not great when looking to learning concepts.

It looks like the next month or two might be pretty travel heavy as it turns out that my training sessions have inspired a couple clients to add additional training sessions and expand their integrations. This is a good sign of course, but because clients and Project Managers come to trust in the trainer as the delivery agent, they end up requesting me for their future training needs too. This isn't necessary as we have some great trainers (better than me) available, but there is a familiarity thing.

When I was still living in Australia I was walking around with a new girlfriend through a shopping center and a lot of people stopped me to say hi or waved in recognition. She found it strange that such a varied range of people and ages said hi, but I explained that these were my clients from the several companies I had worked for over the years and in a small city of a few hundred thousand, the circles are small and the chance of bumping into one another down the street is high.

Yesterday I was talking with a colleague about social groups and bullying, something that he and I have in common from childhood. The difference between us is that he sees himself as a victim of bullying, I see myself as more of a survivor or more precisely, an observer of bullying. I say "observer" as from a very young age I made the decision not to take it too personally as I knew that it had nothing to do with me, it was them who held the issues.

I think that some people might find that strange as a position as of course getting teased or hit or whatever seems a very personal attack, but I think that when observed, the behaviors bullies exhibit is a reflection of what they know, what is familiar, what comes automatically. In this way, there is a disconnection between who they are or could be and, who they are in the moment.

I think that because of this, I was able to disconnect myself from the circumstances I was in and find commonalities in behavior, patterns in the way people act under various conditions. It is probably this that allowed me to spend a lot of time with so many different kinds of people and personalities and build connections with them that might not be obvious from the outset.

How I see it is that we are all prejudiced as we all evaluate our environmental conditions on what we are familiar with and unfamiliarity gives us pause. That means that we can make a fast judgement and dismiss quickly without looking any further to see what in common there may be. I see this as a barrier to discussion, understanding and friendships to form and so I generally go a little bit further than others to dig a little deeper to see what is under the surface. We nearly all have more that unites us than separates us once we look at common desires and fears of and for this world.

The picture in this post is one I took yesterday and it wasn't so long ago that I had quite strong arachnophobia, and while I still don't like spiders, I am not overly concerned by them. Of course, the difference now is that I live in Finland and this tiny (but menacing close up) spider is harmless, whereas in Australia it might tell quite a different story.

Context matters when it comes to how we evaluate our circumstances and if one can read the patterns well enough, it might be easier to discover probabilities of whether someone or something is a threat or not. The problem comes when we do not have the sensitivity to look past the obvious and cross-reference it with what we know. For example, "spider" used to raise fear in me, but in the context of "Finland" there is no fear that rises.

I think that fear is an interesting component and very influential in our behavior, but most of us don't spend much time thinking about it, instead we spend time feeling it. I do not know the make-up of the brain structure so well but I imagine that the part of the brain that evokes fear while walking along the edge of a cliff is the same wiring that processes the fear of loss or fear of social ridicule. While one is a physical risk if falling, the others are emotional and psychological and offer nothing "real" yet affect our behaviors.

I wonder what that spider in the picture fears and whether if when it sees itself in reflection it recognizes itself as something to be feared, or am I the monster in its life?

Perhaps it comes down to perspective but I do not plan on being feared by others for my behavior. It is an interesting thing to consider online as many people and especially trolls seem to go out of their way to be feared, while not offering themselves as a target of response from behind their screens. I would say that many of them are quite weak in real life and have suffered from a lack of a sense of control over aspects of their life. Perhaps they were victims and as a response to their own inadequacies to cope, they victimize others.

I think that many people online fear being discovered, fear being found out as a fraud, fear that in real life they are not all they crack themselves up to be. Dunno.

For me as someone that writes a lot of relatively personal and reflective content with my opinions, there is a great deal of possibility to cherry pick and attack from various vectors. This is also likely why so many people are so closed when it comes to sharing as they can't take the critique and can't offer the skills they purport on-the-fly as they do not actually hold them.

Perhaps they have learned what they claim to know from a list, rather than experience.

In the webs we weave, sometimes we become the fly.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]