“The battle between listening to your own body’s needs versus letting technology tell you what your body needs has begun. Call me a Luddite, but I side with your inner voice. When was the last time you wrote in a journal—dear diary—how you felt physically (energy levels), what you ate and your mood two-three hours later; or what you did for exercise (walking included) and used complete sentences? It sounds cheesy, but I’m serious. You owe it to yourself. Tracking calories from your Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup addiction in a food app is not going to solve your problems. Reflecting on how groggy you felt after eating the sugar bomb will.â€
An interesting counterpoint to Federico Viticci’s experience with using his iPhone to get back in shape after cancer. I’m trying to drop another 30 pounds, and it’s hard. Calorie tracking got me from 230 to 200, so there’s something to it, but these new tools are still blunt. It would be great to get a better sense of how what I eat and how I move affects me, and I’m terrible at reading myself. My inner voice is the one that says “eat the pudding.”
I do think we’ll get there, eventually, but we shouldn’t lose sight that people managed to get into shape, drop pounds, and be healthy long before we had iPhones and fitness trackers.
Our reluctance to have an honest and open conversation about the flaws of celebrities we love stems from a simple fact: we see ourselves in them. If your favorite smart, talented, successful celebrity can be classist, sexist or racist then what does that say about you? Well, it says that you can be classist, sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic.
But you can and you are at least some of these things sometimes. So am I. Own it. Learn from it. It’s not an attack, it’s the truth. Nobody is a perfect example of civil rights virtue. If you aren’t screwing up, you aren’t trying.
Nobody likes to learn uncomfortable truths about themselves, let alone the people they admire, but it’s the only way we can learn. How can you expect to do better by others, and even by yourself, when you don’t know when you’re causing harm? Try to drop the defensiveness, and cross the empathy gap.
There’s a theory that people with autism don’t lack empathy, but have an excess of it. The social symptoms are parts of the brain shutting down to protect itself from being overwhelmed by emotion. As a theory, it’s interesting to think about, and as someone on the spectrum, who is fully aware of the intensity of emotions that can wash over him in response to someone’s stories of pain, it rings true.
In the early days of the Internet, much noise was made and much ink was spilled about how connecting the planet together would usher in a utopia of understanding. The barriers to understanding between peoples would fall, the lines on the map between countries would be revealed imaginary, and peace would rule the land. You still see a shade or two of this rhetoric in the high-minded idealist language in tech company press releases, but most of us see through it.
As we move deeper into the Social Media age, where all people (who can afford it) are connected at all times, the great promise of universal understanding and empathy looks to be further and further from reality. I don’t need to unspool a litany of the horrors, especially haven written about them here before. There’s been a plenty of attempts to rationalize the horrors of what goes on, the most infamous being John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, better known in polite society as the Online Disinhibition Effect.
I wonder if it’s possibly that over a certain limit, perhaps Dunbar’s Number, the human capacity not only for stable relationships, but for empathy, decreases. The human mind is a hodgepodge of cognitive shortcuts that make it easy for us—all of us—to lump people into categories of who deserves, or doesn’t, our empathy and understanding. I can only speak for myself, with no research to draw on [1], but I know it’s incredibly difficult for me to empathize with a person who has ended up in the category I’ll call my “shit list.” It’s true that nobody thinks they’re stupid, and everybody has their reasons. That doesn’t mean that I understand. My inability to do so, or even try, for those on the outs with me, is a major shortcoming. My hope is that I share it with others, who seek to overcome.
When writing about topics like these in the past, I’ve often made the claim that it’s too early to tell, and that as we adapt to the new, connected world we live in, things will reach equilibirum. Right now, that rings hollow, as much as I agree that we’re in the prehistoric period of connected life. It rings hollow, despite seeing that the Internet and social media have created new communities of understanding on a certain scale. They’ve helped united disparate groups of the marginalized, and made them a force to be reckoned with. The push towards trans visibility, against racial police violence, and against misogyny in the technology space, they all have been enabled through technology. That’s powerful stuff.
The priorities of the companies who control the experience we have online, who mediate our interactions—even in the lightest sense—have had little incentive to work towards empathy. Twitter has been stepping up their game since the Gamergate fiasco, and I’m glad to see it even if their latest product is failing to protect users. The angle seems to be approaching these problems with a technological solution, but technology only is a dollar store, generic band-aid on a deep wound.
How do we overcome the empathy gap? Simply throwing us together in a virtual room with no rules, and no enforcers, isn’t enough. In their absence, it comes down to us to govern ourselves, and trying to cultivate empathy. It’s within the capabilities of everyone to do so, it just takes practice and work.
I would like to issue a challenge to whoever is still reading. The next time you see something pass through your Twitter stream that irks you, when you see someone else’s outrage, try to think about why someone is reacting the way they are. Don’t half-ass this. Going “Oh, they’re too sensitive and need to get some perspective” isn’t the right way to go about it. You need to actually try. You might fail, but that’s okay. Understand that something might not affect you, but it affects them. It’s not our job to question someone’s lived experience, only to try and understand. Empathy springs from this, hopefully enough to bridge the gap.
If someone can point me towards studies in the vein of the hypothesis I’m making here, send them my way. ↩
Sometimes, the words are there, but they’re not the ones considered appropriate for the situation. They’re four-letter words, or compounds and derivatives thereof, often beginning with the letter F. Those words convey emotion, important and powerful emotion. Those words are cathartic.
They don’t make for a good essay.
Right now, the four-letter invectives I’m summoning are aimed at legislation—signed into law in Indiana, and heading to the governor’s desk in Arkansas—that makes it legal for business owners to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation. More than legal—protected.
Yet, I’m still having trouble finding polite words. I don’t know why polite words are necessary right now.
I’ve not kept my own sexuality much of a secret among people I know. I came out publicly as bisexual after Tim Cook’s announcement of his homosexuality in October. If the leader of one of the biggest companies in the world can be openly gay, a schmuck like me can be openly bisexual. After all, visibility matters. There was a time, before and after I realized my sexual orientation, when I didn’t really see the point. I thought the battle had been won, and the end of the war was in sight.
Laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act are proof of why visibility matters. Would the horrible humans who drafted this legislation, who voted for it, and signed it into law had even considered assenting to it if someone they knew—a friend, a family member, their child—were gay?
I can’t speak for any of them, but I’m the the answer for some would be yes. Some people are just that hateful.
But others, I’m certain, would change their minds if they knew that someone close to them would be a victim of legalized hatred and discrimination for something they have no control over.
We have to do something. Speaking out only is the start. Boycotts are only a start.
The only thing that’ll keep this terrible nonsense, and future horrors like the (thankfully failed) Kentucky bill that offered a bounty for outing transgendered individuals, is to vote the hateful, spiteful bigots out of office, and keep new ones from being voted in. It has to happen at the state, local, and federal levels.
I have friends online and off who are of devout faith. They know who I am, and my orientation, and even if their religion doesn’t like it, they’ve treated me as I treat them—with kindness and respect. With love. If only the people in government who claim to be of faith, who claim to speak for people of faith would treat us all the same way. Maybe then we in the LGBT community wouldn’t have to exhaust ourselves in fighting to be seen as the human beings we are.
I was born in the city. I was raised in the city. God willing, I’ll die in the city, though maybe not the same city I was born in.
It’s the only way of life I’ve known. I was born and raised in Philadelphia. My childhood spent in a residential neighborhood of row houses in the Tacony neighborhood. I went to middle school and high school just north of downtown Philadelphia, and attended college in Brooklyn before returning to Philadelphia to finish my education. I lived in West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill for four years before moving back to New York in 2012, where I intend to stay. The city is in my blood.
I read paeans to the beauty, the tranquility, and the silence of rural life, but I don’t understand it. The silence scares me, unnerves me, especially since it’s never really silent out there. The wind blows and rustles the trees, the insects chatter and buzz, and when you’re used to man-made noises, grew up with them outside your window, it makes sleep difficult. At least in the city, I’m used to the noises, and can tune them out, unless it’s the damn ice cream truck.
The city is density and noise, but it’s also livelihood. It’s never wanting for something to do, even if you don’t want to do anything. It’s being able to walk to the grocery store and back—maybe with a Granny Cart—or ordering in food from almost any cuisine you can name. It’s a neighborhood bar I can walk to, and stagger home from. It’s being able to commune about the miseries of delayed subway trains without speaking a word. It’s finding the silent place, no matter where it is, and appreciating it, for you know it is transient.
Cities let you hide in plain sight. You come and you go placidly, amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there my be in being a part thereof. Whatever sins of urban living you commit today, and you will commit at least one, will be washed away overnight. When you get back on the train the next morning, nobody will even remember. It’s liberating, in a way. It’s the introvert’s dream. All the people around you are extras in the movie of your life, and you are an extra in theirs.
The city is freedom. It’s liberation. Where do the disaffected congregate? Where do the immigrants, minorities, the shunned collect? The city. They build support structures for each other, they build businesses and lives. Every city has its neighborhood whose identity is defined by the people who built a community there, where nobody else would have them. From Chinatowns to Gayborhoods, the marginalized and the different have used cities as places to lift themselves up. One of my favorite New York city memories is walking in the West Village, on my way back to the subway to go home, seeing a man in traditional Saudi garb, talking politics, and saying with the utmost sincerity: “I am an American!†He is, no question.
Living in New York intensifies the common life experience of having daily pleasures and terrible accidents coexist in close proximity. Terrible things can happen right near you, and chance determines whether your life is changed. Most of the time, incredibly, we remain safe.
You can’t forget you exist in the big city. Doing so is to risk death, or at least serious injury. It’s not so much falling down an open manhole cover, more like getting hit by a delivery guy on a bike. That’s the most danger you’ll probably be in, a large, American city’s downtown in 2015. Random horrors can occur anywhere. In the city, the infrastructure is there to deal with it quickly. The NYFP was on the scene of the explosion in three minutes flat. That’s impressive work anywhere.
I’ll never say the ruralists are wrong. It’s a big enough country, a big enough planet, that they can live in their place apart and be happy. I hope they enjoy it. For me, I thrive in city life. I live for long walks on city blocks, curious of what’s new, amazed by what’s old—yet new to me. It’s all here, in the wild, noisy, organized chaos of what I call home. The country is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
