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I wrote hooey there because I figured that, even in our current era of lax moderation, swearing in the title is frowned upon. It really means "bull****."
When I was in elementary school, I routinely got terrible grades, even in subjects I was good at. Partly this was ADD, partly it was a motivation problem. You could say I did badly at subjects because I was good at them; I got a D in reading one year because I did almost none of the work. The teacher asked me why, and I was unconcerned. As I explained to her, the point of classes was to teach me stuff. I already knew how to read very well--the tests said I was at a high school level. So the classes (or something else) had succeeded. The grade was irrelevant, as were my frankly boring assignments. Repeat for other subjects. This drove my teacher crazy, but she couldn't budge me. I honestly forgot about it until twenty-plus years later, when we reconnected on Facebook and she told me.
Anyway, that same basic attitude has stayed with me, to some extent, my whole life. I just don't deal well with when things are bull****. And there's a lot of bull**** in the world. I see it everywhere. In school, at work, wherever I went, I could see how things were plainly not working correctly, and I could see where the problem was coming from, and so did everyone else, but nobody did anything about it because it would be too much work and everybody was accustomed to working with a broken system. My response to this, instinctively, is to throw up my hands, yell, "THIS IS BULL****!" and refuse to cooperate (to the extent I can get away with refusing to cooperate). Now, over the years, I've learned to restrain this urge, since it's self-indulgent and counterproductive. I've met plenty of people who can also see the bull****, and are also frustrated by it, but are able to master their frustration enough to counteract the ****tiness of the system in their own small way. I'd like to be one of those people, but I suspect my innate tendency will stay with me for life in the form of a penchant for cynicism, pessimism, and long meditations on Original Sin.
Of course, while my way of dealing with it is counterproductive, most real change is accomplished by people who see the bull**** and charge in to fix it regardless of the cost. Most of the time, these people fail, but if enough of them throw themselves on any given fire they will eventually put it out. Or they can organize mass movements where everybody piles on the problem at once, but that's just not a plausible strategy for aspies. The rest of the time, the problem is there, and everybody sees it, but since it would take heroic effort to fix it and being a hero hurts, everyone makes the game-theory calculation that their optimal move is to just deal with it. Which is how you get Harvey Weinstein. Sure, your boss is a rapist, and everybody knows it, but what are you going to do? He owns the papers and has many scary lawyers. And it took you so long just to work your way far enough up the hierarchy that you get the privilege of meeting your boss and watching him set up his rape meetings. Are you going to throw that all away for some quixotic effort to show yourself you did the right thing and got whomped for it? Of course not. But you will mumble, into your fourth drink of the evening, that this is bull****.
This post had a point when I started it. Anyway, how do you deal with all this bull****?
When I was in elementary school, I routinely got terrible grades, even in subjects I was good at. Partly this was ADD, partly it was a motivation problem. You could say I did badly at subjects because I was good at them; I got a D in reading one year because I did almost none of the work. The teacher asked me why, and I was unconcerned. As I explained to her, the point of classes was to teach me stuff. I already knew how to read very well--the tests said I was at a high school level. So the classes (or something else) had succeeded. The grade was irrelevant, as were my frankly boring assignments. Repeat for other subjects. This drove my teacher crazy, but she couldn't budge me. I honestly forgot about it until twenty-plus years later, when we reconnected on Facebook and she told me.
Anyway, that same basic attitude has stayed with me, to some extent, my whole life. I just don't deal well with when things are bull****. And there's a lot of bull**** in the world. I see it everywhere. In school, at work, wherever I went, I could see how things were plainly not working correctly, and I could see where the problem was coming from, and so did everyone else, but nobody did anything about it because it would be too much work and everybody was accustomed to working with a broken system. My response to this, instinctively, is to throw up my hands, yell, "THIS IS BULL****!" and refuse to cooperate (to the extent I can get away with refusing to cooperate). Now, over the years, I've learned to restrain this urge, since it's self-indulgent and counterproductive. I've met plenty of people who can also see the bull****, and are also frustrated by it, but are able to master their frustration enough to counteract the ****tiness of the system in their own small way. I'd like to be one of those people, but I suspect my innate tendency will stay with me for life in the form of a penchant for cynicism, pessimism, and long meditations on Original Sin.
Of course, while my way of dealing with it is counterproductive, most real change is accomplished by people who see the bull**** and charge in to fix it regardless of the cost. Most of the time, these people fail, but if enough of them throw themselves on any given fire they will eventually put it out. Or they can organize mass movements where everybody piles on the problem at once, but that's just not a plausible strategy for aspies. The rest of the time, the problem is there, and everybody sees it, but since it would take heroic effort to fix it and being a hero hurts, everyone makes the game-theory calculation that their optimal move is to just deal with it. Which is how you get Harvey Weinstein. Sure, your boss is a rapist, and everybody knows it, but what are you going to do? He owns the papers and has many scary lawyers. And it took you so long just to work your way far enough up the hierarchy that you get the privilege of meeting your boss and watching him set up his rape meetings. Are you going to throw that all away for some quixotic effort to show yourself you did the right thing and got whomped for it? Of course not. But you will mumble, into your fourth drink of the evening, that this is bull****.
This post had a point when I started it. Anyway, how do you deal with all this bull****?
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