You ‘download’ the priorities and goals of the people and groups around you. Their problems become yours. Their ways of thinking become yours. You

You Are Downloading Others' Priorities Into Your Mind

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2024-04-16 19:00:07

You ‘download’ the priorities and goals of the people and groups around you. Their problems become yours. Their ways of thinking become yours. You may think this is not happening, but if, for example, you take a role at a fast food restaurant, eventually you may have nightmares of overcooked fries. You may claim not to really care about this job, but it is hammered into you every shift not to make certain mistakes. Your mind is not equipped to ignore this. Far below your conscious thoughts; you actually want the customer to leave with a smile. Not because you care. Whether you do or not is irrelevant. This happens because you’ve been reinforced to want a certain outcome with various financial, social, emotional and para-social incentives. Between work, your family and your friends, you often switch from ‘individual mode’ to ‘hive member mode’. You are not yourself anymore. This is 100% natural and necessary. Humans would not have been able to develop and grow the societies and civilizations they have without the powers of empathy, sympathy and group-think. It allows us to construct cohesive collectives in a meaningful way; making sure that an individual within the system accepts what is important to the system itself. This is what manifests itself in you when you build and develop relationships to the various groups in your life.

So, whats the problem? Maybe nothing; maybe something. The purpose of this short post is to remind you to be conscious that this is happening. Yes, you are part of the collective; but you are still an individual. You should not blindly accept what is important to the group. It is your responsibility, to yourself and even to the group, to assess priorities, goals and beliefs. You may have become reliant on external sources of priorities and meaning: political affiliation, your workplace, activism, your religion, your lack of religion (this is a ‘negative group’; a group defined as opposition to another group or groups), or a specific subculture.