Musings of a Lynx

There’s more great stuff in the What Now with Trevor Noah episode with Brené Brown that I touched on last week, but what also got me about it was the kind of conversation it was.

Because it was that: a conversation.  There was back and forth.  It wasn’t “I’m going to present my thing and you present your thing.”  It also wasn’t “let’s bloviate together.”  It was, “I’m going to challenge you on that,” and it was, “Wait, what did you say?  Let me think about that for a moment,” and it was ,“Wow, ok, yeah, this relates to this thing I’ve been thinking but I hadn’t thought of that thing or that thing in that way.  So what about this as a concept?”

They were thinking and working stuff out raw and in real time, getting inspiration from each other and broadening their contexts, allowing them to integrate things and deepen their own understanding.

One of the fastest neuro-hacks to a feeling of belonging is collective schadenfreude.

We are going to connect mutually in watching this person fail and fall. And it gives us all kinds of goosebumps. It gives us all kinds of sense of we’re together.

As in, I don’t really know you, but our connection, the three of us, is that we hate the same people.

It’s like being at a public square for a hanging.  And there’s a couple of things that are happening in that public square at the moment.

One, we’re gathered. We’re very limbic. There’s a ton of adrenaline.

Two, we’re also mitigating each other’s shame about enjoying this. That’s what a mob is about, we’re mitigating each other’s shame.

The thing is, the collective schadenfreude about watching someone – especially someone who’s got celebrity or a platform – fail is that it is absolutely not lasting or meaningful.  It may hotwire our brain for a moment, but it’s not real.

We need to notice and be mindful of the counterfeit connection we get from collective schadenfreude.

Especially as we are in a world where so many people are in pain and need, who don’t have the grounding it takes to forge real connection, where there are barriers to connection.  A world where we can be so alone in a room full of people.

In that world where so many people are lonely, and remembering that we are neurobiologically hardwired for connection and that in the absence of connection there is suffering, we look for those surefire ways to get any hit, anything that dulls the loneliness, anything that mimics connection.  And schadenfreude and daggers towards others, even in a comment section, is a surefire way to get that mimicry.

Only it’s absolutely a Faustian bargain.

It is corrosive and damaging over time because we know it’s not real, but it can give us something quick. And it’s doubly damaging over time because by its intrinsic divisive nature it also wrecks the very connection we seek.

So I would say we should really think about collective schadenfreude and need for belonging that we’re not getting.

— adapted from Brené Brown in conversation with Trevor Noah

Sometimes, not only is it that a/the scapegoat is not to blame, but that is that it is actually a smokegoat.

As in, it is smoke bomb lobbed by the real culprit, trying to ninja their way out of our gaze and scrutiny.

I will forever love Rocket in these PJs. :)

“You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario.

But you got to go out there and do something about it.”

— Jalen Brunson

In that great way of separating out our thoughts (and their automatic and already nature) from both the act of thinking and also of who we truly are, this reminds us that hey, our calculating self will, perhaps often, probably regurgitate a bunch of bleak things, but it’s a mistake to automatically collapse it with who we are and what will likely or actually happen.

In other words, just because we have the thought, it doesn’t mean we’re incapable, afraid, flawed, or that we’ve already lost.  Nor, just because we had the thought, does it mean its true.

It just means we had that thought.

It is still our central selves who gets to choose who we will be in this moment.  And, out of that being, what actions we will take.  The agency remains all ours.