[kuramitropolis]

People who care about you, care about you.

The rest is trapping(s).

I thought our individualistic culture was based on the shared understanding that, the more value you provide to others' lives, the more your nonconformities are accepted.

Aint much you can do for your fellows when your hands are in handcuffs though, golden or otherwise, so we better keep up with 'em Joneses and don't dare imagine freedom, or else.

[parthianshotgun]

I'm not quite sure how to parse this or if this was even meant for me, but I do hope that this isn't some pretense to dispair or annihilation (the bad kind)

[kuramitropolis]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I'm basically responsding to the implications I perceived in the "are you a hermit" question, which I feel are quite disheartening in their own right: that meeting society on one's own terms is impossible without imposing on oneself the near-total isolation usually associated with hermitdom.

In another recent comment thread, the refusal to use the conveniences of Big Tech was compared to "self-flagellation" - another quaint association with the atrocities of Western religion - while the fact remains that entrusting contemporary connected technology with stewardship over one's social life is the actual self-harmful approach.

[parthianshotgun]

Yes I'm starting to understand a little more and I agree with you in broad strokes. But I guess to parley with 'society' requires some degree of compromise. Casting your own ego into the mix might be self correcting on societies part (maybe not formally); if you impose yourself without effacing anything, like a hapless lover in a one-sided relationship, you stand to lose all of it, if you're pushing and pulling without giving. That's how I see it, as a matter of practicality.

However the more nuanced point, something maybe deeper, about society, reminds me of Weil's 'Great Beast'. In a way I'm offering a redemptive hermitdom, and that's why I thought your response was hard to parse (blame me, because my question could either be seen as childishly naive or a handshake from one acolyte to another).

My conception of hermitdom isn't cursed or evil or self-destructive necessarily, and I was poking at the parent commentor a little to see if they might think the same way. Weil is probably hitting at the core of the issue with more resolution that I could ever hope to achieve:

> Relationship breaks its way out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave. The way out is solitude. ... To relate belongs to the solitary spirit. No crowd can conceive relationship: "This is good or bad in relation to..." "in so far as ..." That escapes the crowd. A crowd cannot add things together. One who is above social life returns to it when he wishes; not so one who is below. It is the same with everything.