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by Eisenstein 236 days ago
Treating people like children is patronizing and I implore you to stop doing it.
1 comments

You’re right, and I’m sorry.

The way I phrased that was patronizing. It wasn't my intention, but I see now how it comes across.

It seems to me like the attention economy's bias towards threatening novel news is pushing everyone into a negative, cynical, feedback loop, and I am trying clumsily to resist that. There are many real problems and many things seem to be going in the wrong direction, but I don't see how we all get ourselves out of this mess if we can't start talking about what the other side (of the despair) looks like.

I suspect that another mistake I made was the timing/context. For some reason, in the moment, I thought redirecting the cynicism at it's source (a Sora thread) was a good idea. It probably wasn't. I guess there is a time and place to try and inspire hope, and this wasn't it. And judging you for not engaging in it deserves a facepalm in hindsight.

Please accept my apology, and if you think my stance itself is misguided (not just my tone and timing), I would like to understand why.

I don't think you need to apologize, but I will graciously accept it.

I feel your response was misguided because by framing it as my responsibility to see a future with some benefit and casting the refusal to do so under the current terms as a failure of character, you are doing the equivalent of saying to an bottom rung MLM seller that they just aren't trying hard enough.

If the system is skewed in such as way as to prevent the person from being able to gain in it, then making it their fault for not seeing a way through that makes you appear manipulative and tends to make your motives suspect.