Fish bowl
Our very brains, our human nature, our desire for comfort, our habits, our social structures, all of it, pushes us into being fish bowl swimmers. Tiny people moving in tiny circles. Staying in the circumscribed ruts of our comfort. Ignoring a whole big world of what's different and new and interesting just beyond. That's the problem: stuff out there might be new, and interesting, but it's also different. The newness — which is really not new, at all, it's just new to us, so — the differentness, of another mindset or culture, language or belief system, method or opinion or morality or lifestyle, sends our inward threat-o-meter into overdrive. We interpret new and different as scary and difficult , because in terms of our emotions and our mental somersaulting, it is. We don't know how to act. We don't know how to evaluate. We don't know what is safe. We don't know where we fit in. We don't know how our safe, comfortable fish bowl living is affected by this new, different, expanded puddle. Sameness makes us comfortable. And comfort is the height, the very pinnacle, the crowning achievement in our pursuit of happiness. What I mean is that we've mistaken comfort for happiness. All the ways we could pursue happiness, all the freedom and technology and abilities we have to pursue meaning and joy and interaction and challenge and exploration and improvement and aliveness … All of that, at our fingertips, and being comfortable tends to top the list of what we actually want, what we're willing to put effort towards. This seems pathetic. It is pathetic. But also: We're working hard all the time in ways we often don't acknowledge. We have infinite options but finite agency. We have endless information access and very little processing power. We get fucking worn out. It's a lot of work to make a string of decent choices for 10 or 12 hours at a time. It's a lot of effort, some days (most days), to do what is required of us to feel like decent human beings, and the idea of putting in more effort, expending more energy, is exhausting. So we value comfort highly. We're tired. We're exhausted by constant inputs, invisible demands, and the burden of infinite options. Of course we don't leap out of our comfort zones when the opportunity arises: we've already been out of it for so long, on high alert. Our brains are efficiency machines. By valuing comfort so highly, and by equating comfort with sameness, we have programmed our brains to ignore the unfamiliar. Ever wondered why you can feel bored when you have constant stimulation? This is why. We carefully allocate our energy to the highest priorities. Things that aren't familiar don't help. So we ignore them. Of course, we can't always ignore stuff that is different. Sometimes it is right there, glaringly obvious, annoyingly immune to our discomfort, and we are forced to see it, acknowledge it, encounter it, at least mentally. But don't worry! We have defenses! Oh baby, do we have defenses. If we can't keep these alien objects from encroaching upon our consciousness, we can, at least, quickly evaluate the threat they pose and deal with them appropriately. Threat is precisely how we see things that are different. Comfort is bolstered, even built, by the familiar. All things unfamiliar are threats to our comfort. So we're quick to see other groups, philosophies, lifestyles, belief systems, family structures, choices, etc., as weird and wrong. We want to believe they are wrong, because we want to believe that pursuing our own comfort is right. We want to believe we have our priorities in check. Our very desire for comfort creeps into our logical reasoning, so deeply does the desire go. So insidiously does it carry out its programmed mission: to keep us from being uncomfortable, our brains will subvert objectivity and keep us from seeing the fallacies in our own thinking, keep us from recognizing that we are, at heart, selfish and misguided creatures whose greatest delight is sitting around and feeling pretty good about ourselves. If needed, then, we will happily sacrifice the validity and value of every thing, person, or choice that is different from what we know and define as normal. We will, for the sake of our own rightness, define all different things as wrong. We don't even hesitate. Hesitation is a sign that you might be starting to see the truth of your own motivation. If you start hesitating before defining, before casting judgment, before categorizing and labeling, look out: your comfort is at stake. Your brain is scurrying, be sure of it, to come up with great reasons for you to resist this awful urge to be fair. Fair. Fair? Fair! Fair has no place in the pursuit of comfort. Equality is not a factor here. If we value all people equally, we must admit that our own comfort is not the highest priority. We must admit that others, too, have valid needs, valid ideas, that the fact of their differentness is not adequate reason for us to deny them the same respect and autonomy we demand for ourselves. We can't have that. That sort of thinking gets us in trouble. That sort of thinking demolishes the layer upon layer of defensive triggers and traps that we have laid, so carefully, over the entire course of our lives. We are aware, so very aware, of how it could all fall apart. We know the reasons are thin. We know, deep down, the very idea of a fish bowl is absurd. We live in an ocean, and it's big, and it's full of creatures, and we're terrified. We want to believe we can limit what is around us. We want a fish bowl so we can feel like the biggest fish in it. It is the only way we know to feel safe. But there is another way: to see, first, that the fish bowl is an illusion of our own making, with imaginary walls upheld by discriminatory defense systems. If we can begin to see that the walls are not even real, we can see a way out. Maybe we can stop putting so much work into keeping them in place. It's scary. It is being alive. The threat only exists when we think we have something of our own, something utterly more important than all else, to protect and defend. But we don't. We are swimming in this together, all of us. There is no safer ocean, only this one.
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