or at least, i think so
i’m not really sure. here’s a scenario:
i used to be quite rigid. in a few ways. i wouldn’t realize that time has a real effect on your relationships with people. if you’re good friends with someone and then you don’t talk to them for three weeks, you need to have the theory of mind to realize that they are continuing to live their life and this thing that you did had an effect on them. and gradually as time passes, people who you don’t talk to appear less in your brain, and you start to forget. because we’re all the main characters of our lives, etc. if you don’t talk to them for three years, your relationship is not of that of good friends anymore. you don’t know them anymore. your relationship has decayed, even though you didn’t do anything.
this is, for some reason, kind of a tricky thing to grok. for some people, we think of other people as not really people? more like animatronics that turn on when they’re in sight and we talk to them and think of them, and then frozen still when we don’t. something something object permanence. but anyway.
this will then happen to that person that when they come back and can’t immediately resume the relationship as if nothing happened, when they realize that other people — life —has continued to move without their consent, they feel somewhat betrayed. i stood right here, and you moved without telling me. but that’s not true ellen. you didn’t stay right there. you also moved, but you don’t consider your own movement as such because it looks static to you. you’re still you, after all.
anyway, lately i’m thinking about the property of dynamism and how to teach it. it is probably one of the most important qualities someone can have because it enables fun and play and surprise and teaming, it includes joys into your life that you could never do with rigidity, and it enables a pathway towards taking ownership of your life. instead of throwing a tantrum that everyone moved without your permission, you are now a part of the dynamic game, you accept that you have a move just as everyone has a move, and that you’re all making moves in relation and with consideration to each other. basically, life becomes a big multiplayer game and it’s more fun. but dynamism is historically very hard to teach. trying to talk to a soul scared into rigidity, those that have achieved it offer such platitudes as “be present,” “be embodied,” “be playful.” which basically means nothing to the scared soul. the scared soul is rigid out of fear. consider this scenario which just happened to me: a girl and i were flirting and having fun. she was in a mood to take it further, and the moment i wasn’t, but i was interested, and thought about engaging this pathway later. so i did not engage at the time (sending the signal to her as such — scared souls miss the fact that they are always actively making moves even if they don’t think so), then later, she was in a sad mood and came to me looking for emotional support, i engaged that. in a moment of flash rigidity (my old habits come springing back up every once in a while), i was still stuck in the animatronic model, holding her flirty state in my head and, because i wanted that, misfired on that partway through. this, i think, rubbed her the wrong way. it was fine, but it was a misplay on my part. now we’re in this state, where, hey, this flirtationship may die because a misfire is unsexy. what to do.
i think a scared rigid soul would do something like this: be so uncertain of where things are now that they just fully disengage, consider it scrapped, and never talk to this person again. ironically, this might be the right answer, but they’re getting to it the wrong way, so it doesn’t count. when you’re postscarcity, it’s valid to realize that hey, it’s one random flirtationship, i fucked up, now i know something not to do in the future, move on it’s pretty easy to just go get another flirtationship and try again out of the 8 billion people on earth. but running away out of fear of an unrecoverable solution is not the way.
i think a rigid soul might even go further and just be cognitive dissonant about the whole thing. this is very real. sometimes, you’re so rigid and your theory of mind is so tied up in yourself, that your brain just doesn’t even allow you to register that you’ve made the situation unsexy (i do, of course, have to caveat here that sometimes your brain is just making you anxious and you didn’t actually make the situation unsexy at all, but let’s say in this scenario you know your anxiety well and you’re not anxious about it, you just genuinely perceive that this is what you’ve done. i’ll talk a sidenote down below about estimating other people’s state in a sane way). you might just ignore the other person’s state out of fear — your brain putting on blinders and literally rejecting new information, because you’re so afraid of dynamism and so little believe in your own ability to handle a new unexpected situation. you might delude yourself into just thinking that the context is rigid to your first context, the one that was desired, and this — this, is profoundly unsexy. because now not only have you messed up the situation, you’ve plainly exhibited that you have not theory of mind about your conversational partner and quite frankly (this will be hard to hear, but it is true) don’t care about them. because if you did, you would make a move with respect to the moment, like a conversational partner does. i know you’re afraid and that’s why you’re doing these things, but this is what’s downstream of that. sidenote here also that it’s important not to break out of the fear and fall into fawning instead — that’s also unsexy and not good conversational partner. you want a partner! you want peerdom! you want bids! you do not want a servant, limerence, orders or flurries of requests for custom instructions.
the solution is dynamism. own your part, own your move, decide your move, make your bid. maybe it’ll work and you can save it, maybe you can’t. but the key is that you are making bids, not trying to force an outcome. to the untrained soul, they seem like the same thing, and indeed, they are close, but they are subtly different, and that subtle difference is actually night and day from the partner’s perspective.
estimating people’s state in a sane way. you can do it. people often say “don’t assume what someone’s feeling, just ask them,” but it’s also incredibly autistic to need to ask someone what they’re feeling every 10 seconds when you can pretty easily estimate their state either from their previous state, or their theory of mind + actions that have happened. it’s literally control theory, think kalman filtering. anyway.