Sociopath Community

Turncoat said: 

Buttered Toast said: 

Oddly enough, taking these nootropics and supplements to alter oxytocin, I was better able to manage the ups and downs of ordinary emotions, stress, etc.  My ADHD was better, or at least not as stressful.  There were other positive changes.  The negative seemed to be that other emotions and attachments were heightened and longer-lasting.  Emotions were able to reach deeper and actually be explored more.  Now, as I've been gradually going off these things, I already feel the slide back into shallower emotion, detachment and more cognitive empathy-style thinking.

Do you think you'd be able to carry any of that into your shallower mindset? Would you say you were better off with intense feelings, or worse? 

What has changed?  What has remained?  I don't know.

You still have the experiences you can carry with you, which could be enough for you to still explore your feelings in spite of the shift. 

I think the fear revolves around a sense of control being lost or something.  As though caring means you won't be in control of your emotional life, at the whims of the fate of others, etc. 

I see self control by contrast as being able to see what might trigger you without becoming triggered by it, by having once cared enough to become jaded to it in an informed way. 

The hardest thing to do these days is to choose to care, to notice that something got your attention somewhere deep and try to not bury it. 

 I'm hoping the fruit that bears in transitioning back to my "former self" will be more awareness, understanding, perspective.  I know the experiences become less attached to strong emotion and I look at them more objectively.  I hope that means I will have a way to measure better reactions and choices.  I don't want to slide back into the apathy that once was.  I think I was better off without the intense/extreme emotions.  However, this is the former self probably making the evaluation more and more every day.  The middle ground should hopefully be more clear.  I feel ok with this.

And yes, the part of the lesson being learned is as you said: being aware, letting it happen, understanding it.  Who needs all these walls any more?

Turncoat said: 

On my two month road trip I met a surprising amount of people and heard a lot of stories, but often they'd have moments where they constantly had to affirm that they didn't have feelings, that they didn't care. 

"I Don't Care" has to be one of the most toxic phrases against Introspection, a way to bury their feelings instead of growing to understand them, and often when I would explain why caring is harder to do that'd be like a lockpick for a bunch of buried shit they felt like they couldn't talk about with their friends. Groupthink keeps the notion alive, even with phrases like "I was just kidding" when it gets too personal to essentially say "We shouldn't care". 

What makes it so hard for people to care about stuff these days, or at least what makes it so difficult for them to admit to themselves? Why is caring seen as weakness?

From my understanding, "not caring" began as a counterculture response to McCarthyism in the 50's. Where you had fascist conviction in the mainstream, the natural middle-finger to that was "fuck you, we don't care." Probably best typified by the Beatniks etc.

It was probably also an effective defense to the disenfranchisement and lack of autonomy that came after a gnarly first half of the 20th century... If you feel like you've got no control over you life, indifference is protective. Now it's just entrenched in pop culture, and emulated in a feedback loop (seemingly by people who also feel a lack of control over their lives).

On a personal level though, I do think it can be a useful way of navigating chaos. Trying to please everyone you meet is a zero sum game, and if your self-worth is contingent on their opinions, you're gonna be miserable. 

That said, anyone who claims total indifference has zero self-awareness. We make thousands of little interventions in our lives on a daily basis, consciously or otherwise, always motivated by some kinda bias about the outcome. That's caring. 

You people aren't self aware and can't introspect so you come here for therapy/  how to act/  behave. It's party autism. I'm depressing having had clicked on an interesting title and seen mainly pseudointellectual postings.

Denial is a hell of a drug

some are better liars than others, not just in lying to others but to themselves 

Turncoat said: 

I've meanwhile been inverting this at people from how often the "I don't care" mantra is professed, and consequently they act confused over how I could stand strong with the banner of "Caring is Good". 

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As for my own situation with this, I'm focused on it from trying to shed the "I don't care"s from my life. I spent the larger part of my childhood doing the "I don't care" cope as well and it drove me batty with time. Once I was able to unload I realized a lot more epiphanies, such as how weaknesses being known by others doesn't always mean they can prey upon those weaknesses, how said weaknesses through exposure can be rendered moot through Wisdom and Experience with it's divulgence, and how anything that could go wrong as it seems in my head is never as bad as the IRL outcome when it comes to pass. 

Ultimately, I see "I care" as a statement of liberation, and often can ask how someone could care so much about not caring by contrast to my point of not having to care about how I care. By showing how much I allow myself to care about something defiantly they see me not giving a fuck about something they didn't even see as a weakness until then, and as a result some model after it and end up unloading some very repressed shit. 

TLDR; I've spent so much of my life caring too much about not caring, and now I see the other side of the spectrum as strength. 

Being able to admit faults and flaws and having feelings about certain things shows a level of openness without defesiveness. I'm sure you've noticed that people usually say how much they don't care when actually the subject is something they care about; they're trying to gaslight you and themselves. At the end of the day, everyone cares about something, and trying to project otherwise is a sign of fragility.

Tryptamine said: 

Being able to admit faults and flaws and having feelings about certain things shows a level of openness without defesiveness. I'm sure you've noticed that people usually say how much they don't care when actually the subject is something they care about; they're trying to gaslight you and themselves. At the end of the day, everyone cares about something, and trying to project otherwise is a sign of fragility.

Yet those who refuse to admit their faults infuriatingly stick in your memories whereas those who dont... fade away. You choose who you want to be.

Do we?

I do.

What do you choose?