There is an extremely entraining aspect to my thought process. I possess a conscious, strong ability to contradict myself in almost every way. There’s nothing like grounding one’s self in firm beliefs and ideologies and then swiftly, dissecting them into nothing more than stream of foolish thought. (I’ll get into this more in depth at a later time.)
I’ve been doing this for quite some time with all these “theories” I love to type up at late hours of the night. Many of the entries in this blog, I’m sure, contradict each other multiple times, even though I’m the sole author. I guess this happens often because of changing situations and my changing conclusions of how to handle them.
This entry is about how people love to isolate their current situations, poor circumstances, and especially romantic failures and successes and view them as the most superior occurrence of all mankind. It makes sense for an inclination to feel OUR circumstances take precedent to those of the people around us. When we go through a rough time in our lives, we are the ones directly affected, it’s important to us, we focus on the situation, and hope to remedy it.
There’s a term known as the fundamental attribution error in which someone has a tendency to hold a “trait theoretic position” when speaking about another’s situation, as opposed to their own. This idea doesn’t logically work. For example, You may be asked, why is so-and-so such an unstable person after being broken up with? You may respond with: “Oh, well they are a just an extremely weak individual. They are so naive about true love and romance, it makes me sick. They need to get over it, stop being ridiculous, and realize there are more people out there in this world.” Now let’s say YOU recently are having a hard time with a break up and are asked the same thing, your response will likely be: “Her and I were together three years, Joshua. You have to understand how a long term relationship can affect a person. I was best friends with her parents, we were going to move in together, she was my soul mate. It’s an extremely different situation. I was in love, okay? So -and- so on the other hand, now they are just completely foolish.”
These situations are most likely identical, but people are so prone to interpret THEIR situation as the superior. They will view THEIR behaviors and emotions as the rational ones. When someone else shows weakness, it’s a negative trait they possess, but YOU’RE weakness is only a product of negative situations.
It drives me crazy to think that you can give someone the perfect advice, but refuse to listen to that very advice when dealing with it yourself. I take pride in my ability to at least acknowledge this behavior and eventually I’ll be able to remove myself from the situation, reflect from an “outside perspective” and react in a more rational manner.
I guess I’m just disgruntled in why we are so eager to self justify our own actions. When can a person grow the fuck up and admit their problems aren’t much different than anyone else’s? When can we acknowledge that our failures may actually be attributed to our own actions and NOT just an unfortunate chain of events. When will we stop dramatizing our lives and relationships, living under some facade know as the american dream? Let’s face it, every relationship we have will NOT end with a couple kids, the sedan, and white picket fence. You’re first love will most likely NOT be your last. The first time you get your heart broken will almost with out a doubt, be one of may. This is real life, haven’t you noticed a pattern here yet?
Let’s all avoid hypocrisy and attempt to distance ourselves from our own biased opinions of the world and our miniscule place within it. Let’s all start to take responsibility for the choices we make. Deal? DEAL!
x
