I get that most of us are burnt out and don't have a lot of energy for empathy, I really do - but the idea that you have to have distance from people to have the energy to love them is just anti-social. The world should be a lot kinder to introverts, sure.
But I don't think any of us can be a bubble. The instinct to separate and jealously guard your alone time and mental resources is a reaction to something real, but I think it can quickly become a trap that tricks us into individualist thinking & doesn't actually make us happier. At least in my exp
Sorry, to get back to the point a little, rugged individualism & fascism have a lot of shared roots and so does justifying lack of empathy. That's what it was ringing like, to me. Even though I fully understood the feeling
I am not a curmudgeon. I have zero respect for rugged individualism. No man is an island. I do a lot of group therapy to deal with compulsive caretaking where I try to make everyone's problems my own and then end up resenting and ultimately hating them, and myself, for it. Also it makes me poorer.
But honestly I really just feel like I'm at my limit of friends and acquaintances. I barely have enough room in my life for the ones I've got. Besides, I chat amiably with a dozen strangers a day sometimes, just not on a plane where I'm crushed into a tiny space like a vacuum packed mattress.
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But I've never understood this "I don't like most people" energy/cliche, it's just really tacky to me. And I think distances us from each other