Hey beauties! ♥
I just got back from a long weekend in London and it was wonderful :) I got to hang with some of my favorite people in the whole wide world, drink cider, eat shortbread and a Sunday Roast and Dominos pizza and crackers and all the British-y unhealthy things in the world, play Cards Against Humanity, discover the Wellcome Trust Reading Room (which is A-MA-ZING), and speak (rather broken) Romanian to the lovely owner of a cute salon in Aldgate.
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| There's me in London looking and feeling very happy ♥ |
After coming back home, I started thinking about how much I love my friends, and then I thought about why I love my friends. After all, I’m sure the Mormon community has just as many lovely, well-meaning people in it, and yet, I’m friends exclusively with liberal, feminist, highly educated and intelligent people. Of course, that may partly be due to the university environment in which I met these people. But even so – I never made friends with anyone from the Christian society, or anyone whose political views are conservative.
I think that’s because the people I surround myself with
make me feel comfortable. Humans prefer positive feedback to negative feedback.
Obviously. No one enjoys being told they’re wrong. So when I say to my friends,
“I am having NASA send me to Mars if Donald Trump wins the elections” or “If I
was given free rein, I would hang men who catcall women by the balls” (things
which, on occasion, I have been known to say), they laugh and agree with me. No
one I am friends with would ever say, “Well, I think the Republicans do make
some good points” or “I don’t think catcalling is that bad, just take it as a
compliment and move on”. Even in general, in terms of the information I
surround myself with, I read The Guardian (a very liberal, left-wing newspaper),
I actively seek out feminist literature and TED talks, and the discourse that I
surround myself with is always more or less the same. If I hear or read something I disagree with, I generally just go "Wow that's fucking dumb", close the tab and move on.
And, if you’re human, you’re most probably no different in that
respect. Psychologists call the tendency to actively seek out or cherry pick
information that confirms your beliefs confirmation
bias, and it keeps us nice and comfy wrapped in our comfort-zone-blanket. But
I’m afraid the magic happens when we try to engage with discourse that we
fundamentally don’t agree with. By actively seeking out information from
sources that we generally wouldn’t read, or that we know we’re going to disagree
with, I think we make a lot of progress both in understanding how other people
think and also in either strengthening our own positions or realizing that we
may be wrong and advancing personal development. Of course, I’m not saying you
should read #meninist rants on the internet on “NOT ALL MEN do X and MEN HAVE
IT BAD TOO because this one time I went to a bar wearing a fedora and I COULDN’T
EVEN GET LAID”. But a well-articulated piece by someone who disagrees with
feminism (which, granted, I have yet to come across), or an article written by
someone with conservative political views (or liberal, if you’re conservative),
will broaden your horizon.
So this week, read something you disagree with, and read it
through until the end.
Lots of love xx
Damita
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