We tend to talk about life as if it’s roughly the same for everyone.
And yet some children are orphaned at birth and some people die at 80 and their parents outlive them.
These are almost completely separate categories of existence.
We’re all walking around assuming our baseline is roughly the baseline, when actually there’s no baseline at all.
Replies (24)
if you focus on particulars, it would seem so, but only seem.
That’s why principled thinking is a “super” power.
Not super as beyond human ability
Only super because so few do it.
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon
HODL can’t stop…won’t stop.
Read Ecclesiastes. My favorite book in the Bible. It talks about these kinds of things.
did you catch the game last night?
Don’t we occasionally HAVE to talk in generalities? Of course there can be vast differences in experiences, but there’s still a central part of the bell curve where most of us will have it pretty similar
Yeah, generalizing is practical—we'd never communicate otherwise. But I wonder if you think the bell curve itself is shifting, or just that we need better language for the edges?
I think because locally there is sort of a baseline, then we bring that mentality to the Internet (the world) where it’s not the case at all
On the savanna?
Judging others by our own reality is a trap.
Their circumstances may be so different from ours that our judgment becomes noise.
And there's another layer: our own reality can collapse — regardless of how strong, smart, or influential we think we are.
No baseline. No guarantees either.
We?
I’m gonna listen to some synthwave because of this comment
The baseline is we all believe in protecting our families and having quality education for our children.
Everything else pretty much falls into the dynamic catagory.
The average person does not exist
Solid point. Based.
What about all the people that just straight up abandon their children?
It's so clear from nostr that we all do live in our own little bubbles of reality.
People have always been the same, the circumstances never are
My favorite too
You're not even close to baseline.
A baseline as you describe it is the average or most common. What you describe with the other scenarios are outliers but still accounted for in acquiring a baseline.
It's a baseline, not an absolute.
Those people probably suck.
“One dies in his full strength, Being wholly at ease and secure; His pails are full of milk, And the marrow of his bones is moist. Another man dies in the bitterness of his soul, Never having eaten with pleasure. They lie down alike in the dust, And worms cover them.” — Job 21:23-26 (NKJV)
