Role exhaustion
Dec. 7th, 2024 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI have a long-standing issue with the soul / psyche / spirit side of “helping” industries, in that they frequently exist to get people to comply with rules imposed on the person being “helped” by people who are absent from the therapeutic encounter. On the one hand, the person who isn’t complying may or may not be accurately reporting on what is going on. On the other hand, the people who are attempting to get compliance aren’t there to participate in a legit negotiation.
What this used to look like was the idea of “role adjustment”, and was a major target of therapy. So, if you’re a student, and you are doing poorly in school, a psychologist might focus on helping you adjust to “being” a student. Which is ludicrous — it should be a negotiation about what that person wants to learn and how to support them in learning it NOT doing quality control on the Educated Person Production Process. But even ignoring the goal and frame issues, if the only person the therapist is interacting with in person is the student, and they are reading written stuff produced by the people attempting to elicit compliance, I mean. You can see so many problems that are just inevitable.
(I use Student as an example of a role, but Spouse or Parent or Employee or whatever work just fine too.)
We’re all deep enough into the system at this point that we almost don’t need an actual therapist to do a real number on ourselves in this area. We read a grade report or look at a marked up paper or report and we’ll ratchet down the pressure on ourselves. We fear getting caught using an AI on a paper, and we set up self-surveillance in an effort to prove that we really did write it ourselves and the low-perplexity is an artifact of efforts to comply, not a result of “cheating” by using a tool.
Most efforts at prediction are straightforward extensions of current trends into the immediate future and mostly they are accurate until they are not. And I am starting to wonder about how poorly directed compliance measures (including those self-imposed), and the exhaustion they produced, might be producing some surprising and terrifying results (anti-incumbent elections around the world, type of thing). Also, I’m at a phase of life where a lot of people I know have recently suffered a painful relationship experience, are grieving a death, or are anticipating a death, or, for that matter, a painful relationship experience. I’m really seeing a whole lot of people trying really hard, experiencing diminishing returns, and then giving up. In so many various, sad, and dismaying ways.
You are not a role. You are a person. Please take good care, and find your joy whenever you can.
What this used to look like was the idea of “role adjustment”, and was a major target of therapy. So, if you’re a student, and you are doing poorly in school, a psychologist might focus on helping you adjust to “being” a student. Which is ludicrous — it should be a negotiation about what that person wants to learn and how to support them in learning it NOT doing quality control on the Educated Person Production Process. But even ignoring the goal and frame issues, if the only person the therapist is interacting with in person is the student, and they are reading written stuff produced by the people attempting to elicit compliance, I mean. You can see so many problems that are just inevitable.
(I use Student as an example of a role, but Spouse or Parent or Employee or whatever work just fine too.)
We’re all deep enough into the system at this point that we almost don’t need an actual therapist to do a real number on ourselves in this area. We read a grade report or look at a marked up paper or report and we’ll ratchet down the pressure on ourselves. We fear getting caught using an AI on a paper, and we set up self-surveillance in an effort to prove that we really did write it ourselves and the low-perplexity is an artifact of efforts to comply, not a result of “cheating” by using a tool.
Most efforts at prediction are straightforward extensions of current trends into the immediate future and mostly they are accurate until they are not. And I am starting to wonder about how poorly directed compliance measures (including those self-imposed), and the exhaustion they produced, might be producing some surprising and terrifying results (anti-incumbent elections around the world, type of thing). Also, I’m at a phase of life where a lot of people I know have recently suffered a painful relationship experience, are grieving a death, or are anticipating a death, or, for that matter, a painful relationship experience. I’m really seeing a whole lot of people trying really hard, experiencing diminishing returns, and then giving up. In so many various, sad, and dismaying ways.
You are not a role. You are a person. Please take good care, and find your joy whenever you can.