Cynicism and why I hate it

[queueman_as]

It's been a while since I participated in a heated discussion at lunch, as my current teammates generally prefer work-related topics. Well, no, they don't always talk about compilers, it's not that bad. Sometimes they switch to something as generic as programming on GPU. Only once they shared a bunch of fun facts and anecdotes about accents (for

Comments

[sofonia]

Why do you think that pushing yourself towards beeing kind and sensible is a right thing to do?

[queueman_as]

Well, kindness and sensibility are kind of prerequisites for many great things such as love and friendship. Also, pushing yourself (physically or morally) is generally better than not doing anything, and I believe it makes you a better/healthier/more complex person.

That said, the question looks slightly rhetoric, and I think you have your own answer. Am I right?

[sofonia]

Not really.

For me being "sensible" is more natural than being "cynical". It takes some effort, but I don't need to make a choice to fight my cynicism. There is almost nothing to fight :)

So I was curious why you, naturally more "cynical" person, choose to be "sensible".

[ilyakor]

It seems that you mistake cynicism for narrow-mindedness. Saying that some random girl was hit by a train because she was stupid - is not very smart; making such assumptions without knowing details is overconfident in jerky. Cynical attitude would be "the girl was hit by a train, so what? 150k people died the same day, should I feel compassionate to every single one of them? Or should I feel compassionate only to the girl because she was brought to my attention, and intentionally forget about the others? Sounds rather hypocritical." This POV would be at least logically consistent (and therefore not worthless).

[queueman_as]

First, of all, you precisely described the attitude I encountered. I did provide some details about that specific death, so the assumption that "it was her fault" was perfectly legit: you should look around or at least not wear a closed headphones when you cross the railroad. I don't claim that one should always feel grief over the death of random people. But I think it's wrong to treat the situation when people are punished by death for their mistakes and nothing is done to prevent this as normal (especially because it is not related to you, and you believe it never will be).

Cynical POV is certainly consistent and, as I mentioned, very convenient. I still think it's worthless because it doesn't give you anything, except for the false sense of control.

[ilyakor]

I still disagree; trying to estimate intelligence of a person based on her behavior on railroad is stupid. Maybe she was super-genius in quantum physics, but did weird things IRL. Also, "it was her fault" != "she was stupid".

Cynical POV, at least as I understand it, does not state anything specific about whether such situations are normal or whether smth should be done to prevent it. It's just about limiting your empathy towards such a people, because if you're going to be fair an be sympathetic towards people in all such situations, you'll have a very bad time.