2026-05-26
On forgiving people who haven't asked for your apology
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- "How do you forgive people who haven't asked for your apology?"
- I have clearly been mad at (my mind sim of) the world for a long time, because I think other people's inaction is directly going to get me killed or enslaved with significant probability.
- This anger doesn't seem particularly productive, atleast so far. It is not helping me orient all that better (yet) to the problem. It is not helping me persuade others.
- Maybe in the long run this anger might still be productive? Persuasion is a long term game. Doing stuff myself is a long term game. You can accept short-term downsides for a long-term game.
- The anger feels very clearly based on truth though. It is straightforwardly true that inaction of most people (in my friend circle, on lesswrong, in many other social circles I have met) is literally going to get me killed or enslaved with significant probability. I don't want to die, and I don't think I have done anything (yet) that deserves me being murdered.
- Maybe I should rephrase the question from "how do you forgive people who haven't asked for your apology?" to "Should you forgive people who haven't asked for your apology?"
- Why do I even want to forgive these people? I guess it is not actually about forgiveness, I don't really care either way whether these people are forgiven or not, fuck them, they are not so important. It is about me. I don't want to stay this angry all the time, a major reason being it is not clear how this is helping me, and ofcourse anger feels bad. It's pure downside in the short-term, and while I say "truth" is the long-term justification, the actual long-term upside is not anywhere close in sight.
Main 2
- I find myself instinctively going "yay" when Peter Thiel says "madness of crowds, not wisdown of crowds." It is true that "normal people" will totally genocide each other under the right circumstances, most people have no actual principles.
- I want to tell people that they don't need all that much to survive. Worship your God, metaphorically speaking. You can aim for far bigger things if you realise you aren't going to carry your money or your immediate friend circle to your grave. I think staring at death reminds me how little is truly important. I mean, I knew some of this even before I thought about death, but thinking about death has accelerated it.
- Why do these people even matter? Like I said, they are not going to be there at my funeral, so why do I care? Oh right, I care because they are the ones who are going to get me killed in the first place.
- note to self - I am taking few hours break from work to finish this note, it seems important.
Chaos chaos chaos
- Literally no one has a plan. People without a plan don't get much of a right to shut down other people's plans, in my worldview. Inaction is also an action and the consequences are death.
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