Good Intentions

It is human nature to judge oneself by one’s intentions and to judge others by their actions. –(Source + Pt. 2)

I think this sentence bears some reminiscing upon.

I’ve been having many doctor’s appointments, and I’ve noticed that a lot of healthcare professionals seem to be quite impatient and rude. 😩 The last doctor I saw complained at length that the procedure scheduled by another healthcare provider was utterly useless and wouldn’t lead anywhere, deeming it superfluous in every way possible. 🤔💭😔 All the while, he told me he would not discuss any further matters with me and that I should essentially remain quiet and accept his judgmental attitude and dismissive feelings toward the potential outcomes of the procedure before it even happened.

Naturally, I got quite angry,

but I was so startled that I remained docile.

Even afterward, I don’t have the energy to get too angry about these things anymore. If he had a problem with the other healthcare professional’s referral that I needed to get further testing, why didn’t he call them to complain, instead of telling me, a patient with significant fears about a potential cancer diagnosis or something similar? He had absolutely no empathy. 🥲

For this type of doctor, it seems there is no emotional connection to the patient; the patient is just an object they operate on, a sounding board for their complaints about a system that has nothing to do with the patient. My intention, obviously, is to get treatment and move forward with testing to gain clarity on my very concerning situation. If we want to give a charitable reading of the doctor’s intentions, he might be aiming to make the system work most efficiently, ensuring no unnecessary testing is done. Ideally, we should minimize actions to get to concrete diagnoses and treatments in the smoothest way possible.

Then, of course, one might wonder: does this make the behavior excusable? No, not really, and it’s not about excusing things. But I was thinking, what if his intention truly is to make the system work? Obviously, he is engaging in what Freud termed “displacement anger,” a common type of emotional displacement where one’s feelings are targeted at a person wholly unrelated to the given situation. This allows them to vent their frustrations while their intentions are certainly to bring about change.

I mean, what is anger if not the intention to change an undesirable situation into a desired one? The problem here is that the person, in this case, the doctor, is not really exerting any power to bring about change, so his intentions are misaligned with his actions. Likewise, what should I have done? Should I have started arguing with him or told him how rude and unprofessional he was? It’s very likely that it wouldn’t have changed anything. It would have been more intention-misaligned actions because if my intention is to have a world in which doctors aren’t assholes, arguing with this one particular doctor wouldn’t change it.

There might be other ways to go about it. For instance, where I’m from, you need to have pristine grades to become a doctor, which is interesting to me. Even though these people have good grades, it’s not really an indication of them being fit for the title of healthcare provider. I feel that perhaps having some empathy and general human decency would be even more important than excelling in the school system, which is incredibly inefficient, boring, and pointless in many ways. 🤡🤣

I could go on an endless litany of things we should change about the healthcare system and human behavior. But the truth is, I can’t bring about this change, and certainly not by getting angry.

Anger and stress just make you older, exhausted, and sick. I refer to Professor Sapolsky’s lectures on stress and its effects on the central nervous system. This stuff isn’t to be underestimated. Stress literally kills you, slowly and excruciatingly, so there’s no point in being stressed.

So what conclusions can we draw from the idea that human beings have certain intentions, but their actions go against those intentions? This happens to everyone: to me, to you, to the doctor, to the lady at Starbucks, to the cab driver or Uber driver, to the construction site worker accidentally knocking over a highway support beam. Accidents happen. Our mistake is believing that society is well-structured and that things are going to be fine. No, they’re not, because human beings constantly do one thing, and then something entirely different happens. It’s chaos theory, bitch.

So if that’s just a normal thing, what can you do? Get rid of the double standards. If we’re going to judge people by their intentions, we need to judge them by their actions too. Or perhaps judge everyone by a mix of both, but apply this distribution equally to everyone.

Another rule of human behavior or “intellect” is that everyone thinks what’s happening to them right now is the most important story in the entire world. By nature, obviously, we’re always skewed toward ourselves. You might say, well, that’s a truism. Yeah, right. Well, then why do we still get angry at how stupid everyone is? Because we’re just thinking that we are above it or whatever.

Well yeah, I don’t know, and at the same time, there’s a certain trajectory for development. My stance now is that I don’t care anymore what’s happening. I don’t have time for getting angry at people or things. I’ve got no time for politics, no time for drama, no time for angry healthcare providers wasting my time, no time for conversations that lead nowhere, and no time for investing energy in things I cannot change.

And hey, it turns out 99.9 percent of things that happen in the real world, I actually cannot change. I can’t even change one bit. The remaining bit that I can partially change only changes a little and has unforeseen consequences. It’s like the opening to Half-Life, right? We’re always dealing with unforeseen consequences.

So what’s the conclusion here? The conclusion is usually absolute negation; the situation is just too complicated. Let’s just get over it and walk hand in hand into extinction. You think that’s the conclusion? No, that’s not the conclusion, you know why? Because that type of conclusion isn’t going to work since it has unforeseen consequences too. Even that conclusion doesn’t work. Suicide doesn’t work, mass extinction doesn’t work, because you’re never going to get it to work. Your utopia plan isn’t working, your dystopia plan isn’t working; all your plans aren’t working, bitch.

So yeah, you get some grand plan, and it’s not gonna work in either direction. So it’s not nihilism, and it’s not pessimism.

You know, and I’m just saying, I have some humility here because the situation is bigger than you. There are going to be situations when you’re dead because, you know, you’re not actually important. I’m not actually important, so there’s just going to be a bunch of interlinked situations. The best thing to do is to be patient with everything and control the things you can. Figure out which things you can control to a minuscule extent, but you can control some things. Then, figure out all the stuff you cannot control and don’t invest energy in what you cannot control.

And don’t think, “Oh, I’ve already got this figured out,” because you don’t. You have to figure this out every day. The human organism is geared toward thinking it can control certain things, but it cannot because it’s constantly in an illusory state. Unless you have everything figured out, in which case, why are you reading this? Go out and, I don’t know, save the galaxy or something. Please. Please actually save the galaxy and stop healthcare providers from being assholes. That’s my demand to the demigods out there.

For everyone else, just try to have more humility and realize that other people are about as stupid as you are. Usually, they’re more stupid than you are because you’ve already taken the step to reflect on how stupid you are, so it’s like 0.1% smart or something.

Okay, peace the fuck out.