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Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview.

Oh, wait, I was skimming and didn't even read this part. This is just flatly wrong. Single pieces of media do sometimes change the entire direction of peoples' lives. I've seen it happen! I mean they technically don't change someone's "entire worldview" because that's not really possible, but definitely can be critical very large personal changes. And yeah, I know, everything changes slowly and maybe the piece of media was just a "straw that broke the camel's back", but in my experience that's only partially true. Which makes sense, "media" broadly are stories that are designed to be as compelling as possible to people, and the reason we like stories is that we learn from them. It just makes sense that strong resonant "emotional" experiences could influence someone.

Now of course it's very rare for that to happen, given how much people read and watch and listen in their life, and even if it does happen it's probably better to let the person evolve by learning new compelling information even if it makes them partially wrong for a time, you can let them fail and figure it out later.

I mean they technically don't change someone's "entire worldview" because that's not really possible

...

And yeah, I know, everything changes slowly and maybe the piece of media was just a "straw that broke the camel's back"

Come on man.

  • -11

But how else do you think beliefs/worldviews are shaped? Lived experiences usually, sure, but I believe it's the 21th-century schizoid modern man we're talking about, whose lived experiences account for like 20% of his actual sum total of EXP points (guilty as charged, at least), the rest is pixels or letters. Do you totally deny the ability of artistic media able to change people's minds in any way, or is the issue that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough?

I join other commenters below in their admission of being thoroughly influenced by media, mostly vidya in my case: Bioshock planted seeds of doubt against libertarianism which persist to this day (even if I was a countryside rube and knew jack shit about e.g. coordination problems at the time), Persona 3 made me a robofucker introduced the careless teenage me to the concept of death and its consequences, etc. Call me shallow if you like, but I firmly believe that the correct response to "to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview" is "that but unironically", and media doesn't actually have to be "deep" (which is subjective as hell anyway) to get the proverbial noggin joggin - it just has to resonate with you to some extent that you begin to think on the evoked themes independently. It is indeed closer to a spiritual experience instead of anything literal.

Feel free to consider this a midwit take because it kind of is, but I struggle to understand or agree with your viewpoint. I'll posit that either it's the air you're breathing to some extent, i.e. you're so accustomed to thinking along the lines of or drawing inspiration from various intellectual works that you don't notice the influences in your thinking, or that you've actually never experienced that distinct "THIS HOLE WAS MADE FOR ME" feeling of inexplicably clicking together with a piece of media, a sensation definitely not age-restricted to zoomers or millenials, in which case I respectfully sympathize.

Am I wrong about the average age here? The joke was that I was afraid this kid would watch a movie and suddenly flip his entire worldview, a premise that was mocked mercilessly when I was growing up, because "everyone knows" that nobody is influenced by just one thing, everything is a confluence of the innumerable stories everyone hears all day every day. That doesn't mean media doesn't have an influence on people, of course it does! But nobody becomes a nihilist after watching fight club one time, just like nobody becomes a libertarian after reading atlas shrugged and nobody becomes a mass shooter after playing doom - there are a thousand other stops along the way there, and if it looks like an immediate turn that is because prior stories predisposed the person to absorb that influence.

I chose the words "a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview." very carefully, to avoid this exact tangent.

So the issue is that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough for the purposes of your joke?

I chose the words "a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview." very carefully, to avoid this exact tangent.

Not carefully enough, it seems, they could use a timeline descriptor since from what I read the pushback you get (mine included) seems to be that a single piece of media can absolutely [re]shape someone's entire worldview, just not immediately.

This seems like a semantic quibble at its core - you yourself admit in your reply "that there are a thousand other stops along the way", I'm not sure what your objection is when people point out that a single piece of media can indeed be the last stop, the straw that breaks the camel's back (which as written would presumably qualify for the purposes of your joke?). I'm not even sure we disagree at all. Maybe the argument is too big brained for me and I embody everything that's wrong with the Motte nowadays.

Yes, it is a semantic quibble.

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is singlehoofedly responsible for:

  1. Reducing my depression to manageable levels which a support group managed to finish off
  2. Giving me enough confidence to get my degree
  3. Reigniting my passion for writing
  4. Teaching me about healthy relationships in a theoretical and logical enough way to break through my autism and show me what everyone had claimed was so profound all my life which I couldn’t see before, to the point people are now generally shocked when I say I have autism and I mostly don’t feel I have it anymore
  5. Showing me how journalism really works, and why never to trust a journalist
  6. Rescuing a long-time family friendship I accidentally almost broke
  7. Getting me the third best job I’ve ever had
  8. Revealing a piece of theology which is sorely underserved, the true meaning of shalom

I would be a completely different person today if I hadn’t seen the first episode I ever saw, S1E4, at that exact moment in my life.

lol wut? Am I missing something

I'm pretty sure he's entirely sincere, although idk if it's an example of what I described or not.

He's sincere, we've discussed it before. Personally I watched one specific anime series, maybe 5 hours long, in one afternoon and that had pretty formative effects.

I can't really narrate a personal experience I or a close friend of mine might've had without coming too close to doxxing myself (and I'm not a good enough writer atm to do it well), but things in the same vague category as 'fight club' have, in my direct experienced, causally affected peoples' life trajectory or ideology at the largest scale and in a non-butterfly effect way. Something doesn't need to change someone's entire worldview, nor does it need to require zero pre-existing affinity to the topic to work, to be the kind of thing you're claiming doesn't exist.

It's definitely a judgement call to say that it isn't mostly the 'straw break camel back effect' and I can't really justify it in any compact way, but I'm like 99% confident these individual instances of watching/reading media have several orders of magnitude more impact than others in these peoples' lives. It's sort of similar to a spiritual experience, I think.

iirc, 'this book changed my life' of thing isn't that uncommon a trope for notable figures, and while most cases are clearly exaggerated I think some cases aren't.

(I don't think this makes it reasonable to worry about individual pieces of media though.)

Single pieces of media do sometimes change the entire direction of peoples' lives

Right, the existence of this community is arguably a result of Harry Potter fanfiction of all things. That book certainly changed the course of my life.