Tripwires
Recently I think I have been able to formulate a model that encompasses the way I generally see interactions with people. Both people that I’m close with and also people that I am not. This model is relatively low resolution, but I find it helpful when navigating conversations in both real time and retrospectively.
The way it seems to me is like this: I am in a room, the room is my interaction with the person. The room itself is neutral — maybe I’m just hanging out, maybe I have some kind of goal, maybe I’m insistent on a specific point, or I’m trying to make an inquiry, or find something out. It’s all within the bounds of this room.
The room is full of tripwires.
I don’t know exactly why the tripwires are there, I can guess, but I don’t definitively know. Many of these tripwires have to do with emotional consistency, a few ones here and there might be in response to a past trauma, some are just casual latent thoughts. If I accidentally trip one, the entire room shifts. I’m no longer in the same place, but a completely different room. More importantly, I’m no longer talking to the same “person”. It's as if a spirit has taken possession of them — My conversation is now with that possessing spirit.
Intentions don’t matter to a tripwire, I could step with concentrated care or complete haphazardness — once it's triggered, it's triggered. The possessing spirit has its own room fully decked out with a generally completely different set of trip wires. This may be a room I have seen before depending on if I have encountered the possessing spirit before, but most of the time there are at least a few variations.
Consistency between the original room and the possessing spirits room is low, it really oftentimes is like interacting with a completely different person. Trying to get back to the original room is often very very difficult. Oftentimes, it is better to just opt for a hard reset, and to re-engage with the individual at a later date after enough time has passed.
Here is a simple example in an attempt to explain the model better: Covid. I am sure that by this point, everyone has had a similar experience to me regardless of what they think on the matter. When having a conversation with someone… about anything, if the topic of Covid-19 comes up, a minor or major tripwire snaps, and the conversation is now a completely different room. If it was a major tripwire, throw everything we had just recently established out the window because I am now talking with someone else. Every step is a risk of triggering new but familiar increasingly more fragile tripwires. And to be clear, tripwires are not necessarily only represented by disagreement, it's not simple, oftentimes appeasement or full agreement can once again, swap out the entire room.
When possessed by a spirit, I think it becomes very difficult for the person possessed to act in an “aiming up” manner. The interactions become very sports-team like, very tribal. The goal is not generative, the goal is only to survive and propagate regardless of fitness. As such, triggering certain tripwires will render the interaction more or less wasted. Which I believe is an unfortunate thing, because it implies that regardless of intent, some steps forward will send you to Monopoly jail—- do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
And as people feel unconsciously or consciously encouraged to establish more and more tripwires within their mental infrastructure, the probabilities of fruitful and developing interactions decrease substantially. Which in turns leads to less creativity, less play, and ultimately in the short term, less beauty in the world. Which to me seems unnecessarily self-destructive as individuals with the capacity to truly live.