The Outside Angle

When one wants to degrade another, the usually try to do so by pointing out or making a big deal out of the latter having a particular trait. This is aimed at making the latter feel worse about themselves by giving attention to characteristics that they are supposedly insecure about or are uncomfortable about having. 

But if you have come to terms with and accepted having traits that others try to use as a means to degrade you, then pointing those traits out to either yourself or to others (to some extent), won’t be effective in making you feel bad about who you are,.

Someone who is rich or popular? Idolized by most, regardless of how they got there.

Someone who discovers something ground-breaking or does work which positively impact lives? Appreciated by few, ignored by almost everyone else.

This paradigm gets embedded in cultural expectations. Coupled with a need for validation or acceptance, it causes many people to structure their goals around climbing and maintaining a cultural hierarchy rather than, say, trying to make an impact on any scale. It’s sourced in the erroneous belief that if everyone just pursues what actions are best for them, it’ll end up working out best for everyone overall. The end result is that we lose sight of those broader, more serious issues that need to be addressed.

But it’s not fair, either, to blame people for simply wanting to do what they feel will improve their self-image or their perception of their own value, whatever that may involve. So the big question is, how can cultural templates be developed that align self-empowerment with efforts that address and try to solve these broader problems?

Good advice is well-intentioned and is comprised of good content that could be useful to someone in a particular predicament.

Effective advice is not only good, but it is also delivered in a way that takes into account what the other person is receptive to and understanding of, making it more likely for it to actually contribute towards helping them.

The difference is communication. Don’t underestimate it.

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FYI, I’m going to write an upcoming Snip about the Art of Advice Giving. Keep an eye out for it!

*sigh of relief* *does a little dance*

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You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Recently, this blog just got a good influx of new followers (thanks to Liv @ Yeah Write - you’re awesome), so I just thought I’d take some time out to give everyone the quick and dirty about The Outside Angle. I also just re-organized and did some housekeeping in the last hour, so hopefully things are less cluttered.

Hi new followers!

I’m glad that something perked your interest about this blog and I hope that you find the rest of it interesting enough to stick around. 

TOA is a blog that looks to flesh out what drives people or groups to behave in the diverse ways that we do. It’s a bit of psychology and social commentary, but a lot more informal and observation-based. It tries to be more relatable than say, an academic article, but it still tries to retain respect for the breadth of whatever topic an article is discussing. Just remember that at the end of the day, it’s all just my opinion and thought on the matter and everything is always up for discussion and improvement. I always have more to learn, and that excites me.

For more about the blog and its off-the-wall author, see the “About the Blog” tab. 

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All of the articles on the various topics can be found in the “Current Angles” tab. Everything written here is original content, and will fall into one of a few types of posts:

Series: Full-blown, multi-article discussions of a general topic or theme (like Relationships or Self-Identity). These can get pretty long, so I’d recommend taking them one article at a time, maybe even in parts. 

One-Offs: Single, full-length article discussion of a particular theme. 

Snips: Shorter articles on more specific topics (like Friend-Zoning)

Pet Peeves: Expressions and explanations of things from social environment that bug me and why. Maybe some of these things happen to bug you too!

Questions: These are questions I’ve posted to provoke thought, usually with my own take on the subject attached. 

Thoughts: These are short quotes that I came up with regarding various things. Some of them come with a short explanation.

Special Features: These are posts that are addressed to or are about a specific audience (like Writers!)

Updates don’t occur on any regularly scheduled basis, unfortunately. I write for this blog in the fringes of my 50-ish hour work week and when I’m not involved with my other hobbies, so articles are posted with almost random timing. I try to keep the blog active in the gaps with the shorter-type posts, however. Some posts also need serious editing writing-wise (see About the Blog), which I’ll get to eventually, but I haven’t quite found the time yet.

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Anyway, here are a few of what has seemed to be the more popular posts (I guess?) of TOA as a sample of what goes on around here. Since many of you are writers like me, some of these can be interesting to keep in mind when you’re developing characters or worlds for your stories.

Snip: What making a big deal about “Friend-Zoning” says about how we view personal interactions - How people are prone to turning personal interactions into a business of emotional commodities.

Snip: Why It’s Important to Differentiate Between Cultural and Natural Influences - We plan our behavior around what we perceive as ‘natural’, whereas we try to change or affect things that we perceive as ‘cultural’. Mistaking one for the other is the cause of systematic discrimination and is damaging for society.

Question 16: Does developing the motivation to pursue something require that one initially idealize it to some extent? What about vice-versa? - What’s behind the notion of ‘fake it ‘till you make it’

Series: Necessary but Not Sufficient Conditions Issue 1 - Being Similar to Your Partner, but Different - Being complementary is more important to a working relationship than just similarities or differences.

I’m not generally a fan of the phrase “write what you know”.

I don’t have anything against the content of that phrase. It points out a very simple but powerful concept about writing by telling a writer to draw from what they know about their outlook, experiences and observations. The problem I have with this phrase is that it trivializes an obstacle that most of us – writers or not – tend to have: that we don’t always know what we know.  

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Probably nonfiction, some extended discussion of my viewpoint on self-identity or something along the lines of the topics I talked about here. Except more concise, edited, and cleaned up (as opposed to the fairly raw brain vomit that comes out here). 

I don’t even care about it getting published or not, I just want to write it for the sake of it. (It probably wouldn’t be something that would sell very well either - so it’d be good to not have that pressure when writing it). 

Just a thought.

The article includes an introduction and 5 bite-sized parts. 

Introduction

1.1. Disclaimers and declaration of perspective 

1.2. What should you be taking away from your social sciences and humanities classes?

1.3. Why is being educated in social sciences and humanities important?

1.4. Why do people hate on the social sciences and humanities?

1.5. Why it is important for social sciences/humanities educators to be open minded? 

Introduction

1.1. Disclaimers and declaration of perspective 

1.2. What should you be taking away from your social sciences and humanities classes? (This Post)

1.3. Why is being educated in social sciences and humanities important?

1.4. Why do people hate on the social sciences and humanities?

1.5. Why it is important for social sciences/humanities educators to be open minded?

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I feel that since most social science and humanities subjects are not as quantitative as hard science and engineering subjects, it becomes unclear to many as to what exactly one is supposed to be learning in these fields. I’d often hear people ask something along the lines of ‘when am I ever going to use the knowledge of what was happening in Europe in the 1700s or ‘who cares about what the theme is in this old ass story’ or whatnot. This is in contrast to subjects like math and physics, where while many people dislike these subjects for one reason or another, it is not as likely on average that people would question the need for someone to care about their subject material.

This lack of clarity occurs not in the subject definition, but in the applicability of these subjects or the process of learning them to something that people can relate to. This is strongly compounded by the fact that many teachers and professors of social science and humanities subjects at all grade levels sort of use their position as a vehicle for imposing their opinions on society and the world on their students. If a student is exposed to teachers or professors of conflicting specific opinions and their grade is on the line each time, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the subject would lose credibility in their eyes. Add in the fact that for many of these subjects, there isn’t a superstructure for one to resort to when evaluating whether something they’ve learned is on the “right” track or not, confusion arises.

So let’s start with some definitions after the jump.

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Introduction

1.1. Disclaimers and declaration of perspective 

1.2. What should you be taking away from your social sciences and humanities classes?

1.3. Why is being educated in social sciences and humanities important?

1.4. Why do people hate on the social sciences and humanities?

1.5. Why it is important for social sciences/humanities educators to be open minded? (This Post)

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At its core, the skills gained from a proper social science and humanities education can be somewhat powerful if one is skilled at applying them. Being able to understand where people are coming from and using that understanding to perturb their behavior can potentially accomplish a lot of things by affecting people’s perceptions and such. These skills form sort of a double-edged sword: they can be used to clear up a lot of bullshit about how people behave or, in contrast, create a lot of fallacious perceptions for how people behave. There is a thin line between these two, and it is important that for these fields to be valuable to society, educators keep to one side of the line. More after the jump.

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