Table of Contents
1. Forword: Why God Wants You to Write Your Own Bibles
2. The Heart
5. Flashes of an Alternate Universe #1
6. Flashes of an Alternate Universe #2: Depending on How You Look at It [EXPLICIT]
7. The Same Neighborhood! (video)
8. I'm the Gamer! (video)
9. "Listen up, you partisan screwheads!"/"I will turn your culture wars into a new Olympics!" (memory of a lecture given out into nature itself when every other avenue for exercising my freedom of speech had been taken away)
Melody narrowed her eyes. Not her normal bright blue ones, but the hidden intangible ones. She saw a thin string connecting Bessie with her boyfriend. It was pulled as tight as it could be. It wouldn't take much more for it to snap altogether.
"Melody? You still there?"
Melody snapped back to her normal eyes. She was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling with her cellphone resting next to her ear.
"Yeah, I'm still here," she said. "Have you actually talked to him about this?"
"Yes, but he just won't--" Bessie started, but Melody cut her off, a touch impatiently.
"I don't mean an argument. I mean did you really talk to him? Like, you say you don't know what his problem is. Did you actually ask him how he feels? Not demand, ask."
The answering silence told Melody all she needed to hear.
"God, why are you talking to me right now? You could be talking to him instead!"
"Because I don't know what to do, and you always give good advice..."
Melody took a deep breath. Counted to ten. Let it out.
"Bessie, it's 1 o'clock in the morning, and I have work at nine. If you don't talk to Bryan as soon as possible and reassure him that you're still into him, he's going to dump you."
"You sound awfully certain of that," said Bessie, suspiciously. "Has Bryan been talking to you then?"
"Oh for the love of--" Melody started angrily, then stopped herself. 1 o'clock in the morning.
She sighed.
"Wait, you're not still telling people that you can see relationships, are you?" asked Bessie, sounding annoyed.
Melody pinched the bridge of her nose.
"I'm not getting into this argument with you again, Bess," she said firmly. "I don't care if you believe me or not. But if Bryan dumps you it will be just as much your fault as his. I won't say I told you so, but you'll know I'm thinking it. Now let me go back to sleep."
"Alright," said Bessie, apologetically. "Sorry for waking you up, I just--"
"It's cool," Melody told her. "Next time call Bryan instead of me. Tell him you miss him and that I said hi. Okay?"
"Alright," said Bessie. "Good night Melody."
"Good night," said Melody, and hung up. She turned on the "do not disturb" setting, then turned off herself shortly after.
So it's occurred to me that there are too many people who don't know how to understand, relate to or talk to those with different political views than their own. If you've ever thought something like, "I just don't understand people like that. How could they do and believe such crazy things?" then here are some nifty tricks to help you learn how to do just that.
1. Values before facts. Your goal is to connect with the other person, establish trust, and share your thoughts, feelings and perspectives with each other. NOT to prove them wrong or change their behavior. Persuasion on specific issues can come later. First you need to find common ground and build the relationship, which arguably is more important anyway.
2. Listen without judgment. Understanding someone else requires temporarily taking on their perspective, looking at the world through their eyes and seeing what they see, "stepping into their shoes" as it's often said. Don't filter their paradigms through your own while listening to them, because then you're not really listening. Temporarily remove all your assumptions (even when those assumptions are valid and true!) and just hear them out.
3. Steelman the other person and their perspective. Imagine your way into the mind of the most reasonable, normal, human version of the person you're talking to. That's probably who you're actually talking to, or close enough to start connecting with. The person you're talking to is a human being, so if your mental picture of them doesn't pass the Ideological Turing test* then it's probably a strawman.
These three rules of thumb won't make you an expert communicator overnight, but they should be enough to get you started on reaching people across the political divide. Try it, see how it goes!
*The Ideological Turing Test
Your loneliness isn't your fault. You are not ugly, you are not a bad person and you are not "undatable". If you actually look at all the people who are complaining about their lack of a love life, and compare to the ones who are in loving relationships, you will realize that there is often no pattern, no rhyme or reason for why some people have it and others don't.
The problem isn't just that you in particular can't find love, it's also that those who would love you if they knew you can't find you. Because without the community infrastructure, the social connections and networks to point us in the right direction and help narrow the search, we're all looking for a needle in a haystack!
For the most part that infrastructure just doesn't exist right now. In its place we have dating apps, which are terrible at helping people find compatible matches because they're software and not human beings. The software doesn't understand human beings well enough to understand what we need out of our relationships and who we would enjoy and fit with best.
You deserve to be loved, and there are many compatible people out there who you could find happiness with if only you could find each other. But right now whether you find each other or not is dependent on an unfair lottery. The odds of your finding each other are often very slim. Improving yourself, your appearance or the way you interact with others may have very little impact on those odds if at all.
We need to bring back human matchmaking. Fill out this quiz and share your answers with a trusted friend or community member. Have them recommend people to date or others who can give you recommendations.
Please share this message and the quiz with all your friends. We can make the world a more loving place.
Thank you.
It's not your individual flaws that keep you isolated. The community infrastructure just isn't there. Human matchmaking has mostly died out in the modern era, and computer programs usually don't understand people well enough to make decent recommendations for potential dates. And as for finding communities or relationships of the non-romantic kind, there aren't any apps for that let alone human specialists.
This is a civilization-wide problem, and the only way to fix it is to build the infrastructure, to forge connections between different communities and expand our social networks so that we humans ourselves can be the matchmakers we need.
Also, fixing this problem will go a long way towards getting humankind to work together better on solving other important problems, including ones that threaten humanity's very existence like global warming and excessive automation. After all, when people are better connected to each other they also are better at working together.
We can do this. We got this.
