caring for what you want helps you not be an asshole ~
Often when we think of someone who is an asshole, we think about people who are assertive and controlling in a pretty obvious way. It's super easy for most folks to dunk on this kind of person.
But what is it really about people that tends to bother us? I'm friends with lots of people who are super different from me and that's what makes them interesting – even (especially?) when they are bombastic and assertive. I find people who are no bullshit about what they want and what they like sooo refreshing to be around.
So what is it that actually bothers me when I start to think someone is being a bit of an assh0le? I notice that, for me, it's when I start to think that they don't like themselves enough to care for what they want.
Woa woa woaaa ripple, I think the assholes in my life enjoy themselves TOO MUCH and care TOO MUCH about themselves! To that I say, yea I hear you... And I think there's a difference between self-absorption and caring for ourselves. And I think that some people who disregard themselves to a fault are actually bigger assholes than people who take up a lot of space.
But let's break down what I mean by self-absorption.... fair warning, I am going to go super deep and make some subtle distinctions here cuz this topic is actually really complicated...
Have you ever noticed something about yourself and been like, "What does that mean about who I really am?" Perhaps you were really vulnerable with someone and think "Oh maybe that means I'm selfish about getting attention." Or another time you didn't say no cuz you were nervous about sharing your discomfort and think to yourself "Maybe that means I lead people on." Or you follow your gut without hesitation and think, "Maybe I'm an impulsive person."
We are habituated to think of our actions and our us-ness as having these kinds of "essential qualities" that live outside of time and space and attach to us at the level of our very being. This infiltrates our perception of ourselves at a deep level. And can often make self-reflection feel like a wild goose chase. We keep trying to pin ourselves down. Am I intuitive or impulsive? Am I dishonest and leading people on or am I good at self-protection? Who or what am I really?
I notice that when I ask myself (and clients) what essential qualities like "dishonest" / "impulsive" / "selfish" actually mean, they break down. Like, what are specific examples of where you operated this way? What is the most accurate and caring way to name that? Often these big heavy labels get way more nuanced and complex. It's very different to name specific qualities within real interactions in the world than to slap a label or category on yourself.
Here’s how I think about it: None of these "essential qualities" that live outside of time and space are real in and of themselves. All concepts become real through our use of them to describe specific phenomena we experience – in real moments that take place. When we think of “essential qualities” as real in and of themselves, we are experiencing a phenomenon identified as "reification" – it's a trap of treating ideas like physical things, very similar to essentialism. I contrast reification with “identification” – where the specific qualities of particular things are named with a category. This is similar to the construction used in the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement on identity politics.[1]
Funnily enough, the common and contemporary sense of one’s “identity” is often a reification. People come out as queer or nonbinary and construct their identity based on oppression they have never experienced. “I am queer” does not mean “I am inherently queer and take on all that is queerness,” – it means “I have particular qualities that I name as queerness in myself and others have particular aspects of their own experience that share a characteristic that we name as queerness.” [2] Sharing identities is a kind of solidarity (if we are naming shared characteristics as well as differences) – but when we share a reified essential quality without mindfulness, those differences can disappear. Hiding differences is not solidarity, though it can certainly feel like it, especially when first learning about ourselves.
Now I’m not suggesting that we use that kind of word salad to talk in all everyday conversations (ex: "I have particular qualities that are shared in others that we name as queer" every time I want say "I'm queer" lol). I casually say many things that could be interpreted as reifications, even in this article (though I try to be as specific as possible). The distinction between liberatory identification and reification is not about the use of a certain language, but what we MEAN when we use our words (though being specific does help). Here’s an illustration of the difference in meaning-making:
Another great example of common reification is the thought that my behavior is the product of my mental condition – "I am my mental condition." While this is not an entirely untrue statement, it is also a half-truth. Mental health conditions are a result of real, intergenerational traumatic experiences and oppression. When used in the best way, mental health diagnoses are a description of a current state – not an underlying cause. In fact, they were originally created to hide these underlying causes (and continue this function). The mental health industrial complex exists and is based on diagnoses to hide the real roots of the USA’s mental health crisis (cough cough ridiculous levels of oppression and alienation cough cough). If this became truly apparent to most, the masses would gain power to rework the systems that harm us. Instead, we are told to reify our diagnoses as a part of our identity and as a full explanation for our behavior. No further analysis needed of the historical, material conditions of our lives. This is how oppressive reifications operate. As shitty wallpaper.
Reification wallpapers create a sense that what is happening in the world is already determined for us – hiding our agency to make our own meanings based on our own specific context.
The same thing is at play in more mundane situations – when we think anything like "this thing happened in my life because of some essential quality of being I have," even if it's a good quality. For example, "I enjoy Bella’s face because she is beautiful” is a favorite example of mine to illustrate this. Millions of people would chalk up their enjoyment of someone's face to an essential quality of “beauty.” Oooo how mystical! But beauty is immensely subjective and often dependent on the emotional history and nuance of those involved in a specific moment, not to mention cultural indoctrination into oppressive beauty standards. That real complexity enables me to develop my own ideas and perceptions. Reification of an essential quality of beauty hides all of that richness of experience. It creates rules for how we are supposed to feel and think, that come out through things like "How can you not be attracted to Bella? She is beautiful."
The influence to think in reified essential qualities is inescapable. We have all received thousands of messages that our experiences in the world are a reflection of who we truly are at some essentialized level. We are constantly told our life is the product of the flaws and advantages in our personality – our "essential qualities of being." Entire philosophies are dedicated to this way of thinking (See metaphysical idealism, e.g. Hegel, Kant, Plato, Aristotle).
But reification operates in more nasty ways than hiding how we construct "beauty" or confusing newbie queers. International systems of capital and systemic power collude deeply with this little quirk of human meaning-making. They tell us that if we are hardworking, beautiful, strong, smart, and good enough (by their standard) – that our lives will be good enough. This is a method of coercive control.
I was raised in a deep belly of this way of thinking: in a fundamentalist christian church and K-8 and high school community in the suburbs of Saint Louis. The message there was literally that we don't deserve this life. That we have to DO certain things and avoid other certain things to make us worthy of our own lives. That has fucked with my head my entire life – and is a lot of the reason I do this work.
Even those of us who grew up with ideal caregivers and decent groups of friends see thousands and thousands of advertisements and media where the implication is that if you are sexy enough (or insert any adjective) your life will be good (or something else will happen automatically). Or had some authority figure who implied that being XYZ kind of way means we'll be good enough to deserve to be cared for or at least deserve to not be punished. Implicitly, deserving to be cared for is a "deserving of life" itself. And deserving to be punished is a way of saying we are not deserving of care (not deserving of our life – functionally, deserving to die).
All these messages are reifications, implicit meanings about our essential qualities of being. They function to colonize our identities into general categories rather than locating us in our specific experiences and help us feel agency to create our own meaning.
Unfortunately, many radical counter-cultural movements follow these same threads, with inverted meanings:
Make the most captivating art and you'll have friends who love you unconditionally and ask you to hang out.
Be the most oppressed and you get to be right in every conflict and don't have to deal with other people's ethics or accountability.
Love your friends hard enough and do enough things for them and they will care for you in the ways you want.
But none of this is true fundamentally. There can be moments where these statements end up being true but that's because of what actually happened (like if you were oppressed in a way that others can't see so a particular conflict IS largely about your experience being made visible, acknowledged, and cared for – which you may or may not have the spoons to explain, especially when people can't take feedback). But this truth is not because you satisfied some "divine criteria" of making good enough art, being the most harmed, or doing enough work in relationships. It's because of what's relevant in specific situations.
The point is: the idea that any of these reified divine criteria / essential qualities determine our lives is a (and perhaps "the") boot of our oppression. Internalized unintentional reification makes us play by other peoples' rules to earn our place. As long as we are trying to achieve (or avoid) "being" an essential quality – or even just being perceived as one of those qualities – we are absorbed in our inner game (that's designed by others). Whether that essentialized quality is trying to be "revolutionary" or just "not bad," we lose our agency to make our own meaning in our lives. Paradoxically, this happens BY being absorbed in ourselves and our inner game.
But ripple uhh… what does this have to do with whether or not someone is being a dick and why I don’t like them?
I'm getting to that ok! But first, one more intersecting rant...
Developing the agency to make meaning of our own lives is not just a game of reworking the way we think, it's also intricately bound up with how we feel at any given moment.
As children, we all got conditioned with reifications in one form or another, almost always through real moments where we felt threatened – and where the way out of the threat was to "be good" or "be obedient" (or another ideal) to whoever held power to determine our achievement of the ideal or to restrict our care. Or maybe we picked up a shitty judgment of ourselves that implies we don't deserve care – that we functionally deserve to die. The body (which includes the brain) processes these thoughts as actual life threats – this is congruent with the meaning we are making! The safety systems in our nervous system come online as if there were a tiger in the room.
Even if we rebelled and reclaimed "bad" as "good," it's just running reverse down the same path – the internalized threat that we don't deserve this life unless we do a certain thing still creates a groove in our mental model of safety that's based on a way we’re supposed to be (or not be). Our body consciousness holds this memory. And since we learned to get safe by meeting or rebelling against expectations, we now associate the achievement of our ideal self (or avoidance of our worst nightmare self) as safety from these threats. It ends up feeling horrifyingly scary to think we might be outside of the safe conception of ourselves.
Reified essential qualities that make us deserving of life (or indicate what is not deserving of life) are like conceptual safe spaces we are told we can access with the right key and everything will be ok. Be real enough. Be right enough. Be angry enough. Don't be too normie. Don't do harm. Be accountable enough. Then you will arrive in "safety."
But these spaces are just that: conceptual. We cannot arrive and we cannot depart. We cannot “achieve” ourselves into safety. Especially not in the USA in 2025.
Our safety is not a concept. We have to relocate safety – not in the realm of divining my (or their!) essential nature – but in the real phenomena we experience. This means we need to assess actual threat and non-threat in material scenarios.
A gargantuan amount of non-threat exists in the world. We can attune to it as a resource. You know all the mundane beautiful things like flowers and bugs and rocks and your own hands and a bath and even the drywall in your apartment. There is no life threat there. It's just parts of the world, just being there. It pays to really let that in. Take a moment and just notice whatever is behind the screen you're reading this on. What does that feel like? Attuning to non-threat is like building a ground of pleasure and play to stand on. This helps us find agency to choose our responses to real threat.
And much real threat exists. And neoliberalism is soooo good at hiding it. "Self-reliance" norms are manufactured (see: Reagan) and combined with too-little-too-late support for people who can't get access to work that pays enough (which as we all know is basically everyone) creates more shitty reified wallpaper that hides folks' life-threatening oppression even from themselves. Our funding of the genocide in Palestine is done under the guise of "international aid." All American life exists with homelessness, not being able to pay medical bills, and isolation from community peeking over the horizon of our lives (or blazing fire either right outside our window or consuming us). And threat exists in mundane omissions of the truth in our friendships – we might not be in physical danger of tissue damage, but secrets (for example) deconstruct our access to community solidarity. This is another kind of real threat!
Threat exists even outside of human-made systems, animals eat each other. Seismic shifts in climate have occurred far before there were enough humans to cause it. Famines, flooding, fires, etc. all have existed for millennia and we've had to survive under those conditions. And we have these animal bodies that just get scared at shit because that's how we got enough safety to even have a consciousness in the first place. Rabbits get PTSD. "Trauma" is not just a "human-made ill." "Threat" is a part of the universe.
These bodies we have are so powerful and also quite fragile and limited. We all die eventually. There's no escaping "threat" for good.
We can certainly build resilience to threat. We can build attunement to non-threat as our ground to, through our agency and choice, engage with the real threats we encounter. We can reject the categories we have been assigned and build new ones – not in the sky, but from the ground up. We can build more and more space to just Be and to feel the erotic as power.
But we cannot disappear the existence of threat in the universe. Any attempt to do that will result in creating the exact violence we're trying to eradicate. Annihilating annihilation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We build the exact thing we are fighting. I'm not critiquing the use of violence to fight oppressive power. I'm saying that fascistic thinking originates within the urge to be completely safe. To create the "perfect society." To reclaim the homeland where we will finally be free. To get rid of all the abusers forever. To use other peoples' bodies so we don't have to feel discomfort. We must be very skeptical of these urges to get perfectly comfortable. I say "we" because we all have the capacity to be so self-absorbed that we casually discard (or eventually violently eliminate) the parts of the world that "aren't right."
Ok whew dang I really went in there. Let me take a breath. :D
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of things that are conspiring to make us self-absorbed and kind of assholes to each other. Our nervous systems' threat detection systems have been influenced to make us think we can ACT ourselves into security and safety. It's so trippy how this happens without any of this being said to us directly.
And the real point I'm trying to make is that the alternative to being self-absorbed is to care for ourselves. To include ourselves in our own lives. Deep down what we want for ourselves is actually in the interest of other people as well. We don't have to lose ourselves to be dedicated to the collective. We don’t have to lose ourselves to acknowledge the complexity of this very moment as you’re reading this. It's in these spaces that your agency to make meaning and Be you exists. Because you’re actually here reading this right now.
In fact, when people lose themselves in others (don't uphold their limits/boundaries) it's often because we are self-absorbed through the perceptions of other people. The times I have been most defensive and out of pocket (and also boundary-less & people please-y) are because I've been afraid of being judged with an essential quality about my being.
It's a reified idea of "human nature" weaponized by the power-elite that says we are essentially selfish and our desires are not to be trusted. When we think that about ourselves, that can actually be true. If I think I’m selfish, I’m going to act selfish because I'm self-absorbed. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when we zoom out and look at the universe and notice that we are a small but essential and unerasable part of this big fucking thing, how can we not care about all of everything? How can what we want deep down be selfish?
When we are stuck in trying to make things better or less bad just in and of themselves, that's when we really start to look like assholes. And it's where we stop caring for ourselves because we are so absorbed in stuff that supposedly means something about who we really are. I think a lot of the power-elite is in this mindset: "I have been chosen or selected by the universe to have this degree of power. Something about me is inherently awesome otherwise I wouldn’t be in this position and my rich-ass community reflects this back to me. Being a good steward of my power is to continue to solidify it." There are things that are true and not true about these statements! But do you notice all the essential qualities in there?
When we strip away these essential qualities and just take in the magnitude of all that exists and our connection to that through the body, the authentic desire remains (for me and the people I work with) to just Be and play and enjoy and build things that allow others to be like that too [3]. We can more easily see how some people are getting suuuper fucked over and that's not a necessary evil. And we can see that to build a world where people can just Be and play, we have to fuck some shit up and dismantle so much of our current systems (which will probably have to be violent). And that's not just to get rid of the way things are and hope that we can magically build something better just because we are intending to, but to be in the experiment of building a world where we actually care about what each other wants. Something that's not just an idealistic fantasy but a real place that deals with the real problems that come with Being. A place that gives people what they need to survive and the power to shape the world. A place that actually dreams its own future. When we are stuck absorbed in thinking about what we REALLY are or what everyone REALLY is we lose this ability to dream [4].
It's in the specifics of realizing these dreams that wires get crossed. When we want to be there for someone but don't know how to be and we hurt them in trying to care for them. When we want something better for everyone, speak to that, and people don't understand us. When we want something from someone and freak them out on accident. When we have to discern our truth in the face of a good critique. We don't know what other people want unless they tell us. There are LOTS of things we don't know – that makes us very limited beings. Even if we can dream expansive deep loving desires for the whole.
So, again, what is it that's actually bothering me when I start to think someone is being a bit of an asshole?
It's when I think people think they have to be Right about shit rather than just accept their desire in the moment. It's when people justify themselves (or shit on themselves inside) so they can’t show up and just be here with me. It's when I think people are absorbed in their reified identity. It's when I start to think they don't nurture and trust their own wants for themselves.
I think that's what makes it hard to just fucking say:
"Oh I don't really want to talk about something that intense right now" or
"Ah I'm not in the mood for pizza tonight" or
"Hey, I want to be close to you. Do you share that desire? Would you want to talk about ways we can be close with each other?"
Instead, we ask people to hang out and just make eyes at them, hope they touch our leg, get sad when what we want doesn't happen, and think about how we aren’t pretty enough. Or think of them as a "prude." Or make moves without asking because we are afraid of what it means about us if they reject us.
Or talk about the intense thing that we didn't want to because we didn't think we were justified to change the subject. Or we eat the pizza and have indigestion and then we feel resentful because WE OVERSTRETCHED OURSELVES.
Or when someone does something that really upsets us, we tell them they're doing shit all wrong and really need to fix themselves – instead of just revealing that when they canceled on us last minute that it hurt our feelings and that we are scared they don't like us as much as they used to. Or that we had to do a ton of work to clean up after them, that doesn't feel good to us, and we think they would wanna know if we’re feeling bad. Not to make them wrong and have to fix themselves, but so we can feel each others experience.
See what I'm doing? It's so easy to get stuck in justifications about who should be allowed to want what – when really, relationships are usually very simple. Ask for 100% of what you want and negotiate to agreement, ideally 100% of the time (see: cooperation theory).
That doesn't mean it's always easy to get to the simplicity. Remember the primary method of social control in the modern era is to put essential qualities on things (to reify) because this forecloses the dreaming of a new world. It mechanizes our relationships into "well they are just this or that way" so it's only natural that I'm angry and I have to either fight them or dispose of them. We think there's no use in fighting against the current systems of power cuz this is just the way things are and everyone is basically an idiot. Or we think that we need to kill every last oppressor so the world can be free of all that evil.
When really, all we need to do is attune to everything bigger than us, let that influence our desire, and trust what we want to keep showing us the way through our little lives toward a world that people have space to Be within. That likely involves really difficult things (like taking in really hard critique, doing tasks that are really uncomfortable, or letting yourself feel other people's pain), but they will be really difficult things that you actually want to do.
What you want actually does connect you to everything else in the world, especially if you think of yourself as more than just your body. And even though we are so limited and small, caring for what we want (and asking for it!) keeps us from being self-absorbed assholes. Especially, if you're making space for others around you to care for what they want too. We call this cooperation in Radical Therapy.
We still have to fight the fuckers that are ruining everything and making it hard for the masses to just Be... but we REALLY don't need to be self-absorbed to do that... in fact, that's what got us into this mess in the first place.
So what is it that you want deep down for yourself? This isn't a stupid, wasteful, or mundane question. And it is, also, very ordinary. AND we usually can't know the answer right off the top of our heads. It can't be known fully with words. This question takes a lifetime of living into, experimenting, and noticing to continually reveal itself. Some of the answers are inside of you right now. But so are more questions. The Zapatistas say "to walk asking questions" – meaning we allow the learning along the way to determine the way itself. We find the right questions within the way we feel about all that is around us, including the depths of horrifying ongoing worldwide genocide, pretty butterflies and grass and domesticated animals. The stones from which we build our path are found within relationality. And we need support that is unafraid to be audaciously centering what is it that YOU FEEL. That's not a reification. Just something I've noticed.
Caring for what we want is an audacious act in this culture of self-absorption. Let's make a new world where it's the only way to not be an asshole.
[1] - Since the world is a psychedelic fractal, the mirror image of everything I say is also true. There are ways that reifications can be beautiful and laboratory and while that isn't the focus of this piece. I hope to write further about that in a future work.
[2] - To discuss what exactly IS queerness is another matter, and maybe I’ll write about that someday.
[3] - Our conception of self can vary quite a bit between people and even within one person across a day. I can expand my conception of self right now to include the entire earth and that impacts the way I perceive the way my hands are touching the keyboard right now. And I can become quite small, even just a small part of my body like my head. I know many people who think of themselves as living entirely in their heads. And I see myself as just my head or my face sometimes too. What I think I am in a moment impacts what I feel I want. It's easy to get caught up in the Adjectives for What I Am which all impact what I start to feel that I want (those fuckin Essential Qualities). Oh, whoopsie – I'm all self-absorbed again.
And when there's an actual life threat near me due to the impending neoliberal slow death (which is constant), I need to maintain my body's integrity against that. I'll NEED to bring my awareness back to my body to protect it. But I don't NEED to get self-absorbed in my essential qualities.
[4] - The 7 principles of the Zapatistas are a beautiful depiction of what I'm trying to say here. I'll probably try to write something about how those have impacted me personally at some point.