I had often wondered about the cause of touchiness. What causes us to be so sensitive and explode in anger or feel hurt?
And I say that touchiness is one of the worst traits to have.
And I say that touchiness is one of the worst traits to have.
I had zoomed in on the feelings being damaged and / or on thoughts / rationality being damaged as the possible causes of this touchiness.
A damage to the thought is when, say, someone accuses you of dishonesty. If you are a very honest person, this is enough to get some of us into a rage. Unfortunately, we value external opinion so much that even an external untrue assertion can upset us.
In other people, a damage to our feelings is enough to get us all riled up. This damage may be because someone addressed us in the singular instead of in the plural. (This singular and plural form of addressing exists in many languages but not in English.) A damage to your feelings could also happen when someone uses abusive language at you or hits you or uses a loud intimidating tone. In all these cases, there is nothing done to or said about your character. In each of these cases, the issue is not one of whether what someone said was true or not, rather whether what was said or done was socially appropriate.
Essentially, the injury we feel is of two kinds. One, when what is alleged is untrue. Second, when what is alleged or said is hurting but where there is no question of falsehood of what was said.
When people tell you, that you were very harsh - the thing often forgotten is: whether what you said was untrue. Or just harsh but true. Our emotions step in and zoom into the how something was said, rather than allowing our rational thought to check whether the said thing was true.
Note that something very negative printed about you is not libel if the printed thing is true. The emotions in us would hate to accept this.
Note that something very negative printed about you is not libel if the printed thing is true. The emotions in us would hate to accept this.
Hence it's interesting to ask ourselves: are we upset more by harshness and the tone used? Or more by unfair allegations? What does each of these trigger in us?
It's one thing to be a nun and be called a whore. It's quite another thing to be a whore and be called one. Each of these may cause anguish in us and for very different reasons.
As DK said, the experiencing self is different from the remembering self (Read about DK and his book here: https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahnemann.html.
The remembering self, apparently, remembers the end and not a summary of all the events. Hence a social adept strategy is to always end an interaction well no matter how bad the earlier moments or years were. A socially inept strategy, on the other hand, is to end poorly.
Being humans we tend to place an inordinate emphasis on the end. An event that triggers a touchy response in us is enough to ingratiate itself in our remembering self, any positive memories from the experiencing self is locked out or squeezed small.
I guess the reverse is also true. You can change eons of poor experiencing self with a lovely finale. All is well that ends well.
Why is touchiness bad?
Because it erases any positive experiences and replaces them with the unpleasant remembering self. As I said in the beginning of this post, touchiness is awful.
Imagine if
100 - 5 = -4
And
-100 + 5 =4
The 5 standing metaphorically for the last social interaction. A negative sign indicates a negative interaction or negative memory. The 100 stands for the experiencing self. The remembering self is the sum value and equals almost the value of the last interaction while largely disregarding the experiencing self.
We then understand the importance we implicitly assign to the sign in our "mental maths".
It's one thing to be a nun and be called a whore. It's quite another thing to be a whore and be called one. Each of these may cause anguish in us and for very different reasons.
As DK said, the experiencing self is different from the remembering self (Read about DK and his book here: https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahnemann.html.
The remembering self, apparently, remembers the end and not a summary of all the events. Hence a social adept strategy is to always end an interaction well no matter how bad the earlier moments or years were. A socially inept strategy, on the other hand, is to end poorly.
Being humans we tend to place an inordinate emphasis on the end. An event that triggers a touchy response in us is enough to ingratiate itself in our remembering self, any positive memories from the experiencing self is locked out or squeezed small.
I guess the reverse is also true. You can change eons of poor experiencing self with a lovely finale. All is well that ends well.
Why is touchiness bad?
Because it erases any positive experiences and replaces them with the unpleasant remembering self. As I said in the beginning of this post, touchiness is awful.
Imagine if
100 - 5 = -4
And
-100 + 5 =4
The 5 standing metaphorically for the last social interaction. A negative sign indicates a negative interaction or negative memory. The 100 stands for the experiencing self. The remembering self is the sum value and equals almost the value of the last interaction while largely disregarding the experiencing self.
We then understand the importance we implicitly assign to the sign in our "mental maths".
We probably love dogs because they seem to place so little emphasis on "last minute remembering self". The experiencing self in them seems to be so overpowering.
Read: https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2018/07/inna-chethaarai-oruthal.html.
Essentially being touchy seems to very unfair in that it doesn't reward the experiencing self at all, focusing, instead, all the attention on the negative remembering self. Is it possible for us touchy people to consciously force ourselves to focus on the memories of the experiencing self?
Additional reading
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-nobel-prize-winner-daniel-kahneman-gave-up-on-happiness-1.6528513: Quote - "Moreover, we usually choose the next vacation not as an experience but as a future memory. If prior to the decision about our next vacation we assume that at the end all the photos will be erased, and we’ll be given a drug that will also erase our memory, it’s quite possible that we’ll choose a different vacation from the one that we actually choose.”
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