: Kind of sad but kind of not. An old friend I have known for 35 years fucked up his life exactly the way I told him he was fucking up his life back then and how it was going to turn out if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing with the attitude he had. Well, he’s 60 at the end of the year, and it’s one of those cases where I quip but am serious that I hate being right so much. He is in a bad, bad spot that nobody can help him with. Actively burned too many bridges, he did, some of them…
^^^^ (Cont’d.)
…even gleefully. That wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t been the wrong ones to burn, which means that, yes, he kept traveling on the ones lead him to where he is now. All of those “friends” were playing but according to the trick, just “living life as it came at them”, i.e., fake AF for fun and profit. Truly I hate it for him. It’s a real tragedy because he wasn’t brought up the way he is, quite the opposite. He is where he is because he rebelled so hard against his parents.
^^^^ (Cont’d.)
I do know the many, many factors that have gone into it, since his young childhood. He and I and his family and I were very close for a very long time. To greatly oversimplify but still be absolutely spot on, He made generally purely emotional decisions, almost all of which were bad for him, and he used his genuinely formidable intelligence to rationalize, played rhetorical games to be correct. Emotional dysregulation and self-deception doesn’t get the credit they deserve.
@thedisasterautist
Really sad he had formidable intelligence, but not the ability to learn what he was doing to harm himself. I suspect some people never learn the habits that harm them.
@thedisasterautist
I am sure we all have gaping blind spots we will never see. This is the benefit of people who love us. It certainly isn't always easy to hear. But if it can improve our life? It is worth it.
@CinnamonGirlE: In my experience, most do not. If I were to ballpark it, then I would say maybe one-third do over the course of their lives. That’s why I say emotional dysregulation and emotional self-deception do not get the credit they deserve. I know plenty of highly intelligent people, brilliant people even, and they have the emotional self-awareness of a wet cinderblock. They intellectualize their emotions into facts, objective reality, logic and go from there.
Vanity. Greed. Pride.