DailyJim: The dangers of not imagining how other people are feeling

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today, this is the episode, okay it's slightly afterwards, this is the episode for Tuesday, July 16th, 2024. Today I want to talk about the dangers of not imagining how other people are feeling.

So this came up in two conversations, at least two conversations over the last two days. And i think when we disconnect from imagining how other people are feeling we can actually put ourselves into a lot of danger now i also think it's a danger when we disconnect from how we're feeling but i can talk about that in another episode and bring them all together perhaps, but this idea is that often we disconnect from how somebody else is feeling i asked somebody buddy, how do you imagine I might be feeling right now? And they said, I don't want to imagine how you're feeling right now. Just tell me. I said, no, it's different though if I tell you than if you imagine it.

She didn't get the point. I talked to another friend and she was in a relationship issue and the guy said, you're not considering how I'm feeling.

And for me to consider how someone feeling is different than listening to how someone say they're feeling. And maybe you don't understand what I mean by the difference. So if you, if I'm talking with you and you tell me I'm angry.

Then I hear that you're angry, but it's different if I go in my head, well, I imagine this person might be feeling angry because now I've engaged my kind of imagination and the creative part of my brain to understand, oh, maybe what's going on. I started to explore, I started to investigate more about your context, more about what you might be feeling. So for example, if I think maybe you're feeling scared because of what's happening with the upcoming election. And this can apply to different countries, whatever. Ah, okay. And instead of you saying, I feel scared it's coming up to the election, I don't have to get you to say it for me to imagine it. And when I imagine it, I can start to imagine what you're feeling. I can start to try to make guesses and predictions on how you're feeling. It doesn't mean I am assuming with 100% certainty what you're feeling. It's just to start to connect to your emotions as a human. One, to humanize you, but two, to really predict your behaviors.

And this for me is where I think it becomes quite dangerous to not try to connect to how somebody else is feeling, to not try to imagine how somebody else is feeling. So just purely talking from a physical self-defense standpoint i remember taking classes of krav maga and just thinking about it if i go into a bar and i am not able to recognize when people are feeling angry in the bar i am in more danger because a fight doesn't just come out of nowhere typically somebody gets a little more angry maybe there's a little push maybe there's a little shove and then they'll whom and then somebody throws a fist. Maybe, you know, it's possible to recognize it in certain looks. It's possible to recognize it in maybe fists being clenched or somebody kind of puffing out the chest. These are things that can show us what other people might be feeling. So if somebody comes up to me and they're puffing out their chest and they're kind of like squeezing their fist, and they say that they're totally fine, you know, it's happy to see you. Like, to be honest, I'm going to listen to the words, but I'm going to respect what I believe that they're feeling. Because if the words are clashing with what the body is saying, from a safety standpoint, I don't want to get punched in the face. And so I start paying attention as well, if not more, to what I imagine they might be feeling in this context. Again, it doesn't mean I get it right. Sometimes I'll even ask, which can change the emotion sometimes and say, hey, you look like you might be feeling angry. They go, I'm not angry. Hey, okay, now you're angry. and maybe they weren't originally or they didn't realize they were originally.

But I find this idea of disconnecting from how somebody else is feeling I don't want to know how they're feeling I don't want to think about how they're feeling actually quite dangerous it's like walking into an alleyway blindfolded and being like oh yeah they robbed me I don't know why I got robbed because you were blindfolded you didn't see the potential threats not even like like just anger threats, but you just didn't see the potential emotions. It's like trying to navigate a maze with our eyes closed.

Sometimes, not sometimes, I'd say most of the time, when we feel emotions, it leads to different behaviors. If someone feels afraid, they don't respond to a message. If somebody feels really happy, they're going to respond. Why? If somebody's really happy, why wouldn't they respond? Unless they're very happy because they're very present with whoever they're interacting with, and so that's why they're not responding to the message. I'm not saying it's easy to predict with 100% certainty especially at a distance how somebody is feeling but the act of imagining how that person is feeling. Can one, lead to us predicting how they might behave and why they might be behaving in that way and two can help us stop thinking that we're surrounded by, dehumanized monsters that are trying to destroy us because the more that I imagine how other people are feeling, the more that I realize people are trying their best, man. So even if somebody cusses me out in interaction, I go, ah, okay, how do I imagine this person might be feeling when they think about their financial status? Hey, maybe they feel terrified. Maybe they feel proud. I don't know. Okay, what about their relationship with their parents? Maybe they feel grateful. Maybe they feel ashamed. Who knows? but just doing that whether it's right or wrong can help me see them as a human being, now if i can get more accurate with this then yeah i could even help predict the behaviors but just the idea of seeing them as a human being can help me want to engage with them again and want to figure out what's actually going on with them and not see them as a threat not see them as a um.

Yeah, a force trying to destroy my life or someone that doesn't care about me at all. I've done this exercise so many times and it makes it so much easier for me to quickly, quickly realize that people are just trying their best.

So if you find yourself calling somebody an asshole all the time or you think this person doesn't care about you, I strongly suggest just doing very simple exercises to imagine how that person might be feeling. And I wonder what society would look like if we did this just a little bit more often. And we realized that the other people out there, they care a lot. They may not want to admit that they care. Maybe they're afraid to admit that they care because they're afraid to care so much and afraid to lose themselves. And maybe that's a conversation for tomorrow about connecting to how we feel as well and doing both. But this idea of disconnecting from how other people are feeling, I just don't think it protects us much, if at all. Maybe in the short term, in the moment, because we're so overwhelmed, we want to, I don't know.

Let me see. Maybe if we don't, if we think that they're evil, then there's no way we will come close to them. And if we don't come close to them, there's no way that we will get hurt in theory, but it hurts to not get close to them because we're constantly fighting ourselves to not feel any type of affection towards them. So I would say even in the short term, it's not very good at protecting our hearts.

But yeah, anyways, that's the talk for today. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye. Peace.