deserve is broken
- Written to a friend October 16th, 2020, & anonymized:
- I have often found it helpful, I guess kinda similarly to the "Nothing is Behind" thing although I hadn't made that connection until this moment, to completely hit reset on the entire idea of "deserve", and feel into what it's like to live in a world where nobody deserves anything because "deserving" is a confused concept like phlogiston.
- Importantly, this viewpoint is compatible with me saying "you didn't deserve the kind of shit you went through in your childhood. nobody deserves that." Which I hereby do say unto you, whoever you are: you didn't deserve the kind of shit you went through in your childhood. nobody deserves that.
- But then the question of "do I deserve this love I'm receiving?" kind of just dissolves. I think in practice when people think "I don't deserve this" (or wonder about this) they usually mean something more like "I deserve less than this", which affirms the concept of deserving.
- A caveat you probably don't need for various reasons but which I'll add for my own sense of thoroughness is that trying on this viewpoint can be potent, and without processing & integrating old feelings & experiences that are encoded with "deserve" (eg Bio-Emotive "worthless" core feelings) then it's possible to end up a bit compartmentalized by internalizing "I shouldn't be orienting to worthiness at all".
- Written to a friend February 9th, 2021
- I've thought about "deserve" a bunch and 2 things I have available are:
- 1. "deserve" seems weird and broken, but in a korzybskian sense, even if deserve is borked, it may be worth actively going and clearing up old things you currently confusedly think you deserve not to have
- so it might not make sense to say "I deserve nice things" because that's maybe entitled or something? but the contrapositive is actually a separate statement that is not wrong: "I don't deserve to be without nice things".
- likewise, "you don't deserve to be lonely your whole life", "nobody deserves to grow up in a shitty household", etc
- 2. the other useful frame on this is to think in terms of that-which-I-won't-settle-for-less-than.
- I've been using this in relation to the ideal partner thing
- there's a link between this and the old tangled meaning of deserve, in the sense that someone with less to start with might find themselves realistically needing to settle for less, or something (my inner blackpill critiques my models here—usefully, when I can keep it sandboxed) but that doesn't mean I ought to settle for less than what I think I can get
- (morally someone might say I should but the actual issue is whether I'm doing omniwins)
3 linked references
February 3rd, 2023
- brilliant articulation:
- > "deserve" perhaps needs a little unpacking here.
when we say "deserve" often we mean "refutation of deserve-not"
It's not that there is an obligation to provide these things
But that there is /no obligation not to/. No active undeservingness.