Hardshipification
When I got cancer, all of my acquaintances turned into automatons. Everyone I had zero-to-low degrees of social contact with started reaching out, saying the exact same thing: “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you”. No matter how tenuous the connection, people pledged their emotional support — including my father’s wife’s mother, who I met a few hours every other Christmas. It was only a bit of testicle cancer — what’s the big deal? No Swedish person had died from it for 20 years, and the risk of metastasis was below 1%. I settled in for a few months of suck — surgical ball removal and chemotherapy. My friends, who knew me well, opted to support me with dark humour. When I told my satanist roommate that I had a ball tumour, he offered to “pop” it for me — it works for pimples, right? To me, this response was pure gold, much better than being met with shallow displays of performative pity. None of the acquaintances asked me what I wanted. They didn’t ask me how I felt. They all settled for a socially appropriate script, chasing me like a hoard of vaguely condescending zombies. A Difference in Value Judgements Here’s my best guess at the origins of their pity: 1. A person hears that I have a case of the ball cancer 2. This makes the person concerned — cancer is Very Bad, and if you have it you are a victim future survivor. 3. The person feels a social obligation to be there for me “in my moment of weakness”, and offer support in a way that is supposed to be as non-intrusive as possible. Being a Stoic, I rejected the assumption in step #2 as an invalid value judgement. The tumor in my ball didn’t mean I was in hardship. The itch after chemotherapy sucked ball(s), and my nausea made it impossible to enjoy the mountains of chocolate people gifted. These hardships were mild, in the grander scheme of things. I consciously didn’t turn them into a Traumatic Event, something Very Bad, or any such nonsense. I had fun by ridiculing the entire situation
This tracks with something I've been thinking about in terms of antagonistic and non-antagonistic social environments, where non-antagonistic ones are marked by trust, good intent, respect for boundaries, limited/benign power moves (scoring points by "outplaying" others socially). Generally marked by the kind of games the norms enforce; do they tend towards positive or zero/negative sum games? Also marked by how conflicts are resolved - subterfuge or mutual attempts at synthesis? Is it possible to "go meta" (or "go back channel") and resolve a situation?
I like how you're pointing at them being separate equilibria, with "light worlds" actively needing to defend themselves in order to stave off corruption. I've though in terms of... (read more)