Xenon
(blankpages)
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2009
- Messages
- 832
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5
Not to be stepping on toes here but...doesn't this sort of concern you? I mean it must take a tremendous amount of energy alone to "feel" for so much in the world. I know my ENFJ is sympathetic and there are things that really effect him but he is more like the majority of replies in this thread. Of course I am asking because I honestly have no grasp of this. The Amy Winehouse thing got a....wow....I didn't see THAT coming....and then I didn't think about it again.
Yeah, this was my reaction too. I'm nothing like that, and when I read about it I think, 'Wow, I wonder what that's like. That must be exhausting'. ('I wonder what that's like' is a reaction I have a lot on this board when different types are describing their thinking processes.) It's hard to imagine. For the most part I don't feel anything at all in reaction to news stories or far-away tragedies, other than this vague sense of guilt in the back of my mind because I wonder if I should be feeling more than I do. But I can't make it happen any more than someone who is very sensitive to tragic news can stop it. I feel strong compassion only rarely, mostly only for a certain few people, at times that can be hard to predict or even understand.
It probably is type-related. Of course, that hardly means it's entirely dependent on type: Marm was talking about unresolved grief or depression, and SilkRoad mentioned a friend who had lost a boyfriend in a crash and then overreacted to MJ's death...I really think that sort of thing - a disproportionate reaction to one thing because it triggers something else inside you - can happen to anyone.
I don't get disrespect for tragedy either. I know jokes are supposed to be one coping mechanism. But just outright disrespect for its own sake, why? Why not at least respect the fact that some people are legitimately grieving this tragedy? Some people always seem to have to make a point or something. I just loved (er, not...) how some non-Americans were like "I don't know why the Americans made such a big deal of 9/11. What a bunch of patriotic crybabies. When there are millions of people dying of other causes every day." I just think...yeah, wait till your country is hit by a terrorist atrocity or you lose someone by mass murder. Then see how you like it when I call you a whiner and a crybaby.
While I would not defend this sort of behaviour (and 'people die all the time, therefore you shouldn't care too much about these particular deaths' is an absurd thing to argue), I do think I get the annoyance behind it. I think a lot of it comes from that guilt I was talking about. I can get annoyed with these big, public grief sessions because they just give me this niggling sense that I should be feeling something I don't feel, or that I have some obligation to at least pretend to feel something, and if I don't put up an act then I'm an asshole. And I hate that. So sometimes people can defensively turn that around and pretend there's something wrong with the people who do care instead.