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From an old Reddit post: When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”
Spot on! Also, “I should [verb]” is a comparison of my choices with a standard I got from someone else if I can’t truthfully say “I want to…” or “I need to…” in its place. If that replacement doesn’t help, I can try replacing it with “I could…” or “I can…” to replace obligation with opportunity and maybe even place it in my Next Actions queue, pre-choosing it in a way.
There’s also “I should be able to…” which is a similar dynamic relating ability to worth.
Reminds me of Jubal Harshaw
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
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There are different shoulds with different meanings, so we can’t know what is behind the should without more information.
“I should pick up the new video game” may involve simply “I want to play the video game as it is pleasing”
“I should work out” may involve “I know intellectually that working out will ultimately lead to more enjoyment, yet it’s hard to appreciate this as it is so displeasing”
“I should work out” may alternatively involve “I am going to criticize myself for not doing something which will bring me more value”; or is may involve many other things
Even “worthy of love and respect” is hopelessly vague:
A parental or divine love means “I am treating myself reasonably and with the greater good in mind, knowing I don’t have to sweat and stress myself
By love we may mean “highest self-valuation”, and this in turn can be reinforced through either positive reward or fear of hating oneself depending frame of mind
Respect may mean dignity, as in basic respect, or it may mean an aspired-to respect
For a lot of these, there’s a juggling of pain and reward. A person looking out the window saying “I should go on a run” may have has feelings about this utterance change in real time as he watches the weather and thermometer change. We can never know whether our future pleasure is actually secured when we invest some displeasure. “I should try to get that girl’s number” can quickly lead to “I should never have tried to get that girl’s number”.
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I’m not exactly convinced. For some things, things that are in some way visible to other people, that people see as good things, I could buy it as a good mental model. But I should (study more, eat better, reduce screen time, etc.) I just don’t see where the “worthy of love and respect” comes in. Often, I don’t even bring up what I’m doing to other people simply because it’s not about other people.
In wellness support groups among people with existing persistent unhealthy self-talk, talking about “should” statements usually involves examining whose expectations, standards, or priorities are bundled into that “should”. There’s nothing wrong with the self-owned or logical should as long as one recognizes the unspoken imperative which by its very nature involves an emotion, however dispassionate:
I get that, and I’ve seen people do it in toxic ways. I just don’t see it as something that always and universally applies to everyone in all situations. Sometimes I think self-improvement ideas can overfit just because the techniques are developed for those settings are developed to rehabilitate the sick and don’t necessarily carry that baggage for those who are not sick. I want to learn formal logic and statistics because I think they’re useful tools for understanding the world. I want to write stories because it’s an interesting and fun hobby. Saying I should study in the context of self study to better myself, or I should work out so I don’t have a heart attack at 50, or I should finish my short story— these don’t necessarily have anything to do with other people.
What’s somewhat worse to me is that in some cases, that kind of assumption can end up being just as much of a guilt trip as the original “should” thought. If everything you tell yourself you should do is really about meeting other people’s expectations, then why do anything to improve yourself? Why exercise if you are only doing it to impress others? Okay, but then you will probably end up obese and are in poor heath. Why finish that story if you’re only trying to impress people? The alternative is another failed project that you started and didn’t finish and then you feel like a loser because you don’t actually do anything. Why learn? The alternative is that you live in Sagan’s demon haunted world where you can’t make good decisions because you have no idea how anything works and don’t have the tools to figure in out.
I think a lot of mental health advice ends up that way: designed to help people with severe problems, and works pretty well there, then gets applied to the general population and not only doesn’t help, but can create the problems that it was intended to prevent. Asking whether you’re doing something to people please is reasonable if you have a severe problem people pleasing. But for most people, shoulds are what gets them off the couch and into motion and doing things that they really should be doing. You should accomplish things. You should study and build a career. You should keep up your house or apartment. And on things like ruminating on your feelings, for normal healthy people, this can make them feel depressed because they focus on the negative feelings produced by events in their lives and over time talk themselves into anxiety and depression.
And that's why I posted it in the Wellness Wednesday thread as mental wellness advice instead of the Friday Fun thread as lexical insight porn.
As far as agonizing or guilt-tripping over whether a given "should" is a problematic should inspired by bad boundaries or anxiety or low self-worth etc., sounds like an anxiety problem I don't have and thus don't need to worry about.
In other words, I shouldn't worry about shoulds, and nobody should worry about my shoulds either. And I don't, except when someone makes a particularly poignant or potent point.
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I suppose, to the extent that love and respect of our fellow humans is one of the core human motivations. You could go one step further and say “in order to secure my lineage”, or just “to be happy”. But I don’t think that’s really a conscious thought.
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Do people really process language in this way? It doesn't feel like that internally to me. All these phrasings are basically equivalent and I certainly am not consciously making a distinction between them.
I, also, always got mad when my friend's mom wouldn't give me a cookie if I asked, "Can I have a cookie." No I'm not still mad, why should you ask, or is it would you ask?
Sort of yes, but not in the way I think you’re asking about. This post is about a few of the wellness-related emotion-based implications used by an unhealthy subconscious which uses “should” to smuggle a personal negative judgment in with a prioritization statement. As a person with autism, I have found that stating the exact implications of my innocuous statements can cleanly uncover my subconscious/unconscious expressing someone else’s emotions as if I’d originally generated them.
My “should” analysis hit me hard since I’ve been working on the unconscious portion of my weight problem lately with some success. I’d returned to “should” emotion-statements without noticing: “I shouldn’t eat, I’m full” instead of the decisive “I won’t eat” or the confessional “I want to eat”, “I should be able to turn down food” instead of the opportunistic framing “I can”, and so on. My own big realization struck whilst reading about someone with ADHD recounting making the statement “I should be able to focus” who was then told by their therapist ‘When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”’
Neither the human seeking of self-esteem, nor the akrasiatic self-negation of unworthiness emotions, care about the logic of inability/disability. They are of a different nature than logic.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YWmIlGQmuvU
Yeah, yeah, but it does take a while to work out which estimations of one’s worth and abilities are just delusions and which ones model reality.
The mind can be as hallucinatory as an LLM on the small details, especially since, as an autistic person, my learned understanding of emotions is basically prosthetic for my missing emotional instincts.
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I don't. Suppose I say "I should trim back the plants in my yard," this is silently followed up by "in order to better enjoy spending time in my yard."
Perhaps when my mother was younger there was some hope left for "may" vs "can" when making requests, but that ship has sailed, and I think she may have given up on it.
I'm about to give up on "cut" in the past tense, the kids seem to be losing some irregular past verb forms.
What do you mean by this? I am genuinely confused, but I don't interact much with younger children.
"He cutted!!!" for skipping ahead in a line. I can't remember if they say they cutted the paper or not, I think it might go both ways.
Oh! I think I heard that even as a child for cutting in line. But, not often. It might get corrected later in life and die out. Kids often misuse language and correct later, but sometimes the mistakes get adopted as the correct usage.
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