I think there are at least two levels where you want change to happen—on an individual level, you want people to stop doing a thing they’re doing that hurts you, and on a social level, you want society to be structured so that you and others don’t keep having that same/similar experience.
The second thing is going to be hard, and likely impossible to do completely. But the first thing… responding to this:
It wouldn’t be so bad, if I only heard it fifty times a month. It wouldn’t be so bad, if I didn’t hear it from friends, family, teachers, colleagues. It wouldn’t be so bad, if there were breaks sometimes.
I think it would be healthy and good and enable you to be more effective at creating the change you want in society, if you could arrange for there to be some breaks sometimes. I see in the comments that you don’t want to solve things on your individual level completely yet because there’s a societal problem to solve and you don’t want to lose your motivation, and I get that. (EDIT: I realize that I’m projecting/guessing here a bit, which is dangerous if I guess wrong and you feel erased as a result… so I’m going to flag this as a guess and not something I know. But my guess is the something precious you would lose by caring less about these papercuts has to do with a motivation to fix the underlying problem for a broader group of people). But if you are suffering emotional hurt to the extent that it’s beyond your ability to cope with and you’re responding to people in ways you don’t like or retrospectively endorse, then taking some action to dial the papercut/poke-the-wound frequency back a bit among the people you interact with the most is probably called for.
With that said, it seems to me that while it may be hard to fix society, the few trusted and I assume mostly fairly smart people who you interact with most frequently can be guided to avoid this error, by learning the things about you that don’t fit into their models of “everyone”, and that it would really help if they said “almost all” rather than “all”. People in general may have to rely on models and heuristics into which you don’t fit, but your close friends and family can learn who you are and how to stop poking your sore spots. This gives you a core group of people who you can go be with when you want a break from society in general, and some time to recharge so you can better reengage with changing that society.
As for fixing society, I said above that it may be impossible to do completely, but if I was trying for most good for the greatest number, my angle of attack would be, make a list of the instances where people are typical-minding you, and order that list based on how uncommon the attribute they’re assuming doesn’t exist is. Some aspects of your cognition or personality may be genuinely and literally unique, while others that get elided may be shared by 30% of the population that the person you’re speaking to at the moment just doesn’t have in their social bubble. The things that are least uncommon are both going to be easiest to build a constituency around and get society to adjust to, and have the most people benefit from the change when it happens.
I think there are at least two levels where you want change to happen—on an individual level, you want people to stop doing a thing they’re doing that hurts you, and on a social level, you want society to be structured so that you and others don’t keep having that same/similar experience.
The second thing is going to be hard, and likely impossible to do completely. But the first thing… responding to this:
I think it would be healthy and good and enable you to be more effective at creating the change you want in society, if you could arrange for there to be some breaks sometimes. I see in the comments that you don’t want to solve things on your individual level completely yet because there’s a societal problem to solve and you don’t want to lose your motivation, and I get that. (EDIT: I realize that I’m projecting/guessing here a bit, which is dangerous if I guess wrong and you feel erased as a result… so I’m going to flag this as a guess and not something I know. But my guess is the something precious you would lose by caring less about these papercuts has to do with a motivation to fix the underlying problem for a broader group of people). But if you are suffering emotional hurt to the extent that it’s beyond your ability to cope with and you’re responding to people in ways you don’t like or retrospectively endorse, then taking some action to dial the papercut/poke-the-wound frequency back a bit among the people you interact with the most is probably called for.
With that said, it seems to me that while it may be hard to fix society, the few trusted and I assume mostly fairly smart people who you interact with most frequently can be guided to avoid this error, by learning the things about you that don’t fit into their models of “everyone”, and that it would really help if they said “almost all” rather than “all”. People in general may have to rely on models and heuristics into which you don’t fit, but your close friends and family can learn who you are and how to stop poking your sore spots. This gives you a core group of people who you can go be with when you want a break from society in general, and some time to recharge so you can better reengage with changing that society.
As for fixing society, I said above that it may be impossible to do completely, but if I was trying for most good for the greatest number, my angle of attack would be, make a list of the instances where people are typical-minding you, and order that list based on how uncommon the attribute they’re assuming doesn’t exist is. Some aspects of your cognition or personality may be genuinely and literally unique, while others that get elided may be shared by 30% of the population that the person you’re speaking to at the moment just doesn’t have in their social bubble. The things that are least uncommon are both going to be easiest to build a constituency around and get society to adjust to, and have the most people benefit from the change when it happens.