I don’t mean to pooh-pooh your objection by having a knee-jerk suggestion—I take as given that you have high odds of having already thought of this, and that even implementing it doesn’t necessarily empty your point of all of its strength, but:
Here, what I think I do is view the traffic officer and the university professor as additional pieces of the environment that I need to take as given, and treat them as input/output devices from which I can get more-or-less optimal responses. So I may signal remorse to the traffic cop that doesn’t actually equate to suffering in my soul, because I understand that’s part of the toll system.
Ditto with the professor—it’s hard to do this without outright lying, and I strongly approve of a norm of “always say true things,” but I would try to say words that indicated awareness of a large cost, apology for the damage to the flow of the curriculum, acceptance of the standard penalty of a lower grade, and intentions to continue to improve my ability to prioritize and juggle multiple responsibility (along with acknowledgement of their sense that my priorities ought be different relative to their class). For me, some mix of all of that tends to produce a mollification of their response, because it doesn’t leave them feeling (given their sense that this should be a blow to me) that I haven’t heard and understood how serious this is.
Put another way, I try to acknowledge the absolute seriousness of the effects of my actions and their consequences, without broadcasting that I find them to be relatively unserious because my priorities are arranged differently. Usually, acknowledging absolute costs seems to be enough for me to dodge the punishment you’re referencing, and I don’t have to make any reference at all to the fact that I refuse to suffer on a relative level.
I think this is a reasonable suggestion that will help many people with the same problem. I also think it helped me when I adopted a somewhat similar algorithm, though it didn’t solve the bulk of the problem for me (it turns out to be very hard to acknowledge the absolute seriousness in a way that does threaten my internal locus of control and still satisfies the counterparts need to feel in control of the situation).
I might write a whole post about this at some point, since I think this specific problem has been the cause of at least 10-20% (and possibly more like 40%) of the emotional stress I’ve experienced over the last few years, and so I’ve put a lot of optimization power and thought into this.
I don’t mean to pooh-pooh your objection by having a knee-jerk suggestion—I take as given that you have high odds of having already thought of this, and that even implementing it doesn’t necessarily empty your point of all of its strength, but:
Here, what I think I do is view the traffic officer and the university professor as additional pieces of the environment that I need to take as given, and treat them as input/output devices from which I can get more-or-less optimal responses. So I may signal remorse to the traffic cop that doesn’t actually equate to suffering in my soul, because I understand that’s part of the toll system.
Ditto with the professor—it’s hard to do this without outright lying, and I strongly approve of a norm of “always say true things,” but I would try to say words that indicated awareness of a large cost, apology for the damage to the flow of the curriculum, acceptance of the standard penalty of a lower grade, and intentions to continue to improve my ability to prioritize and juggle multiple responsibility (along with acknowledgement of their sense that my priorities ought be different relative to their class). For me, some mix of all of that tends to produce a mollification of their response, because it doesn’t leave them feeling (given their sense that this should be a blow to me) that I haven’t heard and understood how serious this is.
Put another way, I try to acknowledge the absolute seriousness of the effects of my actions and their consequences, without broadcasting that I find them to be relatively unserious because my priorities are arranged differently. Usually, acknowledging absolute costs seems to be enough for me to dodge the punishment you’re referencing, and I don’t have to make any reference at all to the fact that I refuse to suffer on a relative level.
I think this is a reasonable suggestion that will help many people with the same problem. I also think it helped me when I adopted a somewhat similar algorithm, though it didn’t solve the bulk of the problem for me (it turns out to be very hard to acknowledge the absolute seriousness in a way that does threaten my internal locus of control and still satisfies the counterparts need to feel in control of the situation).
I might write a whole post about this at some point, since I think this specific problem has been the cause of at least 10-20% (and possibly more like 40%) of the emotional stress I’ve experienced over the last few years, and so I’ve put a lot of optimization power and thought into this.