this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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My wife asked me to stop worrying about whether I was right, and instead focus on being helpful. Changing the way your mind works is quite difficult, but in cases like these, worth doing.
It might also harm you. Beware
Very much.
Taken to extremes, "it doesn't matter if you are right that we shouldn't stomp puppies, but you need to stop focusing on whether you're right and focus on being helpful to us"
I'm intentionally blowing it up to hilight how ridiculous it can be.
It is unsurprising that taking any situation to ridiculous extremes makes it ridiculous :P
I think that perhaps a lot of wisdom is taking things away from ridiculous extremes and understanding them in the context of the world that is, rather than the world that is-not. It's pretty easy to come up with contrived situations where nearly any given thing is absurd.
...but yeah lets do it anyway for fun, because this is the Internet, and what's even the point if we can't be weird. Usually the most efficient way to do reduce moral decisions to absurdity is to make it into a trolley-problem. So for example, the puppy ate the disarming codes for an armed nuclear weapon at a puppy farm, and is slowly getting away on it's cute, stubby legs. So you can either passively allow thousands of puppies to die, or actively stomp one.
The reality of course is couples arguing about trifling things, like minor expenses, housework, small behaviors, or whether to put a toilet seat down. We make our lives miserable for such petty reasons sometimes. I've realized I'd rather be wrong and make my partner happy, than be right and make her unhappy -- if at all practical. My mind is fairly rigid by nature -- it's just so easy for me to be an idiot-by-default in these matters.
As an aside, we eat dog in my country -- although I don't, it smells weird, it's expensive, and looks sketchy.
If I married someone who wanted to harm me, I have bigger problems.
Thankfully, I did not :)