MINUTES of a MONDAY #121
A couple of ideas to get your last days of 2024 and first days of 2025 off to a flyer
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Slán - Niall☘️ **
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BRAIN FOOD: Empathy Overload
“Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them. Instead of judging their innocence by their actions, we judge their actions by their assumed innocence, looking for the most sympathetic explanation for everything they do.
For instance, Lyle and Erik supporters sometimes argue the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their freshly murdered parents’ money was not a sign of greed but just more evidence they were traumatized, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.
Empathy produces fiction in the mind because it’s ultimately a form of imagination. The fact that movies and literature can easily make us empathize with fictional characters shows how easily our empathy can be hacked. This may explain why Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in the hit Netflix show Monsters, became convinced the brothers are telling the truth, and even visited them in prison. He had to put himself in Erik’s shoes as a fulltime job, but he never actually empathized with Erik; only with the idealized version of Erik he’d chosen to portray.”
on How Empathy Makes us Cruel and IrrationalSOUL FOOD:
“Against stupidity the Gods themselves fight in vain.”
Friedrich Schiller
LOL:
Michael Caine on going that extra air mile for a woman in a coffee commercial:
APPENDIX:
“I have no ambition to preside over a vast bureaucracy. That is why we have only nineteen clients. The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.”
David Ogilvy
A.O.B.
That’s it for #121, the last of 2024.
I wish you and yours a prosperous New Year on all fronts. May it bring nothing but good tidings.
Mind how you go out there - Niall