Monday, November 19, 2018

Italy in 10 Days -- Hitchhiking

After we leave Rome, Daniel and I start hitchhiking. His theory:

It's a complex game.

First – logistics. You have to choose the road (motorway is faster, but more problematic; on local road it's easier to catch a ride, but it won't be that far) and place (you need to be visible, it's better if there is space to stop a car, and if cars don't go too fast in this particular place; bus stop after curve is great, but not too close to the curve).

Second – good first impression. The driver will see you for several seconds and you want to convince him you're a good person he wants to take. It doesn't matter how long you wait, if you're stressed or tired, you put it all aside and play a nice, chilled, positive person (which you immediately become right after someone stops).

Third thing – someone took you for a ride, then what? I treat it like an exchange – driver offers me transportation from A to B, plus I watch him and wonder what kind of person he is, how to talk to him, how to act (“be who they want you to be”, a game I play often, and for being a good player I get rewards in many places). What I give him is positive feelings, a smile, sometimes a story or an interesting thought. And company, of course.

All of this is especially interesting because in everyday life you don't meet real strangers. You meet your friends, their friends, but they aren't random, because you choose your friends and they choose theirs, so in fact people you meet come to you through a kind of a filter (hope you understand what I mean). And now you not only meet a stranger, you also sit in his car and try to follow his rules. I guess it helps to develop empathy / emotional intelligence / intuition.

Fourth thing – I say it's easy to tell everything about yourself to a person you just met and will probably never see again. You meet this kind of people not only in bars, but also during hitchhiking. One thing is you rather want to be subtle, because you don’t know the guy, but if it's this kind of person, when you feel kind of a connection, you can tell them anything you want and he will not call you three years later saying what he thinks about you. It's like talking with yourself in my opinion.

And the last thing is where they leave you. Sometimes you're left on the crossing in the middle of nowhere, with nobody in sight, and when the car goes his way it's only you and silence, and I feel absolutely free in those situations. I really like this feeling, being on the road, you know.

So I think that's it.

And when I talk to Daniel most of the time that we are together, it feels a little this way -- like I am talking to a stranger, but in a lot of ways much more than talking to a random stranger like with the hitchhiking, I feel like I am talking to myself. 

Because I'm interested in really understanding the people I meet, as much as they want to be understood, I was interested to try out hitchhiking with him. We ended up choosing to go north instead because he had to make an international flight leaving out of France in about 6 days. Without really having planned it beforehand, we ended up traveling together for a week. First the hitchhiking, not very far just from Rome to Civitavecchia (if you want to look it up on a map. Worth seeing maybe, and apparently a frequent cruise stop or origin. We then, at the advice of the last person we met with, took a train up to Follonica, which is a nice beach resort town with only Italian tourists and pretty cheap. Worth a visit too if you're spending like a month in Italy. 

I've written a ton more about Daniel and his life philosophies and how I was surprised by some of his observations to realize the extent of my irrational thinking on certain topics. But maybe better to get it from the source, his new blog. Also, I'll probably get deeper into it in the second book. It's just hard to explain part of it without explaining all of it, but a quick thing to think about is his observation -- most people try to buy their life with money. But the best things in life you don’t get like chocolate from the box that you buy. You get them like chasing after the puffy seed of the dandelion and you never have a guarantee that you’ll get it. You don’t buy your life. 

In hitchhiking (in which you you're not trying to travel by buying the comfort and illusion of independence from other people) and in so many ways in which we interacted with others and made our way in the world, I kept thinking about how much I try to buy my life and otherwise try to shield myself from dealing with or relying on other people in ways that are obvious, like the same way that it is obvious that you rely on people when you're asking them for a ride. I became aware of this and at least a half dozen other little self deceptions by hanging out with him. 


  1. I think I finally understand Vegas.

    She was so very not-threatening. Unambiguously non-threatening.

    So I've worked out **-* does not trust words.

    He comprehends action. There's clarity of intent in action. When things are at stake, words are meaningless.

    For people who are so reluctant to trust and who experience life so differently, clarity is important.

    Interestingly, most interestingly, when M.E. meet me, she told me I had a greater than normal requirement for predictability.

    Everyone needs predictability and when we don't get it, we handle it in particular ways. We use different means to figure out intent.

    And since psychopathic people can't interpret emotional behaviour effectively, they preference overtly non-threatening displays.

    They play it safe and defend vigorously where any ambiguity exists.

    Actions over words.

    Enacting my feelings in fantasy is pretty much the best way to communicate with him. He gets it when the feeling is made physical.

    It's fascinating.

    So yeah. Vegas. That's why you guys loved her. She want going to hurt you.

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  3. Replies
    1. I'm still floatin around. I check at least a hundred times a day even though nothing is going on here. I scroll through my facebook page a couple thousands times a day too even though nothing is going on there either. It's pathetic. Maybe I have autism. I watch as my clients with autism perseverate on a topic, and things run through their mind over and over again. ANYWAY, Alcibiades, I have a question. Is there a difference, in your opinion, between male and female psychopaths?

    2. Now, is this just one client, a few, several? Many = one big mess.

  4. Where do you meet these 'clients' anon? Legion hall, coffee shop, truck station, out in the woods? Are your practices lawful?

    1. no totally not lawful :D

    2. Lol, that sounds coo-coo. Not lawful, how? In what way?

    3. it was a joke. Are genuinely curious about what I do? Probly not gonna discuss it. Was just curious if Alciabades felt there was a difference between females and males, and what are they

    4. I already know what you do. Are we going to scrap our device?

    5. Well then I guess you know how many clients I have then, and where they come from....ahem, medicaid referrals. and yes, if you put my clients together it probably would be a disaster....little bit a autism, little bit a conduct disorder....yea, prolly get crazy. Are you stalking me? no stalking others on the net. Get a job peoples

    6. No, no, no.. I wasn't talking about that. You see, sometimes it's fruitless to dissuade others. Some people collect Intel with their confidants on persons of interest in their local area. This obsession can defy legal boundaries. Do you understand where I'm coming from?

    7. Medicaid referrals, autism, conduct disorder... school department/ school board?

    8. school board...hmm, I think maybe you're stalking someone else, not me

  5. Re ME's tweet:

    "Socio friend just now on non-socios:
    “when I hear other ppl talk politics I wonder who really has short supply of empathy 🧐”

    The difficulty non socios have is not so much that socios lack empathy but that we can't connect with you and that your social responses are quite different.

    We don't understand you and are thus very wary. Or in a personal relationship, we're shocked because you made it seem, at the start, that you connected to us deeply. That's cheating; we don't like it.

    I've noticed socios think the rest of us are endlessly hypocritical because we act aggressively towards other groups. Life is competitive and no one else is surprised by this. Socios have a naivety when it comes to this fact.

    It comes down to this: we collaborate in order to compete. It's just a much more efficient strategy to align with people who have similar goals. We bond to this end. And we treat each other fairly or risk getting kicked out from the group.

    Everyone take advantage where they can.

    Life is just like sport.

  6. Psychopaths and sociopaths really should be exterminated like the vermin you are. If that sounds hypocritical, it's not. You see, normal people understand that there's a world of difference between the DESERVING and the UN-deserving. Why should anyone waste their empathy on something evil when there are innocents who are far more worthy of our concern? Sociopaths and psychopaths are inhuman to me, pure aberrations, and I delight in their destruction, as your absence make the world a better place.

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