Posts by Joseph Gonzalez57

Jack Smith5 said:Quentin Tarantino

It all comes down to perception. My grandfather passed away a pretty simple, unassuming man. He spent his entire life grinding through endless shifts—jobs that were grueling and exhausting—mostly for people who didn't give a damn about him or barely acknowledged his effort. But honestly? It didn't bother him. He found a weird kind of peace in just staying busy; he was happy as long as there was work to be done. He used to tell me that he didn't care what people called him or how they viewed him, provided they weren't going out of their way to be malicious. When it came to money, he never let it go to his head. He wasn't greedy. If someone asked him for help, he gave it. I remember being about ten or eleven years old, asking him for a pack of Marlboros, and he wouldn't have thought twice about handing them over. He told me that straight up. He just lived life on his own terms.
He was "chill" about pretty much everything. You could have practically stood on his head and he wouldn't have blinked. Nothing really got under his skin, and honestly, he lived a pretty happy, fulfilled life—well, if you ignore the occasional little thing like a world war here and there.😂 I guess it’s more or less the same thing.
Quentin Tarantino

You’re one hundred percent right on that point, but my actual intention was to focus on the people who... Things are finally starting to pick up today. It’s about time. Back in the day, when people talk about "country living," there’s a massive distinction they tend to miss. I'm talking about the gap between folks who have lived in rural America their entire lives—people whose families have worked the same dirt for generations—and those who just moved out to the sticks recently. Or, you know, the actual ghosts of the past, the people who inhabited these towns long before we ever showed up. You catch my drift?

These are the people who have grown sick of the city grind and just want to live a completely different kind of life.

Not necessarily... personally, I want to live outside the city limits, but not because I'm fed up with urban life. Motivation doesn't always have to be rooted in something negative or tied to social friction. For me, it's purely about health and providing a better environment for my future kids!

Jack Smith5 said:Actually, I see it differently. A manipulator isn't looking for a fool; they're usually hunting for someone even more cunning than themselves. On the flip side, it's the people with genuine intentions who gravitate toward the naive. They might see the simplicity as a flaw, but they view that inherent goodness as a redeeming quality that outweighs everything else.

Look at the folks moving out of the concrete jungles and back to the countryside lately. They aren't looking for those sleazy, small-town types who spend their whole lives trying to cheat a neighbor out of a few extra bucks just so they can brag about it at the local diner. That kind of behavior is just bottom-tier.

It feels to me like you're becoming a bit obsessed with this...🙂 relax.
First off, where you live doesn't dictate your psychological makeup. You can find plenty of shady characters looking to scam someone out of a few dollars in the middle of nowhere, too.
From what I've seen, human nature is pretty much independent of geography; it's shaped by life experience, as I mentioned earlier. Everyone has their own reasons for how they act.

Emily Garcia3 said:But wait, how exactly do you mean we end up trusting even more? Like, are we talking about putting more faith in one specific person or just the rest of the world at large? 😬

That idea about starting with ourselves is spot on, honestly, it's such a huge truth because if you aren't out there doing the right thing yourself, you kind of just assume—or maybe you just desperately hope—that everyone else operates the same way, which makes it almost impossible to wrap your head around the fact that some people actually go out of their way to be malicious on purpose 🤷

The real kicker is just realizing that the world is full of all sorts of characters, so you've gotta learn how to read the room and figure out which group someone belongs to and who's actually worth your time...

When I said "globally," I meant that we begin with ourselves; we use our own moral compass as a baseline. We tell ourselves, "I'm not that kind of person, so surely no one else is either." But he is an outlier, a single individual. It isn't our intellect or our capacity for thought that defines us, but rather our actions and how the world perceives those actions. We always tend to view ourselves in the best possible light, and even the manipulator likely has some sort of positive justification for their behavior, even if, from your perspective, they seem purely malicious. ☕

Emily Garcia3 said:I am 100% with you on this!

I guess I'll just add that as you get older and go through more stuff, you definitely stop being "naive" about certain specific things, but that doesn't mean you have to stop trusting people in general 🤷 I still want to believe that most folks are actually good at heart, even though I've seen enough to know that isn't always the case...

To be honest, I don't really know where I got this from, because my parents never fed me any fairy tales or anything like that, and I've definitely dealt my fair share of sketchy people and bad experiences in my life, so if anything, maybe that's why I choose to lead with trust instead 🤷

It’s nice to see you two in agreement, but the reality is that the more someone tramples on you or betrays your trust, the more you end up trusting... because we always have to start with ourselves. We shouldn't judge the entire world based on one individual's actions.

Matthew Booth2 said:I'm with you on this one. It really does come down to a choice.
Personally, I choose to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sure, I get burned sometimes, but I figure everyone is innocent until proven otherwise. Does that make me naive? Probably.
But honestly, turning into someone who trusts absolutely nobody sounds like a pretty miserable way to live.

Thank You!☕

Naivety is essentially just accepting information from various sources without ever pausing to question if they're actually credible; naiva is really just about misplaced trust, where a naive individual simply wants to believe whoever happens to be serving them a narrative.
It isn't some sort of pathology or medical condition... it's a choice.
Is it curable? Not exactly. But one could certainly attempt to nudge someone in a different direction using more subtle, non-invasive methods... because the moment they realize what you're doing, they'll grow suspicious and likely double down on their faith in the other side.