Your Story Isn’t About You wards against Failures of Sentience. It teaches you how to identify them in your thinking and what do to instead.
It’s my foundational text – a prerequisite for my other products.
Failures of Sentience are so bad, I don’t want you buying from me until you know how to deal with them.
But what are they, exactly?
Summarised, condensed and distilled:
A Failure of Sentience is forgetting that other people exist.
“Oh, come on, William. I’ve never forgotten that other people exist. I’ve never met anyone who has!”
Wrong on both counts.
See, intellectually, you say that other folks exist separate from you, with minds, personalities and desires distinct from yours. Just saying that means nothing. Writing I think, therefore I am on a Post-It note doesn’t make it self-aware.
You forget this obvious truth often, without even realising it.
Potential symptoms of Failures of Sentience are endless. If any of these are true for you, then you’ve got a case of solipsism and you got it bad:
- Someone explained their problem for a moment and you immediately knew what they should do
- You’re rarely wrong in arguments – if ever
- When someone says something, you know what they secretly meant by it
- When you get angry at someone, you always think it’s because of what they did
- You think you could fix society with a few simple changes
- You think that other people secretly agree with you – they just say they don’t because they’re traumatised, brainwashed, hateful or just stupid
- You think other people are selfish because they don’t think of you enough
- When you yell at your printer for being an infernal machine of suffering, it’s because you slept badly, haven’t eaten and are under a lot of pressure. When others do the same thing, it’s because they’re angry people.
- You have thought – or even said – “this person is refusing to consider my point of view. If they did, just for a moment, they’d know I’m right”
You don’t do any of these things – not a one – if you remember other people exist.
And Failures of Sentience are a bigger deal than you might think. That’s why I encourage everyone to read, reread and apply what I talk about here: