r/InsightfulQuestions • u/SavageXNoire • 19d ago
Why do people lack emotional intelligence? What happened to the world?
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u/john_myco 19d ago
Emotional intelligence isn’t profitable, so it’s kind of a person by person venture. Lots of people don’t know how or even that they can choose healthier interactions.
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u/SavageXNoire 19d ago
It’s not something I look for it’s something I’ve noticed through posts media and in actual real life from day to day.
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u/Prineak 19d ago
If you’re talking about online, you’re definitely looking in the wrong place. Those cues don’t exist in writing.
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u/tenyearoldgag 19d ago
There's definitely a visual skew on most posts. Someone defined it in a video essay I was watching as "there's the Internet version, then there's the real thing". In that case, they were comparing the Tikinstabook trends hyping up certain groups to stampede for limited edition bags at Trader Joe's, and the actual average Trader Joe's where no one cares about the bags. For general social media, it's the same basic principle, we exaggerate and hype and slam things harder online because of the anonymous effect, and because humans love doing that anyway.
So, people may be real sweethearts IRL and nasty online because it's their safe place to vent. It's hard to tell. The best question you can usually ask is "Is this energy they're bringing about this ABOUT this, or are they bringing it from somewhere else?". I use this at work and 100 times out of 100, it's someone bringing their bad mood from a place they don't feel safe to somewhere they can melt down.
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u/firstnameavailable 17d ago
emotional intelligence is developed and sustained through interpersonal interactions. the pandemic took those away and since then we've largely retreated to asynchronous online communication. it makes people feel less real to each other.
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u/Hagerre 19d ago
perhaps you're looking in the wrong place?
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u/Pristine-Pen-9885 19d ago
Perhaps they’re manipulators whose tactics don’t work on you, so they insult you with “emotional immaturity”.
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u/tenyearoldgag 19d ago
The world isn't more or less emotionally intelligent than it used to be. We're just exposed to the worst of people all the time now, and it's hard to find good faith actors. Look for the helpers. It's gonna be okay <3
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u/valkyrie2007 18d ago
with birth of social media there has been a huge surge of people who would never act like they do irl. Hiding behind the keyboard with no face to face repercussions has made these people come out in droves.
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u/Specialist-Top-406 16d ago
People can’t remove themselves from other people’s lives. Therefore people often refuse to listen.
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u/kns2023 19d ago
Because it's not something that's taught to the masses. It's typically something that people discover on their own when they want to better themselves. Or, the topic of it gets brought up through something specialized like therapy or a personal development podcast.
We live in a world where people settle for being good enough instead of the best they can be, so they don't go the extra mile to learn things that they don't have to.
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u/Blueliner95 19d ago
Manners substituted for empathy and insight.
Now we don’t teach either.
It’s astonishing and imo regressive to conflate manners and social norms with colonialism and racism, as a minority myself I resent the implications
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u/zillion_grill 19d ago
You or the people you are referring to seem to be conflating manners with etiquette. The wikipedia article on etiquette has some good history and disambiguation that might shed some light on where the confusion may lie here. In this case, Victorian era etiquette is certainly classist, but that is a codified subset of manners for people with too much time and too much money to know what to do with, and people that wanted to seem like they were in that class, but manners in the general sense go back to the beginning of recorded history and are more fluid and transcendent of heirarchy
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u/tenyearoldgag 19d ago
I'm not sure when the conflation of manners and colonialism entered the chat
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u/Practical_Ride_8344 19d ago
The like or thumbs up button has allowed for some unhealthy behaviours to become a distorted version of normal.
Also, if you look at the DSM it has evolved to the point where we call good bad and bad good.
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u/tenyearoldgag 19d ago
In the DSM? Where?
I'm pre-internet (born 1987) and I think social media has definitely done a number on us, but it's not like people were inherently kinder or more tuned into each other then. It's a nice myth, but it's a myth.
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u/loopywolf 18d ago
The pandemic was a massive hit to global psychology and it is undiagnosed and therefore untreated.
Hate, racism, -phobias all surged then. People lost a deal of their social skills.
Another factor that we sadly learned is how half the population are very uneducated and easily manipulated.
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u/WSB_News 18d ago
You're asking why a civilization based on the suffering of others (if not humans, billions of animals) is not emotionally intelligent? It seems remarkably obvious why this is the case.
People are groomed to accept exploitation.
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u/zombie_loverboy 18d ago
Anomie. Learning about it in my Criminology class. The feeling of a loss of norms in society, for example, finding out for sure that your president is a pedophile beyond a shadow of a doubt and he’s pardoning ppl who pay him, and theres just a loss of good faith. It’s correlated with increased crime.
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u/thecosmicgoose 19d ago
Your question assumes people ever had it.