I love this scene so much, for so many reasons (the larger scene, not JUST these few seconds -- but also these few seconds):
I have long wrestled with what information in my head is just my thoughts and what might be "psychic." I have wondered at where the line is between normal thinking and "having visions" (or similar), also what are my thoughts and what might be stray thoughts from other people, somehow overheard. In the last three years, I have had a strange opportunity to somewhat test those questions in a way which helped me sort things out better and I feel a lot more grounded and clear about my own experiences.
I bring this up in part because a lot of homeless individuals have mental health diagnoses of some sort. But I also bring it up because I have had a few odd experiences in interacting with other homeless people which makes me wonder if homeless people are more likely to be psychic than other people and if that psychic sensitivity might be one of the things which helps land them on the street and make them poorly adapted to conventional life.
Also, it makes me wonder if actual psychic sensitivity contributes to some individuals getting a mental health diagnosis to begin with. It is something generally treated as BS and generally not taken seriously. I speak of it not to say "I can predict the future" (I cannot) but to say "If this is happening to you, there are some useful best practices for helping you cope with it."
I hesitate to talk about this because I worry it will hurt my credibility (which is already bad enough, for a variety of reasons). But, also, I hesitate because I don't know if it will be constructive information for vulnerable people living on the street or if it will just fuel personal delusions and avoidant behavior.
In my experience, finding ways to validate my impressions as objectively as possible can help me stay grounded. It has also helped me to read up on how brains work and to learn that some processes which feel "psychic" can just be the mind crunching data in the background and spitting back an answer to a question you did not know you had.
I have tried super hard to find scientific ways to relate to some of my weird experiences. Doing so has done me a lot of good. But it has also done me good to realize that some of my experiences really are psychic phenomenon and it has been helpful to find a means to sort out which is which.
Trying to say I am not experiencing this stuff does not help. It just makes me feel worse. So I have wondered if admitting to this experience might help other people sort out their issues so they can problem solve and get off the street and back on their feet, if they so desire.
I grew up around someone who was kind of like the Trelawney character in the Harry Potter series. Like Trelawney, they were TERRIBLE at actually trying to predict the future but sometimes blurted things that were true that they shouldn't have had any way to know -- though not anywhere near as dramatic as THIS scene: This person was fairly desperate to prove that they weren't crazy and so they would somewhat often say things like "I dreamed about X, I think it means Z will happen" and such predictions never came true as far as I could tell. And, yet, this person would also do things like freak me out by talking about things they had no way of knowing in a "psychic Freudian slip" kind of way, where a word would come out different from what they intended to say and what they actually said was commentary on something real that they shouldn't have known about at all.
So I haven't run around trying to prove to people that I am psychic because I have seen that go bad places for someone else who likely IS, in fact, psychically sensitive and yet all efforts to prove it seem to just make them LOOK crazy even though their goal is try to prove to people "I am NOT crazy. I really do have dreams about future events!!! Honest!!!"
I have learned that I cannot flat out ignore the seemingly "psychic" things in my head and pretend I didn't hear it. It's counterproductive to do that. But I also cannot TRUST that info.
To whatever degree I have "visions" of the future, those visions are probably just my brain crunching data and spitting out predictions, similar to how the weatherman works. Those predictions contain my biases and I sometimes run them past other people so I can stop hyperventilating and feeling like the prisoner of a Greek Tragedy who cannot escape my dire fate.
Over time, I have learned that I can make decisions about how I feel about what those visions or dreams predict and if I am consistent, I can change my (predicted/actual) future. It's helped me be less freaked out by such things.
I sometimes "hear voices." I have found it useful to relate to those voices as if they are people with their own agenda who cannot be trusted and to give pushback against what they say rather than accepting it as some kind of higher truth. Most of the voices in my head are, in fact, RAMPANT liars, not sources of higher wisdom.
I've also had actual auditory hallucinations, a side effect of taking too much decongestant once. I knew they were auditory hallucinations because I only heard them when my eyes were closed and when I opened them what I "heard" going on was clearly not real. I heard someone walking, but there was no one there, for example.
Joan of Arc heard voices and she played a significant role in ending the Hundred Years War. Her military tactics changed how France fought battles and are still in use to this day.
She felt her voices were instruction from God and she lived in a time and place where people were willing to accept that explanation as reasonable and she got results, which helped sell the idea. If she were alive today, she would likely be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted.
I don't know how common it is to hear voices. I don't actually know what causes that nor what it means. I do know at least one historical figure heard voices and was not deemed "crazy" at the time for it.
The inner world of individuals is an intensely private matter. We seem to know relatively little about what is "normal" in that regard.
When Richard Feynman spoke of having synesthesia and associating numbers with colors, that was cool because HE was cool. He was a famous "genius."
If you are homeless and trying to sort out how to relate effectively to what goes on inside your head, it's potentially problematic to discuss that with people. Your current "loser" status will tend to negatively color the feedback you get and it may well not be at all helpful. It may be very, very counterproductive.
But drawing your own conclusions about what is going on and trying to find a more useful idea than "I am simply crazy" can help you navigate life more effectively so you can try to sort out how to get your act together and make your life work.
I have found it emotionally crippling to view it through a lens of "inescapable fate." It made me feel like a victim of a Greek Tragedy I could not escape.
It made me feel helpless and hopeless to view it that way and I eventually concluded that viewing it that way is a kind of 'self-fulfilling prophecy' -- if you make no effort to change your life, it is much less likely to change.
I have concluded that the MAJORITY of such experiences are definitely NOT "psychic." Most of them are just my own mind talking to itself, maybe the subconscious sending messages to the conscious.
I can neither bet on this information being more reliable than other sources of information -- much less some absolutely 100 percent reliable source itelf -- nor outright dismiss it. Both approaches create more problems for me, not fewer problems.
I have found it useful to relate to such things as a puzzle to be solved, a clue that I am concerned about something and need to think more about it and work at better understanding what is going on and why I am worried.
Under the best of circumstance, most of the people you are acquainted with will not know you that well and will not have your best interest at heart. I decided a long, long time ago that most of the people I knew were a bit "crazy" in that everyone seems to have some mental bugaboo and emotional baggage of some sort tripping them up.
I decided one day that being "nuts" is not a crime and asking for validation from other people in most cases is not helpful. They have their own agenda and are rarely really able to think about what is in my best interest.
If I'm crazy but not hurting anyone with it, it's a private matter and not anything I need to explain or justify or even necessarily "fix." I'm absolutely one hundred thousand million percent NOT interested in being the next Uri Geller.
Since I don't wish to be that, this is mostly between me and me. And I generally don't talk about it online and don't plan to make a habit of talking about it routinely in public spaces.
I'm not interested in being the next Uri Geller in part because "I hear voices" is not something provable or even testable, therefore using that as some kind of basis for a relationship to the public is highly problematic, if only because it undermines standard expectations of objective credentials.
Let's say Uri Geller was The Real Deal. Cool. For every one guy who is The Real Deal there will be dozens of others who are con artists trying to make a quick buck.
Furthermore, I don't want to base my relationship to the public on this because I think that would actively undermine my own efforts to relate constructively to something I can neither escape nor TRUST to be reliable information. I think it would go bad places for me to NEED other people to believe me and take my word for it, etc.
Joan of Arc didn't get famous because she heard voices. She got famous because she won battles, ended the Hundred Years War and put The Dauphin on the throne.
Richard Feynman didn't get famous because he associated colors with numbers. He got famous for real world accomplishments.
It can be interesting to wonder how their inner world led to their accomplishments out in the world or how their inner world shaped or influenced the kind of accomplishments they had. But ultimately they were famous due to their accomplishments out in the world not due to whatever went on inside their minds.
Plenty of people have synesthesia -- that's the term for what Feynman was describing -- and are not famous physicists. Plenty of people hear voices and are dimissed as crazy, not lauded as chosen of God and clearly someone who will fix this huge mess their country is in.
Currently, the narrative is that homeless people "are all crazies and junkies" and it's their own fault they are homeless. Reality: There is a dire shortage of the right kind of housing for many people in the US and this is the primary root cause of homelessness.
Millionaire rock stars are often drug addicts. People don't suggest "We should all do hard drugs so we can become millionaire rock stars too!"
Addiction is a real problem but addiction alone does not, per se, CAUSE homelessness. Similarly, you should be leery of anyone telling you that "hearing voices" or similar is just batshit insane and the entire reason your life does not work.
It's highly unlikely to be the case that this ONE detail is the entire reason your life doesn't currently work. I think at a minimum, it would take TWO things for that to ruin your life: Hearing voices and having bad mental models for how to relate to that.
What is batshit insane is wearing something like this on your sleeve and desperately seeking validation from everyone you meet. It will not help you and will come back to bite you in a big way.
We all have to navigate our inner world and the outer world. If your inner world is tripping up your efforts to navigate the outer world, you should work on that but it's not a best practice to provide judgy classist assholes low hanging fruit for telling you it's ALL YOUR FAULT your life doesn't work.
There is ALWAYS some degree of happenstance beyond our control factoring into our outcomes. For some people, they "got lucky" and were born into an upper class family or whatever and others "got unlucky."
Lucky or not, we all have a few bugaboos to deal with. Dealing with it effectively without letting assholes use it to intentionally keep you down is a best practice for trying to sort your problems so you can get off the street and get your life back.
I bring this up in part because a lot of homeless individuals have mental health diagnoses of some sort. But I also bring it up because I have had a few odd experiences in interacting with other homeless people which makes me wonder if homeless people are more likely to be psychic than other people and if that psychic sensitivity might be one of the things which helps land them on the street and make them poorly adapted to conventional life.
Also, it makes me wonder if actual psychic sensitivity contributes to some individuals getting a mental health diagnosis to begin with. It is something generally treated as BS and generally not taken seriously. I speak of it not to say "I can predict the future" (I cannot) but to say "If this is happening to you, there are some useful best practices for helping you cope with it."
I hesitate to talk about this because I worry it will hurt my credibility (which is already bad enough, for a variety of reasons). But, also, I hesitate because I don't know if it will be constructive information for vulnerable people living on the street or if it will just fuel personal delusions and avoidant behavior.
In my experience, finding ways to validate my impressions as objectively as possible can help me stay grounded. It has also helped me to read up on how brains work and to learn that some processes which feel "psychic" can just be the mind crunching data in the background and spitting back an answer to a question you did not know you had.
I have tried super hard to find scientific ways to relate to some of my weird experiences. Doing so has done me a lot of good. But it has also done me good to realize that some of my experiences really are psychic phenomenon and it has been helpful to find a means to sort out which is which.
Trying to say I am not experiencing this stuff does not help. It just makes me feel worse. So I have wondered if admitting to this experience might help other people sort out their issues so they can problem solve and get off the street and back on their feet, if they so desire.
I grew up around someone who was kind of like the Trelawney character in the Harry Potter series. Like Trelawney, they were TERRIBLE at actually trying to predict the future but sometimes blurted things that were true that they shouldn't have had any way to know -- though not anywhere near as dramatic as THIS scene: This person was fairly desperate to prove that they weren't crazy and so they would somewhat often say things like "I dreamed about X, I think it means Z will happen" and such predictions never came true as far as I could tell. And, yet, this person would also do things like freak me out by talking about things they had no way of knowing in a "psychic Freudian slip" kind of way, where a word would come out different from what they intended to say and what they actually said was commentary on something real that they shouldn't have known about at all.
So I haven't run around trying to prove to people that I am psychic because I have seen that go bad places for someone else who likely IS, in fact, psychically sensitive and yet all efforts to prove it seem to just make them LOOK crazy even though their goal is try to prove to people "I am NOT crazy. I really do have dreams about future events!!! Honest!!!"
I have learned that I cannot flat out ignore the seemingly "psychic" things in my head and pretend I didn't hear it. It's counterproductive to do that. But I also cannot TRUST that info.
To whatever degree I have "visions" of the future, those visions are probably just my brain crunching data and spitting out predictions, similar to how the weatherman works. Those predictions contain my biases and I sometimes run them past other people so I can stop hyperventilating and feeling like the prisoner of a Greek Tragedy who cannot escape my dire fate.
Over time, I have learned that I can make decisions about how I feel about what those visions or dreams predict and if I am consistent, I can change my (predicted/actual) future. It's helped me be less freaked out by such things.
I sometimes "hear voices." I have found it useful to relate to those voices as if they are people with their own agenda who cannot be trusted and to give pushback against what they say rather than accepting it as some kind of higher truth. Most of the voices in my head are, in fact, RAMPANT liars, not sources of higher wisdom.
I've also had actual auditory hallucinations, a side effect of taking too much decongestant once. I knew they were auditory hallucinations because I only heard them when my eyes were closed and when I opened them what I "heard" going on was clearly not real. I heard someone walking, but there was no one there, for example.
Joan of Arc heard voices and she played a significant role in ending the Hundred Years War. Her military tactics changed how France fought battles and are still in use to this day.
She felt her voices were instruction from God and she lived in a time and place where people were willing to accept that explanation as reasonable and she got results, which helped sell the idea. If she were alive today, she would likely be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted.
I don't know how common it is to hear voices. I don't actually know what causes that nor what it means. I do know at least one historical figure heard voices and was not deemed "crazy" at the time for it.
The inner world of individuals is an intensely private matter. We seem to know relatively little about what is "normal" in that regard.
When Richard Feynman spoke of having synesthesia and associating numbers with colors, that was cool because HE was cool. He was a famous "genius."
If you are homeless and trying to sort out how to relate effectively to what goes on inside your head, it's potentially problematic to discuss that with people. Your current "loser" status will tend to negatively color the feedback you get and it may well not be at all helpful. It may be very, very counterproductive.
But drawing your own conclusions about what is going on and trying to find a more useful idea than "I am simply crazy" can help you navigate life more effectively so you can try to sort out how to get your act together and make your life work.
Best Practices
I haven't found it useful to see dreams or "visions" (images in my head when I am awake) as some kind of higher truth from some kind of higher power. I haven't found it useful to see such things as "fated" and "definitely going to happen."I have found it emotionally crippling to view it through a lens of "inescapable fate." It made me feel like a victim of a Greek Tragedy I could not escape.
It made me feel helpless and hopeless to view it that way and I eventually concluded that viewing it that way is a kind of 'self-fulfilling prophecy' -- if you make no effort to change your life, it is much less likely to change.
I have concluded that the MAJORITY of such experiences are definitely NOT "psychic." Most of them are just my own mind talking to itself, maybe the subconscious sending messages to the conscious.
I can neither bet on this information being more reliable than other sources of information -- much less some absolutely 100 percent reliable source itelf -- nor outright dismiss it. Both approaches create more problems for me, not fewer problems.
I have found it useful to relate to such things as a puzzle to be solved, a clue that I am concerned about something and need to think more about it and work at better understanding what is going on and why I am worried.
Under the best of circumstance, most of the people you are acquainted with will not know you that well and will not have your best interest at heart. I decided a long, long time ago that most of the people I knew were a bit "crazy" in that everyone seems to have some mental bugaboo and emotional baggage of some sort tripping them up.
I decided one day that being "nuts" is not a crime and asking for validation from other people in most cases is not helpful. They have their own agenda and are rarely really able to think about what is in my best interest.
If I'm crazy but not hurting anyone with it, it's a private matter and not anything I need to explain or justify or even necessarily "fix." I'm absolutely one hundred thousand million percent NOT interested in being the next Uri Geller.
Since I don't wish to be that, this is mostly between me and me. And I generally don't talk about it online and don't plan to make a habit of talking about it routinely in public spaces.
I'm not interested in being the next Uri Geller in part because "I hear voices" is not something provable or even testable, therefore using that as some kind of basis for a relationship to the public is highly problematic, if only because it undermines standard expectations of objective credentials.
Let's say Uri Geller was The Real Deal. Cool. For every one guy who is The Real Deal there will be dozens of others who are con artists trying to make a quick buck.
Furthermore, I don't want to base my relationship to the public on this because I think that would actively undermine my own efforts to relate constructively to something I can neither escape nor TRUST to be reliable information. I think it would go bad places for me to NEED other people to believe me and take my word for it, etc.
Joan of Arc didn't get famous because she heard voices. She got famous because she won battles, ended the Hundred Years War and put The Dauphin on the throne.
Richard Feynman didn't get famous because he associated colors with numbers. He got famous for real world accomplishments.
It can be interesting to wonder how their inner world led to their accomplishments out in the world or how their inner world shaped or influenced the kind of accomplishments they had. But ultimately they were famous due to their accomplishments out in the world not due to whatever went on inside their minds.
Plenty of people have synesthesia -- that's the term for what Feynman was describing -- and are not famous physicists. Plenty of people hear voices and are dimissed as crazy, not lauded as chosen of God and clearly someone who will fix this huge mess their country is in.
Currently, the narrative is that homeless people "are all crazies and junkies" and it's their own fault they are homeless. Reality: There is a dire shortage of the right kind of housing for many people in the US and this is the primary root cause of homelessness.
Millionaire rock stars are often drug addicts. People don't suggest "We should all do hard drugs so we can become millionaire rock stars too!"
Addiction is a real problem but addiction alone does not, per se, CAUSE homelessness. Similarly, you should be leery of anyone telling you that "hearing voices" or similar is just batshit insane and the entire reason your life does not work.
It's highly unlikely to be the case that this ONE detail is the entire reason your life doesn't currently work. I think at a minimum, it would take TWO things for that to ruin your life: Hearing voices and having bad mental models for how to relate to that.
What is batshit insane is wearing something like this on your sleeve and desperately seeking validation from everyone you meet. It will not help you and will come back to bite you in a big way.
We all have to navigate our inner world and the outer world. If your inner world is tripping up your efforts to navigate the outer world, you should work on that but it's not a best practice to provide judgy classist assholes low hanging fruit for telling you it's ALL YOUR FAULT your life doesn't work.
There is ALWAYS some degree of happenstance beyond our control factoring into our outcomes. For some people, they "got lucky" and were born into an upper class family or whatever and others "got unlucky."
Lucky or not, we all have a few bugaboos to deal with. Dealing with it effectively without letting assholes use it to intentionally keep you down is a best practice for trying to sort your problems so you can get off the street and get your life back.