Livestreamed Conversation - The value of a man with Yetineti

[yetineti]

@LordFall

This was never really a conversation about value. However, revealing my values may explain the gap.

The big reveal: we pretty much agree.

I don’t think people have to provide value to have value. However, everyone should probably be trying to provide more value than baseline. The implication someone can sit around is ridiculous. Stage Green bypassing is ridiculous. Maintaining baseline forever is ridiculous.

I also don’t think I ever really disagreed with your values framework. I’ve spent about a month asking questions about it because I was curious how you were getting from a framework that increasingly sounded pretty reasonable to me—competence, contribution, responsibility, solving problems, creating abundance—to fairly confident assumptions about me from very limited information. The more I understood your actual framework, the less I disagreed with it. You don’t even seem to hold yourself to some magical higher standard. You seem to apply basically the same expectations to yourself.

So my question was never really, “How do I defeat this value system?” It was: How did this value system produce those assumptions about me? That has been my loop in this whole thing.

—

Where I probably differ is that I rarely use value as a comparative human scoreboard. I have goals and standards. Obviously I compare sometimes. But I mostly ask whether I am becoming more capable, useful, independent, responsible, skilled, helpful, etc. relative to my own circumstances and potential.

I use comparison sparingly because it gets dangerous extremely fast when the frame is wrong. You are taking a snapshot of somebody without knowing everything that produced the snapshot. That doesn’t mean edge cases destroy the paradigm. I almost think the opposite: the better a paradigm becomes, the more selectively I think it should be applied.

A bad framework fails obviously. A sophisticated framework can explain a LOT. Precisely because it can explain a lot, it can start absorbing contradictory information and producing plausible explanations for almost anything. That’s where I get cautious: use the paradigm to generate questions, use reality to determine whether the paradigm applies, and don’t use the paradigm to determine what reality must have been.

—

And this is where the ENFP thing is actually relevant to me. “Campaigner.” “Champion.” Whatever haha. Obviously I’m not claiming four letters scientifically prove my motives or personality, but the shorthand fits me pretty damn well: people, possibilities, connections, meaning, constantly asking “what about this angle?” And yeah, I can overthink the shit out of something when I’m fascinated by it.

So me spending a month asking you questions about value wasn’t necessarily me evading a values conversation. From my perspective it was almost the opposite: I was interested enough in your framework to keep turning it around trying to figure out exactly how it worked.

I’m fascinated by this whole thing. I don’t think you’re a bad person at all. I actually admire quite a bit of what you’re trying to do around competence, responsibility, contribution and results. These particular traps just caught my attention because I had never really come across them this cleanly before. I’ve argued plenty in my life lol, especially with family, but this felt unusually strong while somehow remaining disconnected from the thing I thought I was asking.

And obviously I got caught in it too. Early on I started defending myself instead of just figuring out what the hell was happening. I was trying to explain myself, understand where you were coming from and defend against the assumptions at the same time. That made everything messier. These traps can happen to anyone. That’s part of why I find them interesting.

—

There’s also a funny personal connection with the INTP thing, but I don’t want to compare you and my dad too much. My dad is an INTP and a master welder. Extremely mechanical. I was hilariously not mechanical AT ALL. He constantly tried to teach me that stuff and I avoided it.

The useful contrast isn’t really “you and my dad.” It’s inside my own life. I found other ways to provide value long before I became mechanically useful, then gradually developed the exact side of myself I had avoided. So there is something funny to me about now having this giant conversation about competence, systems and value with another person identifying as an INTP while I’m finally becoming mechanically competent myself. That’s about as far as I’d take the comparison haha.

—

In high school, my parents divorced. Dad and my much older sister moved out. My mom babysat kids in the house. I felt like I was in an intellectual bubble between the age gaps and family situation, and I had a lot to figure out.

I could ace tests, but decided: fuck college. I skipped plenty of homework to work more shifts, help my mom around the house, or frankly prioritize my own mental health at the time. From some external snapshots, you could probably call parts of that a “low-value” trajectory. But it was extremely valuable. I helped people through really hard periods, kept things functioning, and learned an absurd amount about people, relationships, responsibility and myself.

I wasn’t just going to sit around and watch people I loved remain helpless in their own victim mindsets either. I wanted them okay. Eventually I realized: I need to help myself too.

—

Leo had already helped me a lot here, but I needed a harder test. I moved out and have lived alone for years.

I delivered for a store as their only driver and, shit, made around $4k/month for a while. But my car was expensive to maintain and I didn’t really feel like I brought much unique value personally. Anyone could basically do it. Living alone also makes responsibility impossible to abstract away: dishes dirty? Mine. Laundry? Mine. Bills? Mine. Car broken? Mine.

People around me also started stabilizing and didn’t need me as much. So eventually I made myself start working on my own car. Turns out mechanics is basically high-stakes Legos.

I still didn’t feel useful enough, so I picked up warehouse work: 140°F trailers, hundreds of packages an hour, 1 lb to 200 lbs. Somebody had to do it. Eventually I still felt like I was underselling myself, so I quit delivery and literally let AI interrogate me about what I was good at and where I could provide more value. It found a maintenance application nearby. I drove there without really looking into it further and knocked on the door.

—

For roughly the last year I’ve been maintaining several multi-million-dollar facilities. I’ve taught myself plumbing, electrical, fire systems, compliance, appliances, mechanical troubleshooting, vendor coordination and a pile of other shit I absolutely did not know five years ago. AND I get to apply the communication and people skills I already had.

They joke about shutting down if I leave. It’s a dying trade. Reliable people willing to learn are hard to find. I still help my family and deliberately maintain jobs with flexible schedules. I already have offers for around 33% more income, and I’m working on arrangements where certain jobs could pay close to double my regular rate.

I’ve also been thinking about getting back into music or eventually running my own maintenance company. My dad, naturally, finds all of this hilarious because I barely knew a flathead from a Phillips a few years ago.

—

So yeah: I care A LOT about providing value. Probably too much sometimes.

I’m constantly asking whether I’m more capable than I was, whether I’m solving harder problems, whether I’m making things easier for people around me, whether I’m actually using what I have, where I’m avoiding growth, and where I could contribute more. That is much closer to my framework than asking, “Am I higher value than this other guy?”

And that is precisely why I consciously decided not to devalue myself by spending this entire dispute explaining my value to you. Not because I couldn’t. Because that was never the question I was trying to answer.

I wanted you to explain the assumptions you had already made. You kept coming back to some version of “tell me your value so I can determine whether my judgment was wrong,” while I kept asking: What justified the judgment before you knew the answer?

Those are different questions.

—

And this is what I meant by my immature “You are trapped” comment.

I already suspected we valued things similarly. The longer this went on, the more obvious that became. You’ve been trying to clarify the value framework because you thought I was challenging it.

But I wasn’t challenging your values framework. I was challenging your assumptions.

That distinction is basically the entire disagreement.

And now I’ve finally done the thing I intentionally refused to do during the argument. I told you my values framework. I told you how I think about contribution. I told you how I actually live it.

And it’s basically your framework.

I think people should become capable. I think people should solve problems. I think people should contribute. I think victim mindsets can destroy people. I think bypassing responsibility is destructive. I’m actively trying to provide more value, and I think I already provide quite a lot.

I just don’t generally use that framework to take snapshots of other people and rank them.

—

And again, this isn’t an indictment of you. I don’t think you’re a bad person. I actually admire a lot of this stuff.

I also don’t think these traps mean anything uniquely terrible about you. I got caught in them too by defending myself instead of recognizing what was happening. That’s why I’m fascinated. The framework itself is pretty reasonable.

The interesting question is how a reasonable framework produced the assumptions in the first place, and what happens to those assumptions now that you actually have the information.

That’s really all I’ve been trying to understand.

And the funniest part is still: we basically agree on value.

Edited 2 hours ago by yetineti

[yetineti]

TLDR: Kyle and I basically agree on value. I somehow turned a misunderstanding into a month-long epistemology project. Anyway, I can fix your dryer now.

 

[Joseph Maynor]

The conversation was very defensive on both sides.  

[yetineti]

27 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

The conversation was very defensive on both sides.  

So busy trying to disarm each other, neither of us noticed we’d already exchanged weapons.

 

 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by yetineti

[Natasha Tori Maru]

19 minutes ago, yetineti said:

So busy trying to disarm each other, neither of us noticed we’d already exchanged weapons.

If disarming was the intention the opposite happened! You guys both armoured up  

The only way to disarm is to properly relate to each other - understand each others meaning. Be seen.

Need relational questions and probing to do that. 

It is hard to relate to others and receive when we have something to prove. Listening goes out the window.

[yetineti]

4 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

If disarming was the intention the opposite happened! You guys both armoured up  

The only way to disarm is to properly relate to each other - understand each others meaning. Be seen.

Need relational questions and probing to do that. 

It is hard to relate to others and receive when we have something to prove. Listening goes out the window.

Yes. I prefer more relational questions in the future. I could have probably short circuited this earlier, however.

Never attack an ENFPs character or an INTPs framework! Relate, discuss—never assume. 😁

[Joseph Maynor]

34 minutes ago, yetineti said:

So busy trying to disarm each other, neither of us noticed we’d already exchanged weapons.

 

 

 

But that does not mean it was bad necessarily.  I appreciated you both were very honest and articulated well.  The idea that there is something wrong with the video should be put into question too.  We all like to play the role of the Monday morning quarterback or critic after the artwork has been released.  Props to you both.  I would love to see more videos like this of us on the forum in general.  

[BlessedLion]

Its an interesting discussion. 

 

I have to side more with Yeti Neti, it's essential to have a base of contentment and wholeness and most value metrics are relative. 

A Stage Green women will find value in things that a Stage Orange woman cannot even see. You want to align with where you thrive and your value is seen, not neccesarily create it based on the values of a certain culture. So many people (men) value money and status because that is what their culture and the women in it value, it's not neccesarily their authentic values. So they dedicate decades of time and energy to essentially fit in. 

Value is not defined by the abundance you bring others, because that hinges your value on others way of perceiving value. 

 

Not to say it's not badass to master something in life and crush it if you can, simply for the love of the sport, but happiness should never hinge on extrenalities. 

[Natasha Tori Maru]

8 minutes ago, yetineti said:

Yes. I prefer more relational questions in the future. I could have probably short circuited this earlier, however.

Never attack an ENFPs character or an INTPs framework! Relate, discuss—never assume. 😁

Half the problem is - if the other party doesn't deem that mode of connection useful or contributing to THEIR intention - they will disregard the attempt at connection. Some people are blind to the fact that their points will land and be received with ease when the other person feels truly seen and validated.

[yetineti]

15 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

points will land and be received with ease when the other person feels truly seen and validated.

Yes, but I will also concede to his point that it very much appears insecure from me not to receive valid points—for any reason.

But it should also be recognized that people’s attention is earned and if a point is trying to be made, you must know who it is being made to.

Points don’t make themselves to people or exist independently from people.

A point to no one is a point to nowhere.

Generalizations or assumptions can be a huge turnoff. I used to do sales.

Identify plot. Relate to resolution. Suggest, never assert.

I hated sales, though.

Edited 59 minutes ago by yetineti

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Just now, yetineti said:

But it should also be recognized that people’s attention is earned and if a point is trying to be made, you must know who it is being made to.

Otherwise we are just hammers treating everything as nails

 

[Joseph Maynor]

19 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Otherwise we are just hammers treating everything as nails

 

Which is what we all do on occasion if we are honest.