maybe I'm just an asshole but I've felt whatever is the opposite of sonder these days when I come across people that are so clueless and inattentive they might as well be zombies.
I try to remind myself that there are perfectly fine reasons for this to occur. For example, the person might suffer from insomnia. They might have a lower functioning brain due to developmental issues. They may have been in an accident which caused brain trauma. They might operate on a wavelength sufficiently different from you in that moment such that communication seems impossible, and you perceive that as their deficiency rather than a mutual problem.
The reasons to be compassionate are far more realistic and numerous than the possibility of a person being a zombie. It’s best to assume they have a story and a reason attached to their current state that, given time to consider, you would probably relate to them easily.
The most common explanation is one that didn't make your list, which is that they might not care at all about the subject being discussed. If it's a work situation that prompted it, that's by far the most likely answer to why they aren't using any brainpower to think about how to use the new system: their brainpower is already being used in the background to compare fishing lures. :-)
This was me as a child, quite literally. What kind of lure should I use after school at the lake, and how can I function minimally to survive class until then?
There's another explanation which should be very realistically considered, but which people are (probably intentionally) blind to: they're not as dumb as you think, and you're not as smart as you think.
These people likely have rich inner lives. What makes it hard to hope and dream other than incredible sensitivity, difficult experiences, and complex stories and histories that paralyze a person as they move through life?
Life can be incredibly difficult. It can become scary to dream. The will and desire to do so comes much more easily when you world tells you it’s permissible and rewarding to do so. For many of us, this doesn’t happen. Dreams get crushed over and over, hopes washed away, and fortune doesn’t favour us nearly as much as others.
Not all of us are Epictetus, Viktor Frankl, or other wise philosophers who could take adversity and transform it into meaning and joy. Even so, I doubt very much that this kind of person is anything like a zombie. Maybe outwardly so, but that means very little.
Although you may be right, and they may be wrong. Not that I advocate going around thinking like this as it'll only lead to unhappiness and poor relationships (and you'll also very possibly be wrong).
Shades of the old joke: A man driving on the autobahn hears a newsflash on the radio "Warning for drivers on the A7 northbound! A car is going the wrong way!" "The hell ya say!", snorts the man , "It ain't just one car. It's hundreds of them!"
This reminded me of another joke. Apologies if I botch it, I’m terrible at joke delivery.
A person is driving with a passenger. The driver goes straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “that light was red! Aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.” After crossing several red lights this way, they come to a green light and come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “my brother might be out driving.”
A man climbs into a taxi, "Airport please, I'm late!".
The driver speeds up and starts going straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “That light was red! I'm not that late, aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “Don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.”
After crossing several red lights this way, they come closer to the airport, and at a green light they come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “Why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “Oh, my brother works on this side of town."
it's hard to reconcile, right? conversely I've been the clueless guy enough to realize we all do it. like getting angry at random trash and then thinking "you know, maybe someone dropped this by accident when they thought they got it into their pocket"
Sounds like a thing that everybody would acuse each other of in any given hyperindivisualistic society. I mean especially in the US you sadly have quite some people who would rather hurt themselves than have a penny go to the help of others. This is beyond pure indifference towards strangers. People actively despise living in a society (even if they ultimatly profit from it).
