5 tweets · April 2024 · 1,073 likes · 72 retweets · read on Twitter
I suspect that in a sane culture, people would notice inability to smell much earlier, because interactions would be grounded in experiencing an actual sense of things, not parroting / playing along maybe they'd even be actively cultivating their taste in sensual domains
part of what's going on here is that lots of people identify as "passionate about something" as an imitative or introjected move though, and that that sort of phenomenon is likely to produce an experience of having trouble reasoning about tradeoffs
like if someone were deeply in touch with their own sense of passion, and their own sense of what feels good, they probably wouldn't be Asking Quora whether the tradeoff is worth it (they'd at minimum be asking "how did YOU make such a decision and do you regret it?")
the fact that they're asking Quora how to weigh their passion against their basic life needs is a sign (not conclusive but suggestive) that they're not steering from their own sense of things which is similar to the guy who doesn't notice his anosmia!
here's my mostly-written blog post series about the difference between being able to tell for yourself and taking someone else's word for it: malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…