Reality Tunnels and Empathy

Thomas Madoc

Sometimes different schools within the ANU feel like they inhabit different realities. There was an article last edition, Burn the CBE Down, which talked about the zombielike economic model of the world which makes up the neoliberal consensus. One where the different outcomes between countries— as varied as they are in history, culture and geography — can simply be chalked up to the presence or absence of an abstract Capital.

Perhaps this model is true, how would I know? After all, I’m not an economist; maybe all those PhDs know something I don’t. Or maybe the heterodox economists can see beyond the confines of their institution and its culture.

I’d like to think that I’m open-minded, that I’m willing to change in the face of challenges to my worldview. Nonetheless, the information and ideas I’m exposed to, my own lived experience, is the only basis I have to develop my understanding of a vast and complex world. Even a computer, built from the ground up on Boolean logic, provides no better answers than the information it’s given. Garbage in, garbage out.

This isn’t a new problem. Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of Computer Science, expressed dismay at being asked, “if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” as far back as 1864.

We all have our own models of the world, the parts we’ve been to and the parts we’ve never seen. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of our whole model of the world; it can come so naturally to us that it feels like an objective reality. Our models extend beyond beliefs about the wider world to even our simplest expectations about other people: what they like and don’t like, what they think is wrong and right and how they’ll feel in any situation.

Controversial author and self-described mystic Robert Anton Wilson defines a Reality Tunnel as the set of subconscious beliefs that filter how we interpret our experience of the world. I’m going to broaden this into my own definition. After all, the author is dead, so to speak. Why shouldn’t I take it?

I understand Reality Tunnels as closer to a series of visible and invisible feedback loops which help build who we are and our mental models of the world. These feedback loops cover parts of our lives which can feel like our own choices but are, in so many ways, the product of factors beyond our control. The choices we make thanks to our background, going to ANU, feeling like we’re welcome to join clubs and societies. Contributing to Woroni.

Beyond this, many of the biases and inequalities we learn about when we study intersectionality can be viewed as forms of feedback loops. People make differing assumptions about you based on your race, gender, how you look, how you dress, where you grew up et cetera. Whether or not you like it, these differences in treatment greatly affect who you become, which again affects how you respond to others and the places you feel welcome —what you feel safe to express and to whom.

It can be confronting to think about how much of what we believe about the people and places we think we know can be directly or indirectly a product of our Reality Tunnel. Would they have felt safe making that joke with me if I wasn’t a man? Do people make assumptions about me I’m not even aware of? Is there a whole side to the places I know that I’ve never seen?

All these factors have built up so much of how I think about the broader world. Is this just how I experience the world, my perception projected onto a greater scale?

Maybe I’m just like one of Babbage’s machines. Garbage in, garbage out.

Aside from the epistemic implications of this thinking, I want to focus on a more mundane but in some ways, more important question than how we determine truth. In a world where everyone walks through their own Reality Tunnel, its boundaries often invisible to its inhabitant and to outsiders, how can we be empathetic and compassionate toward each other even as we inhabit what are nearly disjoint realities?

In primary school, a teacher once told me empathy means to put yourself in the place of others. To empathise by walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. But I wonder if this model of empathy misses so many of the psychological and social realities that form our Reality Tunnels.

I am who I am because of the Reality Tunnel I’m stuck in. I really have no way to know if the way I behave would work for someone else. How can I walk a mile in their shoes when I don’t know their size?

Even when I think I know what someone could do, what I think I’d do in their shoes, our mental worlds are nearly as far outside of our control as our circumstances. I don’t know what others don’t know. I don’t know what others know that I don’t.

If everything someone experiences leads them to believe something, even if I’m certain it’s not true, how can I expect them to believe otherwise?

I’m hopeful that we can overcome these limitations. Much of the recent discourse around neurodivergence has left me hopeful that we can learn to empathise not just across differing circumstances and worldviews but across the often-invisible barriers of cognitive differences.

To really empathise means to understand someone else’s experience, not just their circumstances.

I hope we can build a culture where people feel comfortable sharing their truth, irrespective of its objectivity. If we can avoid prescribing experiences to others and instead become comfortable describing our lived experiences, then we can begin to escape our Reality Tunnels. We can start to share our reality, one that is free, equitable and open to everyone.

Art by Jasmin Small

Art by Jasmin Small

Girlboss vs. Tradwife There are no winners under capitalism.

Claudia Hunt

Not too long ago, my Tiktok feed was flooded with a certain subgenre of self-help content. Women everywhere were assuring me that I had a well of untapped potential, some kind of superpower that would make me desirable and charismatic and able to attract all the good things I deserved. It was called “divine feminine energy,” and they were going to teach me how to cultivate it.

None of these women could tell me exactly what it was, but after extensive research (watching lots of Tik Toks), I’ve managed to piece together a definition. Divine feminine energy seems to be a spiritual energy that all women possess, a source of strength and power fed by certain behaviours and depleted by others.

Great, I thought. I’m a woman, and I want to be hot and successful. Where do I start?

At first, most of the advice I found was generic self-help stuff: heal your inner child, dance in the rain, go outside and connect with Mother Nature. But the longer I spent looking at this content, the more extreme my algorithm diet became. Women started teaching me makeup looks that would attract “high value men,” and recommended that I stop trying to prove my point in arguments. Eventually, they began to espouse the benefits of embracing a woman’s traditional role in the kitchen. This was tagged ‘tradwife’ (portmanteau of traditional wife), and led me to a whole community of conservative women who preach that a woman’s only jobs should be wife and mother. This is the current running under most ‘divine feminine’ content. If you spend enough time scrolling, you eventually end up here.

This makes sense. The entire premise of divine feminine energy depends upon the idea that this energy is an inherent part of womanhood, a biologically-determined magic just waiting for us to step into it. It’s gender-essentialism: the belief that gender and its associated traits are determined by biology, inborn and unchangeable. This is a cornerstone of conservative thinking and repressive gender roles, so it will come as no surprise that there are no trans women taking part in this trend, or any trans people in the videos at all. Despite some ‘woke’ creators’ assurances that ‘divine feminine’ doesn’t mean you actually have to be feminine, they’re the minority, and even they stay in the safer waters of traditional expressions of femininity. Some only wear minimal makeup, or even a T-shirt, but you get the feeling this is as butch as they can go before their divine femininity is in peril.

And it is in peril. A lot of these women centre their content around healing their divine feminine energy, mending some deep spiritual wound that they and their followers all seem to be bleeding from. This pain is why I think divine feminine content is worth examining. Judging by the massive amount of engagement these videos garner, hundreds of thousands of women are in a kind of spiritual pain, and are finding comfort in a reactionary, anti-feminist pipeline whose only solutions are “go for a walk” and “regress into a 50s housewife.” These Tik Toks make the latter look very appealing. Slideshows of women in flowing white dresses promise days filled with picnics and baking and strong, masculine husbands doing all the hard work.

‘No work’ is an essential part of the fantasy. One woman expresses how exhausting she finds it living in ‘a very masculine world that values power, success, money’. Another says she has stopped making decisions based on money altogether. Yet another describes supporting herself on her own income as ‘survival mode’.

But success and money aren’t the features of a masculine world - they’re the obsessions of a capitalist one, and working under capitalism sucks.

People are working longer hours for less pay, in capitalist economies where the rental crisis keeps home ownership out of reach. Indeed/YouGov’s 2022 Workplace Happiness Study found that 72% of Australians have felt unhappy at work in the past year, citing demanding workloads and long hours as the leading causes for this unhappiness. A quarter of them are so unhappy they’re looking for a new job. This isn’t an Australian phenomenon. In the United Kingdom, a study conducted in 2018 found that 47% of workers were searching for a new job, for reasons including not enjoying their work and, interestingly, not feeling as if their work made a difference.

This last reason is especially damaging. In his essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, anthropologist David Graeber points out that although we now have the technology that could automate a lot of our work, we aren’t actually working any less. Instead, pointless jobs have been created to keep us grinding punishing hours. Worse, the people doing these jobs know their work is pointless. They cycle from refreshing their inbox, to waiting by the phone, to organising files, to redirecting customers in the endless maze of their call centre, and all the while it eats away at their soul. Graeber describes this as a ‘moral and spiritual damage’, like the spiritual wound divine feminine energy is meant to heal.

Women might feel Graeber’s spiritual damage more keenly when they enter the workplace because they have been taught to expect so much more. We’ve seen the girlbosses of the 2000s and 2010s - pantsuited feminist heroes who smash glass ceilings with the sharp point of their stiletto heels and claim a six figure bonus for their trouble. When this is the image of empowering feminist success, imagine the disappointment of women who go into the workplace and find that their work is less liberation and more meaningless grind. The girlboss is dead and zombified, refreshing her inbox with an atrophied index finger and dreaming a 50s daydream of baking bread in a pin-up dress. Women’s mass discontent suggests that capitalism has failed, and the effort of pretending otherwise - turning hours of bullshit work into a performance review, forwarding emails to higher-ups, making Tik Toks to sell your girlboss lifestyle - is bleeding people dry.

Yet none of these women become anti-capitalist. They don’t join unions or agitate for better pay, less hours, or anything that would make their work less painful. Often, they can’t even name these problems. Their vague discontent is instead turned inwards, and they suffer alone.

It’s similar to the mental health crisis Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism. Capitalism has privatised the symptoms of mental health. The biomedical model, which suggests that mental illnesses are literal diseases of the brain, has become more and more popular. Research is focused on finding biological explanations for mental health conditions - genetic predisposition, family history, chemical imbalances - despite the lack of conclusive results. Even Thomas Insel (former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health), a supporter of the biomedical model, has admitted that only a few of these biological causes have been replicable across different studies, and none are conclusive enough to be clinically actionable. But this biological fixation persists, conveniently minimising or eliminating any question of systemic or societal causation, even though the mental health epidemic proves that capitalism is failing to meet our mental health needs.

Art by Jasmin Small

Just as today’s modern mental health narrative pushes people to look inside themselves rather than at the world around them, the gender essentialism of divine feminine content drives women towards their own biological fixation. It acknowledges their disillusionment, and provides them with an atomised, individual solution. The problem, it insists, is inside you. There’s no need for social, political and economic reform, only personal growth. The content explains away women’s spiritual injury. It reinforces what Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” How can we fight for reform if we can’t even imagine what that reform would look like? Is this the best we can hope for?

Divine feminine and tradwife content is seductive because it avoids these tough questions. It’s far easier to focus on spiritual healing and to go back to the kitchen than it is to work for, or even imagine, an alternative to capitalism. Never mind that spiritual healing is useless if the environmental conditions that cause the spiritual damage persist, or that housewives were so miserable they resorted to amphetamines to keep that pearly-white smile. This content presents an ideal that’s comfortably couched in tradition and sepia-toned nostalgia. And when the capitalist world is grinding them to exhaustion, who can blame women for buying into an easier solution?

But this gender-essentialist solution is a lie. If you want proof that the problem is not unbalanced feminine energy, look no further than divine feminine creators’ Tik Tok bios. Every one of them is selling something. Podcasts, one-on-one coaching sessions (for $700!!!), sponsored brand partnerships. Despite preaching about letting go of ambition, ignoring monetary incentives and leaving the masculine, power-hungry world behind, they still desperately need capital. They work to survive, and although they’ve escaped the traditional 9-to-5, I doubt their careers as grifters are any more fulfilling.

Ultimately these creators don’t care about housewives or spirituality. They don’t acknowledge the practices - Buddhism, tai chi, yoga - that they steal their divine feminine healing methods from. They don’t recognise the difficult, important domestic labour that housewives do, or even teach their followers how to make good bread. They are convincing women that it’s their fault they’re unhappy and then selling them a reactionary fantasy to fix it. But this fantasy won’t save you. It hasn’t even saved them.

Capitalism doesn’t only affect women. Everybody is working and everybody hates it. Divine feminine content and the atomised individualism of today’s mental health narrative insist that these issues are wholly our own, but hasn’t the popularity of this content proved that we’re not alone in feeling this way?

I can’t give you a step-by-step guide to socialism (for that, talk to your coworkers, join a union, agitate for tenants’ rights) because I’m nineteen and don’t really know anything. But I do know there’s nothing wrong with your energy, at least nothing that a ‘feminine energy level-up course’ will fix.

Maybe there’s some cold comfort in knowing that the problem isn’t inside you; it’s all around you.

Burn Out

Grace Barbic

We’ve all heard the phrase “burn(t) out” to describe feeling exhausted and depleted following a series of demanding events, usually associated with work or study. What if the term burnout was literal? What if, when you started to get stressed, your skin started to boil and steam came out of your ears? What if lava poured from your eyes when you stress-cried, or your hair caught aflame?

This is the premise for this screenplay excerpt, aptly called Burn Out. A group of office workers have been experiencing severe burnout in their workplace, and have begun to spontaneously combust when their stress levels are too high. In this excerpt, our main character Jane and her friend and colleague Sarah are confronting their supervisor Liz about her inaction on their burnout.

JANE

This is unacceptable Liz. A beat.

LIZ

What do you want me to do about it?

JANE and SARAH launch into a rapid fire stream of dialogue, overlapping each other.

SARAH

Literally anything! You’re our boss! You’re supposed to look out for us -

JANE

- and you knew this whole time we’ve been on fire -

SARAH

- Cathy’s been on fire three times over two days! -

JANE

- how could you let this happen Liz, after everything I’ve done for you -

SARAH

- HR told me to get a fire blanket! A fucking blanket! -

JANE

- you can’t let this continue, you have to speak to Fran -

SARAH

- Linda’s skin’s about to melt off her face -

JANE

- and if you don’t go to Fran then I’m going to the media!

The two keep overlapping each other talking about how LIZ has failed them and something has to be done. They’re wildly waving the footage around and pointing to the photos, detailing the pain in their colleagues.

Art by Jasmin Small

LIZ’s face reddens the more the women talk, and smoke starts to erupt from her head. Her tummy starts to grumble and skin bubbles, ash crumbling from her eyes, before she finally combusts on her own.

Her eruption is volcanic. Lava leaks from every crevice and drapes her skin, her hair molten and eyes blazing red.

LIZ

YOU DON’T THINK I’VE TRIED?! I SPOKE TO HR THE SECOND IT STARTED IN SYDNEY. I TRIED AGAIN WHEN IT GOT TO MELBOURNE, KNOWING IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME!

The lava pours quicker.

LIZ (cont’d)

YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW?! I WAS THE FIRST! TERRIFIED AND ALONE, AND NO ONE BELIEVED ME! THEN JODIE STARTED, THEN YOU STARTED *jabs a finger at SARAH* THEN DAVE, THEN EVERYONE!

LIZ starts sobbing, the lava gradually turning to water as the eruption starts to slow. As she sobs, she picks up a bucket of water next to her desk and pours it over herself, weeping.

JANE and SARAH exchanged horrified glances, but have a sudden wave of sympathy for LIZ.

They are silent for several moments, until SARAH

So...what now?

Before Entering the IR Classroom, Do Not Forget to Leave Yourself at the Door

Yige Xu

Content Warning: discussions of racism

I have been thinking a lot about the spaces I find myself in recently. Who I am when I enter from the outside, who I become once I step within — and how strange both versions seem to me.

I have observed a sort of ritual that happens before every university tutorial. To secure the 10% participation mark, I leave myself at the door. Stepping into the classroom, I swallow my emotions and hide behind the cloak of academic rationality. I am opinionless, a blank slate student of International Relations (‘IR’), ready to receive and regurgitate what I need to know. I adopt the language of cost-benefit analysis, expected utility and measures of hard power. I make sure I am armed with the knowledge of this week’s readings so that I can draw on concepts and theories and gently push back in the right way when I am expected to.

At times, I find myself proffering “culture” or “constructivism” to the class — never as a statement, but always as a question, a gentle testing of the waters. But I am reminded again and again that culture is a mere glitch in the discussion, an inherently flawed approach to International Relations that is best left by the wayside. Although I notice a funny coincidence that these cultural approaches have mainly been formulated and “debunked” by white men, I can only return to silence and let the class resume its discussion about economic statecraft.

The objective pupil of International Relations does not see anything wrong with having to pretend she is a Japanese war criminal, advocating for the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor. It is, of course, the only way to understand how policymakers really think when faced with complex decisions. The rational third-year scholar is not personally affected when someone all but says outright that Chinese-Australians are agents of the authoritarian state. Foreign interference is, of course, an important national security issue. The raceless, genderless student does not utter a word when she overhears a classmate joke about all the “Oriental women” he cannot wait to pursue in Southeast Asia. He will, of course, be there on a government-funded scholarship.

I try my best to convince myself that culture, race and emotions have no place in International Relations — that they’re indulgences best pursued in my spare time. But there are moments when I slip. When we are given a reading about the history of Australian military culture which attributes “the conformity of Anglo-Celtic ethnic background” as the reason behind Australia’s “strong cultural values”, grounded on the “pillar [of] imperial benevolence”, I can’t help but to bring up the mere possibility of racism to the class. The expected happens — everyone goes silent, the tutor clumsily steers the conversation to the topic of mateship and I die a little inside as I watch my classmates invent clever euphemisms such as “cultural cornerstone” to skirt around the term “structural racism”.

Two years later, I find myself defending the imperial Japanese Navy’s war crimes as a rational part of their ‘national interest’ in a compulsory IR class. After, I can’t help but to ask the lecturer if there is any better way to learn about foreign policy decision-making — an essay, perhaps. I nod as he explains the importance of “putting yourself in the bad guy’s shoes”, once again choosing to ignore the collective trauma of millions in privileging his intellectual exercise.

In these moments, I am paralysed with a nauseating anxiety. I have learned to sit with it, to distract myself from it, to swallow it while accepting presentation feedback about the tone of my voice.

Art by Bob Fang

I hate that the logical thing to do is to change majors, to leave. Maybe I should’ve joined the mass exodus out of IR in first and second year. In a way, I did — I dropped out of a straight IR degree into one that is more flexible, one that allows me to pursue selfdriven research alongside my IR major.

It is through here that I channel my frustrations. I see the branding of Chinese-Australians as a security threat to be a consequence of historical animosity and a representation deficit, so I research the structural discrimination which deters us from entering federal politics. Reflecting on the constant hypersexualisation of East and Southeast Asian women and non-binary people leads me to interview a Chinese-Malaysian artist whose work is about reclaiming sexuality and desire to talk about these concerns.

I consider myself lucky that I can process my pain under the guise of “contributing to the academic field”. I am also glad that I have the space to learn my history and language at university, filling in the gaps that 17 years of internalised racism have left behind.

But I have recently found myself noticing that when I do learn my history, it is mostly from white men. I have also started feeling not less but more vulnerable, as I can no longer leave my culture, emotions, and self at the door. I learned that I have been prescribed a new role. I can and am expected to speak of my experiences and family histories to willing ears, but in doing so I become an object of sociological interest. My research receives an HD; a white man validates my un-belonging and labels it “brave” — our pain props up entire academic fields.

Is this what I must settle for?

I don’t have the capacity to think about this anyway. I write this in snatches of time between four assessments — on the bus, walking down the street, in between class and work. In an hour, I will pretend to be an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy in my foreign policy tutorial. Afterwards, I will have to formulate an academic thesis out of my trauma and structure it into an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion.

At times like this, I wish that I was the rational, emotionless student in the IR classroom — and that I did not have to confront the reality of myself waiting at the door.