Disrespecting Boundaries

Being officially on vacation, I registered for a broking software two days ago, to toy around with it, which is my preferred method of learning about stuff. Obviously, a lot of money can be made that way, so the price-tag “free” wasn’t to be taken seriously. What I hadn’t expected was that the company offering the software would call me repeatedly throughout the day, until I blocked them.

While there are very few boundaries in nature, social interaction between humans is full of them. As we can’t really choose whether we want to be part of nature as well as of society, conflicts of interest arise very often. Many boundaries aren’t clearly defined or even subjective, and sometimes we don’t even get to choose whether we want to violate a boundary, but just… which one. And as the violation of boundaries is often tightly regulated by law, knowing the law and how it’s used is an important prerequisite to successfully disrespect boundaries.

Some boundaries kill people, for example the property law that allows corporations to price water at a level where some people can’t afford to survive. So a stupid sentence like “you should always try to respect boundaries” is actually an excuse for having people killed to one’s own benefit.

This is, by the way, one of the reasons I didn’t finish my university degree. If some regulations are not to be questioned, and writing something outside of regulation causes you to be expelled, I might just as well not have a degree in the first place.

If you intend to disrespect boundaries, I can recommend practicing in virtual reality. When the internet was new, it used to be called a reincarnation of the wild West, but before that there were books. Adding an artificial distance between people communicating allows hard feelings to fizzle instead of leading to short-circuit reactions, but in a culture of hypersensitive people being offended at every kind of “micro-aggression” people swallow their anger and get sick instead.

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