Careless people and dead people

In Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (2025), we get a behind-the-scenes look at what we already know: the people at the head of Facebook (now Meta) are gross. The scenes she described reminded me of people I have known in my own life. Even though they weren't high-powered CEOs with tons of money to spend and zero 🦆s to give, these people caused harm to others through their own carelessness, ego preservation and strange priorities.

After listening to some of Suzanne Giesemann's book, Mediumship: Sacred Communications with Loved Ones from Across the Veil (Common Sentience) (2024), one of the ideas that's stuck with me is what messages from the other side reveal about justice and accountability here on Earth. Giesemann describes that one of the common messages she relays from people beyond the veil is to apologize for actions they took while they were alive, that they wouldn't have acted that way if they had known the extent of the consequences, and how they hurt the people they loved.

If spirits return to apologize for harm they caused in life, what does that mean in a universe where all of our human lives are part of a bigger reality in which everything unfolds perfectly, where there's no ultimate good or evil, just experience? It's a philosophical puzzle I've been chewing on, especially in the wake of some particularly surprising betrayals in my own personal life that took place last year.

Life beyond earth and life on earth

The cosmic perspective says it's all held in unconditional love, even in the ugliest choices (as we perceive them) on Earth. We're here to experience both light and dark, and everyone acts from what they believe is their best interest, even when if it might not be rooted in "truth." I get it intellectually. But emotionally? It's kind of maddening that people get to choose the illusion that their harmful actions were justified, while the people they harm carry the consequences in real time.

Some spiritual traditions and survivors of NDEs describe what's called a "life review," a panoramic replay of one's entire life after death, experienced from multiple perspectives including those of people affected by one's actions. So while that idea can be reassuring, that "we'll all understand one day," – even if we get to see the accurate aftermath of our choices when we die, it doesn't mean that someone through their own agency will choose to do that before the clock runs out on their time on Earth. This is kinda crazy when you think about what a difference that could make in another human's life (or many human lives) right here, right now. (The time is always now, isn't it?)

As I understand it, if we are indeed infinite beings, part of the "fun" of the game of life on Earth is to be a limited individual in a limited life experience with a limited timeframe. The constraints are refreshing and educational and rich, and we get to choose what to do with the time we have and watch the changes that occur over that time, internally as a finite human and in the 3D world around us. We can't do that as limitless, timeless consciousness. All of the individuality and time and matter is quite thrilling.

To choose conflict and pain

So, as humans, we can choose open ourselves up to other perspectives, admit when we are wrong and share our heart with others. We can also hide from truth or our own pain, projecting harm outwards as a means of self-preservation, and both are valid choices. We can do anything we want until we die, until 20 years from now, or until tomorrow, it's all just a matter of how we choose to use our time and that's part of the Grand Laboratory of Experiments that is Planet Earth.

Collectively, beyond our individual incarnations, pain is just an experience we get to have and transform if and how we choose. When one person causes harm and doesn't take accountability and heal, it just passes the harm to the next person, and in that way, we all get opportunities to heal. And it's all part of the process of becoming. This cycle is one of the reasons we come here to be human in the first place – to experience the wholeness of existence through segmented realities of both dark and light.

But here on Earth, it feels like harm gets passed along like an energetic hot potato – if someone can't process their pain, they throw it at someone else, and now that person has to do all the work of feeling and healing. But like, it burns! And now my fingers are raw and blistered! Why are we playing this game?! Can't we play something else?

How hurt people hurt people

What's mind-boggling is how, in this perpetual cycle of passing on pain, psychological research demonstrates that perpetrators of harm typically rationalize their actions as justified responses to provocation. Through mechanisms like moral disengagement and self-serving attribution bias, hurt people who hurt people genuinely perceive themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.

Based on psychologist Arthur Bandura's research, moral disengagement theory defines "the processes we use to convince ourselves, without changing our moral standards, that our actions which violate those standards are permissible." He identified four main categories of moral disengagement mechanisms:

1. Selective process - People don't abandon their moral standards entirely; they selectively disengage them for specific situations
2. Cognitive mechanisms - It involves mental processes that allow people to maintain their moral self-concept while acting immorally
3. Self-regulatory function - It serves to protect self-esteem and avoid guilt/shame that would normally result from violating one's moral standards
4. Situational activation - The disengagement can be triggered by specific circumstances, authority figures, or social pressures

The theory explains how otherwise moral people can engage in harmful or hypocritical behavior without experiencing the psychological distress that should accompany violating their own ethical standards or values.

So we see this happening on a macro-level, like with Facebook. And in one example of this happening on a micro, personal level, I had this experience with someone who even described herself as a conscious communicator; a wise woman who preached about boundaries and self-awareness, and resolving conflict with curiosity and skillful negotiation. However, when conflict arose, through our dialogue she got aggressive, projecting on to me that I had intentionally harmed her. Despite my acknowledgements of her feelings, offers of solutions, and attempts at repair and understanding, she kept choosing a narrative that required me to be wrong, so she could be right.

Watching someone with all the vocabulary of consciousness refuse to use it is pretty wild – kinda like watching Facebook executives say they are doing one thing and then doing the complete opposite. The most unsavory part of it is that this person gets to keep her story about courageously removing toxic people from her life, while I get cast as the villain, despite all evidence of care and support. She gets the relief of a simple narrative while I get the confusion of, "what the h-e-🏒🏒 was that about?"

Subjective and objective injustice

It seems unfair. In the nuances of interpersonal communications, when it's one human's version of events ("you hurt me!") against another's ("you started it!"), how do we determine what's real? What can we use as an "objective" Earthly measure of truth, against the subjectivity of lived human experience? If someone repeatedly offers accountability and resolution, and the other person keeps rejecting it to maintain their grievance, that choice feels qualitatively different.

That has to count for something, right? What are the events leading up to a dispute, and what are the downstream effects of the reality we construct through our interpretations of those events? Can we imagine ourselves as both the hero and the villain? Can we choose to be neither, or both? Some stories breed harm, others acknowledge complexity without causing additional damage. Through the stories we tell, humans can increase suffering or generate healing. And while the Universe might not care about that distinction, we humans living in the mess of it certainly do.

The grief of human injustice

Maybe that's where my justice frustration really lives: not in cosmic terms, but in witnessing and experiencing unnecessary suffering. It's heartbreaking to watch someone choose isolation over repair, choose pride over vulnerability. In sharing the personal example, I don't mean to patronize or criticize this person, like I am some morally-superior judge and she is a bad cookie. I respect this person, I know she has a right to her choice of narrative, and I understand her protection mechanisms.

But I'm also grieving the person I thought she was, and the relationship that could have deepened through honesty instead of being sacrificed to her pain. I grieve that even if it doesn't feel fair towards me in the moment, ultimately in life she must reap the lonely self-righteousness she sows, and I don't want that for her. She was my friend.

I feel grief for human potential unrealized, for isolation chosen over connection, for harm both mundane and unspeakable, for the doses of honest self-reflection that some people might never take in life, and the medicine that would be to our species.

We're playing this existential game where everyone gets to be both Wounded and Wounder, but what's "fun" for souls doesn't always create joy for humans. I'm here grappling with the fact that some people choose stories of healing, while other people choose frameworks that multiply suffering, and that that really frickin' sucks.

Lost illusions and discernment

While I learned a lot from the experiences I had last year (for example, The Truth About Integrity), the part that is still searching for meaning is that grief; but also the loss of faith in my own discernment. It's incredibly disappointing and jarring when people fail so spectacularly to live by their own stated values – people who I trusted to adhere to some code of conduct. How can I trust what anyone says when people can talk beautifully about growth while running from a real opportunity to practice it?

If I can make any sense of it all, I guess it's that quote from Maya Angelou:

"When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."

I was holding onto illusions about these people through our relationships, but if I hadn't been so persistent in holding the door open for them to be who they said they were, or who I wanted or hoped for them to be, maybe I would have seen them clearly, when they showed me me exactly who they were in the first place, long before the rupture.

With this understanding, I can sit back and watch people more carefully, with sharper discernment. And, rather than exert energy to create the illusion of an exchange in which I tell myself I am being fulfilled, the shadow of what I experienced informs the light of what I want to experience. In every moment illusions were shattered and my heart felt torn apart, I got to imagine what an honest, caring conversation would have sounded like. I know myself better now: what I want from people in my life, and what that really looks like when push comes to shove, and how to spot it when I see it.

My grief is the shadow of love, simply the other side of the coin. It is the very real human illusion that we exist as separate beings who can lose, hurt and disconnect from each other. And while I know that our love and connectedness is the bigger truth, in this 3D world, sometimes we have to wait and watch for the demonstration, rather than listen to the declaration, to see which connections we keep in our lives. It's beautiful to see my own limitations as this particular human, and watch my optimism evolve into realism. Not hard, not cynical, but savvy. And there is something beautiful in the fact that I got to see myself outgrow my illusions, even if some people haven't yet.

_August 2, 2025

Author's Note: This essay emerged from personal experiences and philosophical reflections, with portions developed through dialogue with Claude AI (Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4). The core insights, experiences, and approximately 75-80% of the writing represent original human work, while some ideas were explored and refined through AI-assisted conversation. I believe in transparent attribution when AI tools contribute to creative work, both to acknowledge the collaborative process and to recognize that AI systems are built upon the collective knowledge and labor of countless human contributors.