I have had similar experiences with getting lost in the meta, as well as the isolated experience that it provides. In my case, it would manifest as me focusing on trying to improve my big-picture “system metaphor” for my IFS-esque mental multi-threading architecture (one of my most useful constructs), even when I was well past the point where it was worth trying to further refine the top-down granularity.
I did notice the trend eventually, and once I consciously acknowledged the problem I was able to visualize some fairly straightforward paths away from it… except that external circumstances were keeping me from having the resources I would need to act upon those paths. As an attempt to summarize: the system metaphor development was pretty low-computation due to it being a fishing expedition via intuition pump, and the more grounded paths I identified all required major concentration shifts away from daily routines that I couldn’t afford.
I ended up having to make a pretty major environment shift to try and escape that cycle, basically ditching parts of my life that were tying up the resources I wanted to draw upon to follow the non-meta paths. This was a fairly recent change and the dust hasn’t yet settled, but I’ve been able to hit the ground running again on non-meta activities.
I have had similar experiences with getting lost in the meta, as well as the isolated experience that it provides. In my case, it would manifest as me focusing on trying to improve my big-picture “system metaphor” for my IFS-esque mental multi-threading architecture (one of my most useful constructs), even when I was well past the point where it was worth trying to further refine the top-down granularity.
I did notice the trend eventually, and once I consciously acknowledged the problem I was able to visualize some fairly straightforward paths away from it… except that external circumstances were keeping me from having the resources I would need to act upon those paths. As an attempt to summarize: the system metaphor development was pretty low-computation due to it being a fishing expedition via intuition pump, and the more grounded paths I identified all required major concentration shifts away from daily routines that I couldn’t afford.
I ended up having to make a pretty major environment shift to try and escape that cycle, basically ditching parts of my life that were tying up the resources I wanted to draw upon to follow the non-meta paths. This was a fairly recent change and the dust hasn’t yet settled, but I’ve been able to hit the ground running again on non-meta activities.