This was a great post, and I know this is probably a particularly busy time for you, so thanks!
For some reason, reading this made me deeply sad. I think because I DON’T feel like I’ve experienced significant gains, or that those gains I have experienced are traded off against losses. For example, I made some long-distance moves knowing that I was trading things like strong relationships and cultural fit for financial stability (and I underestimated how much I was losing and how unable I would be to regain it). Other marginal improvements in my agency are mainly just a result of getting older.
I thought the “fhafrg ng abba” was poetic license. My “Huh, weird” was that the picture wasn’t of the actual forest. My previous impression was that you could find practically anything under a Creative Commons license, but now I suppose it is only of generic things and not specific things.
I’ve tried various daily gratitude journaling, and it didn’t seem to help. I feel bad when it is HARD to come up with specific things to be grateful for at the end of the day. But I do have success with noticing in the moment when I am experiencing a Nice Thing, and fully appreciating it at that time. I would not have expected that things like greenery, flowers, trees, and strong winds on sunny days would be particularly important to me, but after cultivating that habit it turns out that those are things that I am most likely to notice in the moment and savor.
This was a great post, and I know this is probably a particularly busy time for you, so thanks!
Heh. I tried not writing it and that didn’t work. :P
I would not have expected that things like greenery, flowers, trees, and strong winds on sunny days would be particularly important to me, but after cultivating that habit it turns out that those are things that I am most likely to notice in the moment and savor.
Same.
It’s an interesting question how much of my (and your) general-ageny-improvements can be attributed to rationality-in-particular, vs just generally getting older. I would expect some kind of generic maturity improvement regardless. AFAICT the particular ways I improved at agency involved obvious gears (mostly, “trying things” and being somewhat strategic about which things to try) that would have been present to some degree in non-rationalist-me, just not as densely.)
(Actually, I’m not sure what precisely you mean by agency—I think I tend to do more socially-agenty things, i.e. deliberately create subculture-like-things, which might look more visible, but isn’t obviously less agenty than your various Ballooning exploits)
This was a great post, and I know this is probably a particularly busy time for you, so thanks!
For some reason, reading this made me deeply sad. I think because I DON’T feel like I’ve experienced significant gains, or that those gains I have experienced are traded off against losses. For example, I made some long-distance moves knowing that I was trading things like strong relationships and cultural fit for financial stability (and I underestimated how much I was losing and how unable I would be to regain it). Other marginal improvements in my agency are mainly just a result of getting older.
I thought the “fhafrg ng abba” was poetic license. My “Huh, weird” was that the picture wasn’t of the actual forest. My previous impression was that you could find practically anything under a Creative Commons license, but now I suppose it is only of generic things and not specific things.
I’ve tried various daily gratitude journaling, and it didn’t seem to help. I feel bad when it is HARD to come up with specific things to be grateful for at the end of the day. But I do have success with noticing in the moment when I am experiencing a Nice Thing, and fully appreciating it at that time. I would not have expected that things like greenery, flowers, trees, and strong winds on sunny days would be particularly important to me, but after cultivating that habit it turns out that those are things that I am most likely to notice in the moment and savor.
Heh. I tried not writing it and that didn’t work. :P
Same.
It’s an interesting question how much of my (and your) general-ageny-improvements can be attributed to rationality-in-particular, vs just generally getting older. I would expect some kind of generic maturity improvement regardless. AFAICT the particular ways I improved at agency involved obvious gears (mostly, “trying things” and being somewhat strategic about which things to try) that would have been present to some degree in non-rationalist-me, just not as densely.)
(Actually, I’m not sure what precisely you mean by agency—I think I tend to do more socially-agenty things, i.e. deliberately create subculture-like-things, which might look more visible, but isn’t obviously less agenty than your various Ballooning exploits)