At every moment that you have to put up with fools, you have the option to choose to be patient, to not interrupt their ramblings. You can feign losing your temper with them if it will result in a better outcome, but no matter what, it is always better to be capable of continuing to put up with them. And when you reframe patience as a choice, that becomes possible. [...] Either Ego Depletion doesn’t exist, I don’t experience it, or I haven’t been in annoying enough situations to experience it. But I have never felt that I couldn’t possibly continue to choose patience, despite having bad executive function (lol)
I’ve experienced something close, which was really weird because I normally experience things the way you describe. I’m not ashamed to yell at someone if it’s the right thing to do, so I don’t have any motivation to pretend things “aren’t my choice”. As a result things almost always feel like a choice, it’s almost always easy to choose to not take anger out on people, and the times when I choose anger it actually works because there were reasons to choose it.
The time where that broke down wasn’t an exceptionally annoying situation, but it was after a month of being overloaded with stakes high enough that I couldn’t afford to decline to take on the stress. The way it felt is like each time an imperfect decision is made there’s a rounding error to deal with, and work to do maintain connection between my reflective thinking and my object level thinking. And then after enough overload I just couldn’t repair the damage as fast as it had been accumulating, so I was starting to become an outsider to my own behavior.
Not like “Leave me alone, I can’t help it! Not my responsibility”, but like “That idiot is about to make a big mistake. I’d stop him if I could, but he’s not gonna listen to me”—only I was talking about myself.
This is really interesting! The closest I’ve come to your experience is probably a specific time in high-school when I was having a meltdown with an unhelpful teacher that was telling me it was my fault, and I literally couldn’t control my body or think straight. But I think my thing was much more of a physical reaction as opposed to a decision-making one. (I hope everything worked out!)
I’ve experienced something close, which was really weird because I normally experience things the way you describe. I’m not ashamed to yell at someone if it’s the right thing to do, so I don’t have any motivation to pretend things “aren’t my choice”. As a result things almost always feel like a choice, it’s almost always easy to choose to not take anger out on people, and the times when I choose anger it actually works because there were reasons to choose it.
The time where that broke down wasn’t an exceptionally annoying situation, but it was after a month of being overloaded with stakes high enough that I couldn’t afford to decline to take on the stress. The way it felt is like each time an imperfect decision is made there’s a rounding error to deal with, and work to do maintain connection between my reflective thinking and my object level thinking. And then after enough overload I just couldn’t repair the damage as fast as it had been accumulating, so I was starting to become an outsider to my own behavior.
Not like “Leave me alone, I can’t help it! Not my responsibility”, but like “That idiot is about to make a big mistake. I’d stop him if I could, but he’s not gonna listen to me”—only I was talking about myself.
Welcome to LW :)
This is really interesting! The closest I’ve come to your experience is probably a specific time in high-school when I was having a meltdown with an unhelpful teacher that was telling me it was my fault, and I literally couldn’t control my body or think straight. But I think my thing was much more of a physical reaction as opposed to a decision-making one. (I hope everything worked out!)
Thanks for welcoming me! I’m glad to be here :3