Not a conclusive answer, but I’ve had cases where I’ve gone “oh I didn’t realize how bad I was feeling” for more mundane reasons. Like not realizing how tired I was before I managed to take a nap, not realizing how hungry I was before I got some food, and not realizing how uncomfortable I found some social situation before I got out of it. It seems like a default tendency of the mind to suppress awareness of discomfort it can’t currently do anything about.
Thanks, I think this could be what is happening. But: 1. Your examples that illustrate confusion/mistakes about one’s mental state are, how to put it, small-scale. I feel like there’s a huge leap between “Sometimes a person doesn’t realize how tired they are for a few hours (maybe days)” or “Some fraction of people who get depressed don’t realize it for months (maybe years)” and “Basically everyone’s default state is suffering they’re unaware of, and they don’t realize this during their whole lives”. Maybe you could come up with examples where misconceptions about one’s mental state are more severe, longer-lasting or more common than in my depression example, but I think there would probably be a huge gap between that and the “default state is suffering” hypothesis. 2. My understanding is that the typical reported experience of high school is mostly negative valence, but as people grow up they start to look back on that time in their lives ever more fondly. I don’t have a great model of how this works psychologically, but, when it happens, I’m inclined to think that the changed perspective is wrong. That the high-school-version of a person was more correct about his mental state than the current-version. All of which is to say that when one thinks “My past-self was unaware (or mistaken) of important parts of their conscious experience”, in most cases, this is correct, but in the high school and constant-suffering cases, it seems likely to me that one is wrong.
Are you confident that those are cases where you were actually having the feeling, but were unaware of it? I think sometimes it’s more a case of “my body needed [food/sleep], and this explains why I was feeling [irritable/weak/distracted/sad]”, rather than literally “I was feeling [hungry/tired] but didn’t notice it”.
I’d say it was something like “feeling [weak/confused/etc.] but having temporarily forgotten what not having those feelings is like, so thinking that I feel normal”.
Not a conclusive answer, but I’ve had cases where I’ve gone “oh I didn’t realize how bad I was feeling” for more mundane reasons. Like not realizing how tired I was before I managed to take a nap, not realizing how hungry I was before I got some food, and not realizing how uncomfortable I found some social situation before I got out of it. It seems like a default tendency of the mind to suppress awareness of discomfort it can’t currently do anything about.
Thanks, I think this could be what is happening. But:
1. Your examples that illustrate confusion/mistakes about one’s mental state are, how to put it, small-scale. I feel like there’s a huge leap between “Sometimes a person doesn’t realize how tired they are for a few hours (maybe days)” or “Some fraction of people who get depressed don’t realize it for months (maybe years)” and “Basically everyone’s default state is suffering they’re unaware of, and they don’t realize this during their whole lives”. Maybe you could come up with examples where misconceptions about one’s mental state are more severe, longer-lasting or more common than in my depression example, but I think there would probably be a huge gap between that and the “default state is suffering” hypothesis.
2. My understanding is that the typical reported experience of high school is mostly negative valence, but as people grow up they start to look back on that time in their lives ever more fondly. I don’t have a great model of how this works psychologically, but, when it happens, I’m inclined to think that the changed perspective is wrong. That the high-school-version of a person was more correct about his mental state than the current-version. All of which is to say that when one thinks “My past-self was unaware (or mistaken) of important parts of their conscious experience”, in most cases, this is correct, but in the high school and constant-suffering cases, it seems likely to me that one is wrong.
Are you confident that those are cases where you were actually having the feeling, but were unaware of it? I think sometimes it’s more a case of “my body needed [food/sleep], and this explains why I was feeling [irritable/weak/distracted/sad]”, rather than literally “I was feeling [hungry/tired] but didn’t notice it”.
I’d say it was something like “feeling [weak/confused/etc.] but having temporarily forgotten what not having those feelings is like, so thinking that I feel normal”.