I remember liking the Bruce article when I first saw it linked here. I wish I remember why.
You sabotage yourself because you know that you shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. You’ve heard”no!” since birth and had it confirmed throughout your entire life.
That’s the author’s thesis. Your persistent problems, he says, are due to a facet of your mind that wants to lose and suffer persistently; not to suffer for exhilaration, like a man who enjoys the occasional nipple clamp, but to suffer as penance to the cosmos for being a wretched, worthless person, a person who wouldn’t ever win in a just world, and so shouldn’t win in this one. You shouldn’t be allowed to succeed, he says, and somehow we learn that from people telling us “no”.
There are a few types of “no”s that we hear throughout our lives. There are proscriptive rules for your health, like “Don’t drink from the sump pump hose” or “Don’t play on the roof”. There are proscriptive rules with a more social theme like “Don’t take your pants off in the mall” or “Don’t ask that woman about her nose ring”. Finally, there is occasional advice of infeasibility like, “Don’t invest all your saving in an Indonesian record company” or “You’re probably not smart enough to make it as an actuary.”
The last type plausibly limits people from taking the rare weird but weirdly effective life decisions. Maybe.
Anyway, there are lots of reasons why people have problems. You’re poor, you’re dumb, you’re sick, you’re ugly, you were raised in a culture without a strong work ethic, you were born in the wrong month and got grouped into a class with more developed peers, and so on. You can get around a lot of that with enough effort, but such circumstances are still not trivial. Putting at the top of your list “my strategic behavior opposed to having a nice life” is a bold choice, not least because it calls a human strategic.
I’ve had low self esteem. That’s not the unusual part. I’ve also wanted to make up for my mistakes. I even kind of understand the appeal behind self critical thoughts or the denial of impulses. But the combination of those three, of wanting to make up for existing as a inferior person by losing on purpose, is so foreign to me, and so sad. Even when I’ve had thoughts of suicide, it was always because life was unpleasant, not because my existence was a moral affront to the rest of reality. That depth of shame is just startling.
So startling I’m just going to say no. People don’t have Bruces in their heads. Humans have lots of external causes of problems and our brains don’t always work right to solve them as much as we might. Some people might even act in a Brucey way if they’ve been convinced they’re infected with Bruce Syndrome, like a counter placebo. But until I see some much stronger evidence that people have semi-conscious, self-defeating agency by default and that it’s a persistent cause of their life problems, I’m just dismissing it. Bye, Bruce.
I remember liking the Bruce article when I first saw it linked here. I wish I remember why.
That’s the author’s thesis. Your persistent problems, he says, are due to a facet of your mind that wants to lose and suffer persistently; not to suffer for exhilaration, like a man who enjoys the occasional nipple clamp, but to suffer as penance to the cosmos for being a wretched, worthless person, a person who wouldn’t ever win in a just world, and so shouldn’t win in this one. You shouldn’t be allowed to succeed, he says, and somehow we learn that from people telling us “no”.
There are a few types of “no”s that we hear throughout our lives. There are proscriptive rules for your health, like “Don’t drink from the sump pump hose” or “Don’t play on the roof”. There are proscriptive rules with a more social theme like “Don’t take your pants off in the mall” or “Don’t ask that woman about her nose ring”. Finally, there is occasional advice of infeasibility like, “Don’t invest all your saving in an Indonesian record company” or “You’re probably not smart enough to make it as an actuary.”
The last type plausibly limits people from taking the rare weird but weirdly effective life decisions. Maybe.
Anyway, there are lots of reasons why people have problems. You’re poor, you’re dumb, you’re sick, you’re ugly, you were raised in a culture without a strong work ethic, you were born in the wrong month and got grouped into a class with more developed peers, and so on. You can get around a lot of that with enough effort, but such circumstances are still not trivial. Putting at the top of your list “my strategic behavior opposed to having a nice life” is a bold choice, not least because it calls a human strategic.
I’ve had low self esteem. That’s not the unusual part. I’ve also wanted to make up for my mistakes. I even kind of understand the appeal behind self critical thoughts or the denial of impulses. But the combination of those three, of wanting to make up for existing as a inferior person by losing on purpose, is so foreign to me, and so sad. Even when I’ve had thoughts of suicide, it was always because life was unpleasant, not because my existence was a moral affront to the rest of reality. That depth of shame is just startling.
So startling I’m just going to say no. People don’t have Bruces in their heads. Humans have lots of external causes of problems and our brains don’t always work right to solve them as much as we might. Some people might even act in a Brucey way if they’ve been convinced they’re infected with Bruce Syndrome, like a counter placebo. But until I see some much stronger evidence that people have semi-conscious, self-defeating agency by default and that it’s a persistent cause of their life problems, I’m just dismissing it. Bye, Bruce.