To me, it also seems you undervalue introspection. This can be bad because if you think introspection is not useful, you will underuse it.
Most people I expect can’t tell the difference between “I’m unhappy in my profession” and “I’m unhappy with my immediate manager”
That might be correct, not because it is impossible for these people to introspect, but because they have not learned it. Most people don’t hold off on proposing solutions but I would be surprised if they could not learn to do it.
I am sure I can tell if I am unhappy because of my job or my boss. It is likely I wouldn’t have been able to tell a year ago when I thought I was good at introspection while being terrible at it. So terrible, that it is hard to imagine how I could have been worse.
How is that possible? Well, I thought I was good at introspection because I was very good at certain kinds of introspection. E.g. introspecting on how I do analytical reasoning, while I do it. But I was terrible at emotional introspection. I only had the concept of introspection. Now it is clear to me that there are multiple kinds of introspection. I was blind to emotions, without realizing this.
Before I got better at introspection, all of my negative feelings could have been described as nonspecific discomfort. But it was really not nonspecific at all. It was just that I had ignored and suppressed my emotions so much that they got disassociated from their actual causes. So I would feel bad but didn’t know why. I basically did exactly what Hazard talks about here. I did this basically for every negative emotion I experienced.
But then I discovered this tek to introspect, and it seems to work quite well. I have applied it maybe 8 times now. Mostly to emotions that at first seem nonspecific. In my experience, most emotions are actually non-specific, even if they are temporally linked very tightly.
E.g. if I experience social rejection, I normally feel good at first but after 15 minutes I start to feel bad. It seems like it should be clear to me that this is because of the social rejection, but it’s not. It will seem like the most likely explanation to me, but there will be uncertainty about if this is actually what is going on. This is ridiculous maybe I am especially bad at analyzing emotions without spinning up a conscious expliitit optimization process. But once I use the technique I linked above it becomes very clear why I feel bad. The interesting thing is that once you understand the underlying cause of the nonspecific comfort, it disappears. Without you doing anything.
This makes sort of sense. Once you have truly understood what a specific feeling “wants you to accomplish” there is really no more point in it sticking around. Now that you have understood the feeling you can either optimize for getting what the feeling wants, or you can realize that the feeling doesn’t actually make sense in the current situation. Doing the appropriate thing will make the feeling go away. At least that is what happened so far for me.
To me, it also seems you undervalue introspection. This can be bad because if you think introspection is not useful, you will underuse it.
That might be correct, not because it is impossible for these people to introspect, but because they have not learned it. Most people don’t hold off on proposing solutions but I would be surprised if they could not learn to do it.
I am sure I can tell if I am unhappy because of my job or my boss. It is likely I wouldn’t have been able to tell a year ago when I thought I was good at introspection while being terrible at it. So terrible, that it is hard to imagine how I could have been worse.
How is that possible? Well, I thought I was good at introspection because I was very good at certain kinds of introspection. E.g. introspecting on how I do analytical reasoning, while I do it. But I was terrible at emotional introspection. I only had the concept of introspection. Now it is clear to me that there are multiple kinds of introspection. I was blind to emotions, without realizing this.
Before I got better at introspection, all of my negative feelings could have been described as nonspecific discomfort. But it was really not nonspecific at all. It was just that I had ignored and suppressed my emotions so much that they got disassociated from their actual causes. So I would feel bad but didn’t know why. I basically did exactly what Hazard talks about here. I did this basically for every negative emotion I experienced.
But then I discovered this tek to introspect, and it seems to work quite well. I have applied it maybe 8 times now. Mostly to emotions that at first seem nonspecific. In my experience, most emotions are actually non-specific, even if they are temporally linked very tightly.
E.g. if I experience social rejection, I normally feel good at first but after 15 minutes I start to feel bad. It seems like it should be clear to me that this is because of the social rejection, but it’s not. It will seem like the most likely explanation to me, but there will be uncertainty about if this is actually what is going on. This is ridiculous maybe I am especially bad at analyzing emotions without spinning up a conscious expliitit optimization process. But once I use the technique I linked above it becomes very clear why I feel bad. The interesting thing is that once you understand the underlying cause of the nonspecific comfort, it disappears. Without you doing anything.
This makes sort of sense. Once you have truly understood what a specific feeling “wants you to accomplish” there is really no more point in it sticking around. Now that you have understood the feeling you can either optimize for getting what the feeling wants, or you can realize that the feeling doesn’t actually make sense in the current situation. Doing the appropriate thing will make the feeling go away. At least that is what happened so far for me.