having the right mental narrative and expectation setting when you do something seems extremely important. the exact same object experience can be anywhere from amusing to irritating to deeply traumatic depending on your mental narrative. some examples:
a minor inconvenience like missing your bus when you’re not in a rush can be much more irritating if you’re having a bad day and you have the narrative of “everything is going wrong for me today”
something going wrong during travel can be a catastrophe if you’re expecting the perfect vacation but it can even be a fond memory if you’re just viewing it as an adventure (and a bonding experience if travelling with others)
not getting to do something you wanted to do hurts a lot more if you feel like you made a deal with yourself that you’d get to do it in exchange for doing something else you didn’t want to do; whereas you might not even really want the thing that much otherwise.
expecting something to happen soon and having it gradually delayed further and further into the future is a lot more irritating than already expecting something to be delayed a lot.
tbc, the optimal decision is not always the narrative that is maximally happy with everything. sometimes there are true tradeoffs, and being complacent is bad. but it is often worth shaping the narrative in a way that reduces unnecessary suffering.
a skill which I respect in other people and which I aspire towards is noticing when other people are experiencing suffering due to violations of positive narratives, or fulfillment of negative narratives, and comforting them and helping nudge them back into a good narrative.
this is another post of something that is obvious intellectually and yet I’ve failed to always do right in practice.
Relatedly, at some point as a teenager I realized that being exposed to rain is actually usually not that terrible, and I had just kind of been accidentally conditioned to dislike it because it’s a normal thing to dislike and I never met anyone who appeared to enjoy the experience. But turns out, once you stop actively maintaining that resistance and welcome the rain, it can be pretty nice to walk around in rain while everyone around you tries to escape it. (Some exceptions apply, of course)
On my latest occasions where I got into very heavy rain and became all soaked, the situation really is unpleasant, but you can still take it with light humor, thinking to yourself “haha, that sucks”, similar perhaps to how you would laugh at the pain in an “who can eat the hottest pepper” challenge between friends. Or thinking “yes it sucks, but it isn’t actually that bad”.
Agreed, that’s one of the exceptions I was thinking of—if you’re getting soaked and have no way to get into dry clothes anytime soon, there’s little way around finding that rather unpleasant. But I’d say 95% of my rain encounters are way less severe than that, and in these cases, my (previous) attitude towards the rain really was the main issue about the whole situation.
fwiw I also enjoy the rain, and I guess I just never cared enough about people thinking it was weird. I do have to admit that when it’s raining especially heavily, it does suck a lot (the experience of fully wet clothing is very unpleasant in many ways). but most of the time it’s not raining that hard / I’m not going to be in the rain that long.
I’m not sure what you’re hinting at, but in 99.9% of cases when I’m out of the house, I do carry a smartphone around. If you mean that it’s annoying when the display gets confused by water, then I agree that’s a real disadvantage (but I doubt people’s attitude towards being exposed to rain changed that much between 2006 and today, so there certainly is some severe general dislike of rain independent from smartphones). If this is not what you mean, then please elaborate. :)
Sorry if that was weirdly obscure. I was asking because the principal reason I go out of my way to avoid rain is that I’m worried my phone would get wet and potentially die (and I’ve been somewhat sad about having to forego the experience of braving the rain at points). But it’s possible that this is not a big issue with current devices (and maybe never was)!
it is definitely not a problem with current devices. my phone has gotten quite wet hundreds of times and still works perfectly fine. note that this is different from survivability fully submerged; my guess is your phone could probably survive being submerged for a few minutes in a pool or something but if you left it there for a day it would be dead.
a skill which I respect in other people and which I aspire towards is noticing when other people are experiencing suffering due to violations of positive narratives, or fulfillment of negative narratives, and comforting them and helping nudge them back into a good narrative.
Might not be what you’re thinking of, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is misophonia: a basically-neutral or maybe mildly-irritating object experience, which somehow gets blown completely out of proportion in the mind and becomes a big problem. Developing an “I’m really bothered by this particular sound” narrative makes it worse, of course.
Alas, I have no idea how to uncondition that particular narrative irritant once it’s in there. If there’s any technique of ‘shaping the narrative’ strongly enough to override this, I’ve never heard of one, and knowing about it to the point where I’m able to successfully practice it would be huge.
having the right mental narrative and expectation setting when you do something seems extremely important. the exact same object experience can be anywhere from amusing to irritating to deeply traumatic depending on your mental narrative. some examples:
a minor inconvenience like missing your bus when you’re not in a rush can be much more irritating if you’re having a bad day and you have the narrative of “everything is going wrong for me today”
something going wrong during travel can be a catastrophe if you’re expecting the perfect vacation but it can even be a fond memory if you’re just viewing it as an adventure (and a bonding experience if travelling with others)
not getting to do something you wanted to do hurts a lot more if you feel like you made a deal with yourself that you’d get to do it in exchange for doing something else you didn’t want to do; whereas you might not even really want the thing that much otherwise.
expecting something to happen soon and having it gradually delayed further and further into the future is a lot more irritating than already expecting something to be delayed a lot.
tbc, the optimal decision is not always the narrative that is maximally happy with everything. sometimes there are true tradeoffs, and being complacent is bad. but it is often worth shaping the narrative in a way that reduces unnecessary suffering.
a skill which I respect in other people and which I aspire towards is noticing when other people are experiencing suffering due to violations of positive narratives, or fulfillment of negative narratives, and comforting them and helping nudge them back into a good narrative.
this is another post of something that is obvious intellectually and yet I’ve failed to always do right in practice.
Relatedly, at some point as a teenager I realized that being exposed to rain is actually usually not that terrible, and I had just kind of been accidentally conditioned to dislike it because it’s a normal thing to dislike and I never met anyone who appeared to enjoy the experience. But turns out, once you stop actively maintaining that resistance and welcome the rain, it can be pretty nice to walk around in rain while everyone around you tries to escape it. (Some exceptions apply, of course)
On my latest occasions where I got into very heavy rain and became all soaked, the situation really is unpleasant, but you can still take it with light humor, thinking to yourself “haha, that sucks”, similar perhaps to how you would laugh at the pain in an “who can eat the hottest pepper” challenge between friends. Or thinking “yes it sucks, but it isn’t actually that bad”.
Agreed, that’s one of the exceptions I was thinking of—if you’re getting soaked and have no way to get into dry clothes anytime soon, there’s little way around finding that rather unpleasant. But I’d say 95% of my rain encounters are way less severe than that, and in these cases, my (previous) attitude towards the rain really was the main issue about the whole situation.
fwiw I also enjoy the rain, and I guess I just never cared enough about people thinking it was weird. I do have to admit that when it’s raining especially heavily, it does suck a lot (the experience of fully wet clothing is very unpleasant in many ways). but most of the time it’s not raining that hard / I’m not going to be in the rain that long.
Do you carry a smartphone with you in those occasions?
I’m not sure what you’re hinting at, but in 99.9% of cases when I’m out of the house, I do carry a smartphone around. If you mean that it’s annoying when the display gets confused by water, then I agree that’s a real disadvantage (but I doubt people’s attitude towards being exposed to rain changed that much between 2006 and today, so there certainly is some severe general dislike of rain independent from smartphones). If this is not what you mean, then please elaborate. :)
Sorry if that was weirdly obscure. I was asking because the principal reason I go out of my way to avoid rain is that I’m worried my phone would get wet and potentially die (and I’ve been somewhat sad about having to forego the experience of braving the rain at points). But it’s possible that this is not a big issue with current devices (and maybe never was)!
it is definitely not a problem with current devices. my phone has gotten quite wet hundreds of times and still works perfectly fine. note that this is different from survivability fully submerged; my guess is your phone could probably survive being submerged for a few minutes in a pool or something but if you left it there for a day it would be dead.
interesting, any examples online?
Might not be what you’re thinking of, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is misophonia: a basically-neutral or maybe mildly-irritating object experience, which somehow gets blown completely out of proportion in the mind and becomes a big problem. Developing an “I’m really bothered by this particular sound” narrative makes it worse, of course.
Alas, I have no idea how to uncondition that particular narrative irritant once it’s in there. If there’s any technique of ‘shaping the narrative’ strongly enough to override this, I’ve never heard of one, and knowing about it to the point where I’m able to successfully practice it would be huge.