Curated. While we tend to think about grief in the context of major loss, I think the mental skills involved are a big part of one’s regular practice of rationality (both epistemic and applied). Grieving well is about navigating the difference between reality-as-is and reality-as-you-wish-it-was. The difference between the two is most salient when there’s been loss, but the tension is always there as we always have to navigate it: either giving up on attaining our desires, clinging/fighting towards how we want things to be, or something more mature and effective that lies between. I think the last one is right yet is hard to do well. This post isn’t the entire answer, but I’d love to see more in this genre of how to tackle this hard problem.
(A related problem, in my mind, is how to work hard on something when you assign a very low probability of success.)
Curated. While we tend to think about grief in the context of major loss, I think the mental skills involved are a big part of one’s regular practice of rationality (both epistemic and applied). Grieving well is about navigating the difference between reality-as-is and reality-as-you-wish-it-was. The difference between the two is most salient when there’s been loss, but the tension is always there as we always have to navigate it: either giving up on attaining our desires, clinging/fighting towards how we want things to be, or something more mature and effective that lies between. I think the last one is right yet is hard to do well. This post isn’t the entire answer, but I’d love to see more in this genre of how to tackle this hard problem.
(A related problem, in my mind, is how to work hard on something when you assign a very low probability of success.)