I think my best advice is to be specific (with yourself at least, even if you can’t be with us).
Your post is super vague. You say you’re uncertain, but don’t specify what you’re uncertain about; you say you’re in the shit, but don’t specify what kind or how you got there. Details matter, especially if you’re trying to solve your problems with intelligence. If you’re keeping the details private for your own reasons I can respect that, but I hope you’re at least focusing on them yourself: looking at the cliff face ahead of you usually has less alpha than looking for footholds in front of you.
(I’m leaning on this in particular because it’s the main thing you’d get from a human you wouldn’t get from a RLHF’d LLM. You posted a vague & general complaint and the machines played along, either giving you vague & general advice or trying to yesand you from there into specific actions; none of them said “be more specific and concrete”)
The sensible thing for me to do would be to end this comment here, but I’m not all that sensible, and I’ve thought of some clever things to say, so I’m going to shotgun them below on the off-chance at least one of them helps:
depression
Okay, so at least part of your problem is something at least somewhat like depression. If so, I think the relevant SSC post still mostly holds up.
in a violent sea of uncertainty: drowning, exhausted, with no way out.
If it’s a sea of uncertainty, how can you be sure there’s no way out?
(While I’m taking things too literally: there was a way out for the mice, fwiw. It probably seemed like their problems were insurmountable, but they just had to wait for the scientists to fish them out. It was actually almost impossible for them to drown! I wouldn’t apply this 1:1 to your own life for obvious reasons . . . though I will remark that just waiting for things to get better has a >>0% success rate in humans.)
I don’t trust medicines very much
Therapy doesn’t imply medicines. If you get a counsellor/shrink/whatever and say “no pills”, they have to respect that; and if they don’t, you can just get a new counsellor/shrink/whatever. (Or, at least, that’s how it should work, and how it typically works in most first-world nations: you might want to check it works that way in practice where you live.)
Also, shot in the dark, but: I used to feel very similarly, because I’d read enough anecdotal horror stories that such feelings felt warranted. I then realized that all the pill-centric horror stories I’d heard were about people on antipsychotics realizing “in retrospect, these things were really bad for me and the only reason I kept taking them so long was that they impaired my decision-making process; I probably should have just talked things out with the voices in my head”; and the only anecdotes I’d heard about antidepressants tended to involve the opposite kind of feedback loop, i.e. “the antidepressants made me agentic and ambitious enough that I agentically and ambitiously stopped taking them way earlier than I should have”. Like I said, specificity matters.
(None of the above is Medical Advice, obviously.)
ideas
If you can’t believe in the possibility of Success, you can still reorient around (what our community has been calling) Dignity: “I’m going to conduct myself such that when the inevitable failure happens it’s going to be as little my fault as possible”. Your call as to whether that’s better for you vs just straight-up trying to win.
If you can’t believe in the possibility of Success, you can still reorient around (what our community has been calling) Dignity: “I’m going to conduct myself such that when the inevitable failure happens it’s going to be as little my fault as possible”. Your call as to whether that’s better for you vs just straight-up trying to win.
Is this enough to keep you motivated and increase your life satisfaction?
The sensible thing for me to do would be to end this comment here, but I’m not all that sensible, and I’ve thought of some clever things to say, so I’m going to shotgun them below on the off-chance at least one of them helps:
haha, Thanks, I love that it’s not very sensible, sometimes.
I think my best advice is to be specific (with yourself at least, even if you can’t be with us).
Your post is super vague. You say you’re uncertain, but don’t specify what you’re uncertain about; you say you’re in the shit, but don’t specify what kind or how you got there. Details matter, especially if you’re trying to solve your problems with intelligence. If you’re keeping the details private for your own reasons I can respect that, but I hope you’re at least focusing on them yourself: looking at the cliff face ahead of you usually has less alpha than looking for footholds in front of you.
(I’m leaning on this in particular because it’s the main thing you’d get from a human you wouldn’t get from a RLHF’d LLM. You posted a vague & general complaint and the machines played along, either giving you vague & general advice or trying to yesand you from there into specific actions; none of them said “be more specific and concrete”)
The sensible thing for me to do would be to end this comment here, but I’m not all that sensible, and I’ve thought of some clever things to say, so I’m going to shotgun them below on the off-chance at least one of them helps:
Okay, so at least part of your problem is something at least somewhat like depression. If so, I think the relevant SSC post still mostly holds up.
If it’s a sea of uncertainty, how can you be sure there’s no way out?
(While I’m taking things too literally: there was a way out for the mice, fwiw. It probably seemed like their problems were insurmountable, but they just had to wait for the scientists to fish them out. It was actually almost impossible for them to drown! I wouldn’t apply this 1:1 to your own life for obvious reasons . . . though I will remark that just waiting for things to get better has a >>0% success rate in humans.)
Therapy doesn’t imply medicines. If you get a counsellor/shrink/whatever and say “no pills”, they have to respect that; and if they don’t, you can just get a new counsellor/shrink/whatever. (Or, at least, that’s how it should work, and how it typically works in most first-world nations: you might want to check it works that way in practice where you live.)
Also, shot in the dark, but: I used to feel very similarly, because I’d read enough anecdotal horror stories that such feelings felt warranted. I then realized that all the pill-centric horror stories I’d heard were about people on antipsychotics realizing “in retrospect, these things were really bad for me and the only reason I kept taking them so long was that they impaired my decision-making process; I probably should have just talked things out with the voices in my head”; and the only anecdotes I’d heard about antidepressants tended to involve the opposite kind of feedback loop, i.e. “the antidepressants made me agentic and ambitious enough that I agentically and ambitiously stopped taking them way earlier than I should have”. Like I said, specificity matters.
(None of the above is Medical Advice, obviously.)
If you can’t believe in the possibility of Success, you can still reorient around (what our community has been calling) Dignity: “I’m going to conduct myself such that when the inevitable failure happens it’s going to be as little my fault as possible”. Your call as to whether that’s better for you vs just straight-up trying to win.
Is this enough to keep you motivated and increase your life satisfaction?
haha, Thanks, I love that it’s not very sensible, sometimes.