Oh come on, Eliezer. These strategies aren’t that alien.
I remember a time in my early years, feeling apprehensive about entering adolescence and inevitably transforming into a stereotypical rebellious teenager. It would have been not only boring and cliche but also an affront to every good thing I thought about myself. I didn’t want to become a rebellious teenager, and so I decided, before I was overwhelmed with teenage hormones, that I wouldn’t become one. And it turns out that intentional steering of one’s self-narrative can (sometimes) be quite effective (constrained by what’s physically possible, of course)! (Not saying that I couldn’t have done with a bit more epistemological rebellion in my youth.)
The second one comes pretty naturally to me, too. I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant. Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things. Probably not the best thing for everyone to be like that, though.
There’s also someone I know personally who definitely falls into the third trap, and who is definitely among those for whom this advice would not be helpful at all. She is a genuinely loving, compassionate, and selfless person, but that very selflessness sometimes manifests in a physically debilitating way. Not long after I first got to know her, I noticed that she seemed to exaggerate her reactions to things, not maliciously or even consciously, but more as a sort of moral obligation. As if by not overreacting to every small mishap, it would prove that she didn’t care. As if by not sacrificing her own well-being for the sake of helping everyone around her, it would prove that she didn’t love them. I think at some point in the past, she defined her character as someone who reacts strongly to the things that matter to others, but her subconscious has since twisted this to the point where she now tends to stress herself out over other people’s problems to the point where she becomes physically ill. Again, I don’t think she want to make a martyr out of herself, but I think her self-predicting, motor-directing circuitry thinks that she needs to be one.
An additional possibly-not-helpful bit of advice for the existentially anxious: take a page from Stoicism. Try to imagine all the way things could go disastrously wrong, and try to coax yourself into being emotionally at peace with those outcomes, insofar as they are outside of your control. Strive as much as possible to steer things toward a better future with the tools and resources you have available to you, but practice equanimity towards everything else.
> I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant. > Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things.
This sounds pretty similar to myself, therefore I have some questions:
In the past did you have a lot of overwhelmingly intense emotions? Do you sometimes go from almost non-awareness of feeling (or feeling but weakly) to overwhelming emotion in a very short span? Does encountering information also bring with it emotions? Do you have alexithymia? Are you able to enter your body and basically stay there for 30 minutes without returning to analysis or abstract thought? Does doing this affect your emotions at all?
Is there an internal sense that there is a part of your mind that is ‘personality’+‘analysis/thoughts’, and a part that is ‘where all of the qualia happens’? Possibly also with a third part that is ‘emotions’? These might be divided a bit differently.
For me, the ‘where all of the qualia happens’ component was acting as a blockade between ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’ - it enabled thinking to happen even during intense emotions, but seems to have caused alexithymia. And ‘pushing that to the side’ makes intense emotions available to my sense of experiencing things, and thus available for thinking about/analyzing. Instead of being inaccessible.
All of this happened because as a child during tantrums I set up a ‘mental space’ where I could perform logic and analysis even while having extremely intense emotions. This seems to be why people say that I am ‘like a robot’ or ‘an absurdly analytical person’ - because I am actively suppressing emotions through that dissociated? state. All the time.
So you might get some benefit from seeing what happens if you go from disembodied to embodied for a while. And put away any tools which keep you in that state.
Oh come on, Eliezer. These strategies aren’t that alien.
I remember a time in my early years, feeling apprehensive about entering adolescence and inevitably transforming into a stereotypical rebellious teenager. It would have been not only boring and cliche but also an affront to every good thing I thought about myself. I didn’t want to become a rebellious teenager, and so I decided, before I was overwhelmed with teenage hormones, that I wouldn’t become one. And it turns out that intentional steering of one’s self-narrative can (sometimes) be quite effective (constrained by what’s physically possible, of course)! (Not saying that I couldn’t have done with a bit more epistemological rebellion in my youth.)
The second one comes pretty naturally to me, too. I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant. Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things. Probably not the best thing for everyone to be like that, though.
There’s also someone I know personally who definitely falls into the third trap, and who is definitely among those for whom this advice would not be helpful at all. She is a genuinely loving, compassionate, and selfless person, but that very selflessness sometimes manifests in a physically debilitating way. Not long after I first got to know her, I noticed that she seemed to exaggerate her reactions to things, not maliciously or even consciously, but more as a sort of moral obligation. As if by not overreacting to every small mishap, it would prove that she didn’t care. As if by not sacrificing her own well-being for the sake of helping everyone around her, it would prove that she didn’t love them. I think at some point in the past, she defined her character as someone who reacts strongly to the things that matter to others, but her subconscious has since twisted this to the point where she now tends to stress herself out over other people’s problems to the point where she becomes physically ill. Again, I don’t think she want to make a martyr out of herself, but I think her self-predicting, motor-directing circuitry thinks that she needs to be one.
An additional possibly-not-helpful bit of advice for the existentially anxious: take a page from Stoicism. Try to imagine all the way things could go disastrously wrong, and try to coax yourself into being emotionally at peace with those outcomes, insofar as they are outside of your control. Strive as much as possible to steer things toward a better future with the tools and resources you have available to you, but practice equanimity towards everything else.
> I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant.
> Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things.
This sounds pretty similar to myself, therefore I have some questions:
In the past did you have a lot of overwhelmingly intense emotions? Do you sometimes go from almost non-awareness of feeling (or feeling but weakly) to overwhelming emotion in a very short span?
Does encountering information also bring with it emotions?
Do you have alexithymia?
Are you able to enter your body and basically stay there for 30 minutes without returning to analysis or abstract thought? Does doing this affect your emotions at all?
Is there an internal sense that there is a part of your mind that is ‘personality’+‘analysis/thoughts’, and a part that is ‘where all of the qualia happens’? Possibly also with a third part that is ‘emotions’? These might be divided a bit differently.
For me, the ‘where all of the qualia happens’ component was acting as a blockade between ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’ - it enabled thinking to happen even during intense emotions, but seems to have caused alexithymia. And ‘pushing that to the side’ makes intense emotions available to my sense of experiencing things, and thus available for thinking about/analyzing. Instead of being inaccessible.
All of this happened because as a child during tantrums I set up a ‘mental space’ where I could perform logic and analysis even while having extremely intense emotions.
This seems to be why people say that I am ‘like a robot’ or ‘an absurdly analytical person’ - because I am actively suppressing emotions through that dissociated? state. All the time.
So you might get some benefit from seeing what happens if you go from disembodied to embodied for a while. And put away any tools which keep you in that state.