In my view, it’s part of a more general lesson, which is something like “avoid monopolies on your emotional needs”. For healthy functioning, people need to satisfy various feelings — that their future is secured, that they belong somewhere, that what they’re doing or who they are matters, and so on. And if there’s only one thing or person or self-narrative or other feature that can satisfy a particular need, and this need is very deep — well, you get all the problems that monopolies tend to cause.
It’s a good idea to diversify one’s investments, and that includes emotional investment. Always having a spread of options, instead of only one, is a sensible policy. It’s not always tractable, though, or may be too expensive in some domains. In that case, you may want to invest in… the entirety of the startup scene in the related domain of emotional need satisfaction, which, in this metaphor that suddenly became very tortured, is “confidence in your ability to find a substitute for this emotional-need-provider should it become necessary”.
The tell-tale sign here is being utterly terrified of losing something or failing at something. It’s obviously unavoidable in some cases (you can hardly diversify your emotional investment in your life, at this tech level), but if you feel that, it might be a good idea to look around and consider if there are good diversification opportunities you’re passing up on.
light downvoted but explaining why to give opportunity to reply and disagree. Meta level : - Lack of any explanation, just references some locally appreciated thing - yet it had already 8 upvotes which look like ingroup “I got that reference” instead of “This comment is beneficial to LW” - analogies are bad if you don’t give their boundaries. If I say “x is like y” without specifying along which properties or axis it’s generally low information.
on object level : - I don’t see polyamory as being much of an answer to “avoid monopolies on your emotional needs”. - It kinda maps to “diversify one’s investments” on a surface level but I’d say you expose yourself to more risk with polyamory than not, while diversifying is supposed to reduce risks.
In my view, it’s part of a more general lesson, which is something like “avoid monopolies on your emotional needs”. For healthy functioning, people need to satisfy various feelings — that their future is secured, that they belong somewhere, that what they’re doing or who they are matters, and so on. And if there’s only one thing or person or self-narrative or other feature that can satisfy a particular need, and this need is very deep — well, you get all the problems that monopolies tend to cause.
It’s a good idea to diversify one’s investments, and that includes emotional investment. Always having a spread of options, instead of only one, is a sensible policy. It’s not always tractable, though, or may be too expensive in some domains. In that case, you may want to invest in… the entirety of the startup scene in the related domain of emotional need satisfaction, which, in this metaphor that suddenly became very tortured, is “confidence in your ability to find a substitute for this emotional-need-provider should it become necessary”.
The tell-tale sign here is being utterly terrified of losing something or failing at something. It’s obviously unavoidable in some cases (you can hardly diversify your emotional investment in your life, at this tech level), but if you feel that, it might be a good idea to look around and consider if there are good diversification opportunities you’re passing up on.
Yep, see also polyamory kinda.
light downvoted but explaining why to give opportunity to reply and disagree.
Meta level :
- Lack of any explanation, just references some locally appreciated thing
- yet it had already 8 upvotes which look like ingroup “I got that reference” instead of “This comment is beneficial to LW”
- analogies are bad if you don’t give their boundaries. If I say “x is like y” without specifying along which properties or axis it’s generally low information.
on object level :
- I don’t see polyamory as being much of an answer to “avoid monopolies on your emotional needs”.
- It kinda maps to “diversify one’s investments” on a surface level but I’d say you expose yourself to more risk with polyamory than not, while diversifying is supposed to reduce risks.
Honestly yeah, good points.