What you say makes sense. I think most of the people “doing whatever it is that people do” are making a mistake.
The connection to “masking” is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about autism so I don’t have much background about this. I think that almost everyone experiences this pressure towards acting normal, but it makes sense that it especially stands out as a unique phenomenon (“masking”) when the person doing it is very not-normal. Similarly, it’s interesting that you identify “independence” as a very culturally-pushed value. I can totally see what you mean, but I never thought about it very much, which on reflection is obviously just because I don’t have a hard time being “the culturally normal amount of independent”, so it never became a problem for me. I can see that the effect of the shared culture in these cases is totally qualitatively different depending on where a person is relative to it.
One of the few large psychological interventions I ever consciously did on myself was in about 2014 when I went to one of the early CFAR weekend workshops in some little rented house around Santa Cruz. At the end of the workshop there was a kind of party, and one of the activities at the party was to write down some thing you were going to do differently going forward.
I thought about it and I figured that I should basically stop trying to be normal (which is something that before I thought was actively virtuous, for reasons that are now fuzzy to me, and would consciously try to do—not that I successfully was super normal, but I was aiming in that direction.) It seemed like the ROI on being normal was just crappy in general and I had had enough of it. So that’s what I did.
It’s interesting to me that some people would have trouble with the “how to live more authentically instead” part. My moment to moment life feels like, there is a “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue that is automatically in my head, and I am just grabbing some things out of it and doing them. So to me, the main thing seems to be eliminating any really dumb biases making me do things I don’t value at all, like being normal, and then “living more authentically” is what’s left.
But that’s just my way—it would make sense to me if other people behaved more strategically more often, in which case I guess they might need to do a lot more introspection about their positive values to make that work.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Perhaps in your case it does, or at least enough so that your life is really the life that you would prefer to be living, at the limit of full knowledge and reflective equilibrium. But it’s just not the case that “deliberately subjugating organic desires” is the main way that people end up acting without integrity. We get mixed up below the level of consciousness, so that the automatic thoughts we have arise from all kinds of messed up places. That’s why this kind of thing is so very tricky to fix! We don’t just have to “choose the other option” when we consciously encounter a dilema; we have to learn to see things that are currently invisible to us.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Well, I trust that because at the end of the day I feel happy and fulfilled, so they can’t be too far off.
I believe you that many people need to see the things that are invisible to them, that just isn’t my personal life story.
What you say makes sense. I think most of the people “doing whatever it is that people do” are making a mistake.
The connection to “masking” is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about autism so I don’t have much background about this. I think that almost everyone experiences this pressure towards acting normal, but it makes sense that it especially stands out as a unique phenomenon (“masking”) when the person doing it is very not-normal. Similarly, it’s interesting that you identify “independence” as a very culturally-pushed value. I can totally see what you mean, but I never thought about it very much, which on reflection is obviously just because I don’t have a hard time being “the culturally normal amount of independent”, so it never became a problem for me. I can see that the effect of the shared culture in these cases is totally qualitatively different depending on where a person is relative to it.
One of the few large psychological interventions I ever consciously did on myself was in about 2014 when I went to one of the early CFAR weekend workshops in some little rented house around Santa Cruz. At the end of the workshop there was a kind of party, and one of the activities at the party was to write down some thing you were going to do differently going forward.
I thought about it and I figured that I should basically stop trying to be normal (which is something that before I thought was actively virtuous, for reasons that are now fuzzy to me, and would consciously try to do—not that I successfully was super normal, but I was aiming in that direction.) It seemed like the ROI on being normal was just crappy in general and I had had enough of it. So that’s what I did.
It’s interesting to me that some people would have trouble with the “how to live more authentically instead” part. My moment to moment life feels like, there is a “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue that is automatically in my head, and I am just grabbing some things out of it and doing them. So to me, the main thing seems to be eliminating any really dumb biases making me do things I don’t value at all, like being normal, and then “living more authentically” is what’s left.
But that’s just my way—it would make sense to me if other people behaved more strategically more often, in which case I guess they might need to do a lot more introspection about their positive values to make that work.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Perhaps in your case it does, or at least enough so that your life is really the life that you would prefer to be living, at the limit of full knowledge and reflective equilibrium. But it’s just not the case that “deliberately subjugating organic desires” is the main way that people end up acting without integrity. We get mixed up below the level of consciousness, so that the automatic thoughts we have arise from all kinds of messed up places. That’s why this kind of thing is so very tricky to fix! We don’t just have to “choose the other option” when we consciously encounter a dilema; we have to learn to see things that are currently invisible to us.
Well, I trust that because at the end of the day I feel happy and fulfilled, so they can’t be too far off.
I believe you that many people need to see the things that are invisible to them, that just isn’t my personal life story.