Well, maybe my underlying motivation for this question was the wish for some shortcut to overcome what I perceive as personal deficiencies.
Throughout my life, I‘ve hardly had to work as hard as most people around me to complete mental tasks, and that has led me to live a rather decent life by now. And I‘m still making progress in terms of achievements that secure my material situation.
But being completely honest, I feel lazy and having fallen behind what I could be. The things I value most are intelligence, knowledge and understanding, and I just know a small fraction of the things I could know if I had acquired more discipline (this feeling increases in the presence of highly knowledgeable people as here on LW). My strategy so far has been to externalize motivation by creating social obligations that force me to reach my most ambitious goals. This approach has its limits.
I’ve walked the same path for the most part, but I ultimately ended up elsewhere.
Do you really value intelligence and knowledge, or at these things that you think other people will enjoy seeing from you? And are these core goals, or the means to something more concrete like power or influence? If your goal is actually knowledge and understanding, then my advice would be to set concrete goals, simply because vague goals confuses the brain, they prevent it from planning concrete actions, and the reward mechanism can’t kick in if you don’t have concrete sub-goal finish lines.
You seem to be at a conflict with yourself (look up articles on ‘Akrasia’ for more). This problem is familiar to me, I’ve had to exploit my own tendency to obsess about certain things in order to get myself to study. External motivation is sort of masochistic, and rather than “pushing” yourself like this, I feel it’s better to let yourself be “pulled” by something (carrot-and-stick, you know). I’ve got 100s of suggestions of what to do about this, and some of them are a little out there and perhaps even offensive in a way. Consinder this as a light example: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dark-arts
You can use irrationality in a rational manner, just like you’re trying to improve yourself by inducting what is technically mental illness.
In any case, I feel like there’s no objective sources to rely on, everything must come from ourselves. You know how you might start watching a movie which doesn’t interest you at first, but then feel yourself getting carried away? Losing yourself in something specific might beat having a birds-eye view on things, in that the human sense of meaning is generally one of connectivity/immersion. I can write logical and objective advice, but there’s already plently of that out there, and chances are that you’ve read a lot of it already with limited success. What I focus on is mostly the psychological side of things. Nietzsche said “You must have madness in you to give birth to a dancing star” which is in line with my experiences and possibly the motivation behind your post. I was motivated to learn 10 years ago, and somehow learning more killed the parts of me which enjoyed learning, as this enjoyment was illogical/subjective.
May I add a few of my thoughts to this whole path? Keep in mind that the following text might be a cognitohazard:
I wanted others to think well of me, which is exactly why I stopped learning more. Rationality pushed me out of calibration with other people, and into an objective (rather than subjective) frame of mind. Human appeal seems to be about appearence and artistic skills, and in conflict with disillusionment and clear-sightedness. Social skills seem to rely on system 1 (intuition) rather than system 2 (manual thought). I also dived into philosophy with the conclusion that one should live their life and experience things rather than live in an imaginary world of thought and reductionist models. My knowledge of science and math has let me to believe that they’re both limited, and that no ultimate knowledge can exist, since “ultimate” means *to be of unlimited width*. If you consider specialization and generalization as scope and precision, then I think you’ll find that they’re inversely correlated. I believe that this is the “No free lunch” theorem. Speaking of which, the hedonic treadmill, which also generalizes to all other pursuits, is best defeated by stopping the process of building tolerance, which requires a series of cognitive tricks. For this reason, it might be best to consider yourself less than you are (the opposite often results in the gifted-kid-burnout phenomenon) I’ve become sufficiently wise that most of my advice and thoughts are the complete opposite of what’s intuitive, which is a good thing judging from my experience with ancient literature. Less is more. I hope your approach beats mine. Since about 4 years ago nobody understands me anymore. You’re the first to reply to me on this website.
This was highly unexpected, mirroring my own experiences in a somehow unpleasant way and is indeed hazardous for me right now as I‘ve become a bit mentally unstable over the last weeks. Please give me some time to think this through and adjust.
I’m mostly okay myself, at least my mood is good, so if your troubles relate to my message I probably have an “antidote” or two. But I won’t write anymore unprompted, just in case I make it worse.
Apologizes in advance for writing too much—it tends to happen when I take methylphenidate. (Btw, if stimulants stopped working for you, you might be low on B vitamins. Not sure if stimulants are a good idea if you have bipolar disorder or cyclothymia, though!)
I think you might be feeling guilty because you aren’t motivated to do certain tasks. There’s a good reason you’re not doing them. Could be anxiety about the outcomes, that they’re vague tasks, that they don’t have personal value to you, or that you need a break or to fulfill other needs. By the way, the hardest part is getting started, dopamine seems to sort of build up over time, rather than something which you collect before starting.
Do you connect your goals to things which have meaning for you? I’m using my flaws to my advantage. I’m sort of arrogant, so if a post online says that learning 60 new words in a day is the human limit, then I will teach myself 100. That’s more than I learned in an entire year in grade-school (I just couldn’t be bothered). What do you actually enjoy? I enjoy experiments. I’ve studied while timing the impulses to stop, making a graph of these. Interestingly enough, the impulses slowed down. Turns out I can torture myself if only I’m making fun doing so.
You like video games, no? I do too. Finding exploits in them has helped me a lot. I think we both came up with the idea of exploiting mania because we both like video games. And don’t downplay the positive effects it has had on your spatial intelligence. A lot of what I do is actually optimize myself as a video-game character, and making your own life interesting is not much different from making a video game interesting—to disguise menial actions as meaningful fun. Virtual reality and AR is going to be big in the future, so I don’t think your video game experience has been wasted. If you consider self-actualization the next game to play, wouldn’t that be great? I bet you’re really good at games, and life is not much unlike a game! Don’t think things like “I’m only good at video games, not real life”, reverse these thoughts into positives—it’s a really useful skill, and even sort of fun.
A reason I try to limit my learning is that having more choices is dangerous. A knowledgable person might have to search through 5 or 10 times more possibilities, and the more alternatives we have, the more mental energy it will take to choose any one.
A way to lessen your mental burden is to consider your goals and the things that you like. There’s maybe 10 important items here. If you look at problems and things which could go wrong, then you have to juggle 1000s of things. It’s easy to navigate through a crowd of people in real life if you look at where you want to go—your brain takes care of the rest. This seems to apply for planning as well. I think that “manifesting” things in life is just priming the brain to navigate towards a desired future, rather than looking at potential problems (as we often end up where we look!)
Life is about living, and just living is good enough. It’s actually fairly simple to be happy, we just need to cover our physical and psychological needs. And while nobody is perfect, the bar is much much lower than that. Most animals probably have an IQ of less than 20, and they’re perfectly fine.
There’s few things we actually need to fear. Human beings just have a tendency to collect traumatic memories, and since the brain tries to protect us, it warns us every time an action might go wrong, based on past experiences. Most people don’t dare to speak up in public, which is probably just because a parent figure told them off when they were being loud as children. Simple fears like the fear of making mistakes can cause the brain to look for excuses to avoid doing work. Even taking ourselves less seriously, and laughing more, will help guard against this.
What to know my biggest issue? I’m arrogant, I don’t like being “forced” to do work because I feel its degrading. It feels like a loss whenever I do what I’m supposed to do, even though I choose this path in life myself. A change in perspective should fix this issue, though.
Not to downplay the value of things, of course. I just think we should trust our own evaluations since it’s difficult to find solid external validations. I personally think that we should hold onto our youth, even the confidence and silliness, and that even a healthy dose of egoism can be a good thing. Spontaneity is part of a healthy mentality, and of higher value than “motivation”. A strong personality tends to make characters better rather than worse. Maybe you’re just losing yourself from being objective all the time? It’s good to consume knowledge, but not to have knowledge consume you. Being more myself, even though it meant a reduction in perfection, did wonders for my social life.
These two quotes helped me, as explanations: ”Too many foreign words and values he loads upon himself – now life seems a desert to him!” and ”The spirit wants its will, the one lost to the world now wins its own world”. I think you’re focusing too much on reducing your bad aspects, and too little on cultivating your good ones. You might also want to look into the concept of oversocialization—your desire to be a good, while admirable, might be getting in the way of your self-actualization.
Did any of this help? If you have feelings of nausea or confusion, it might be because you’ve taken in too many new perspectives and ideas too fast. It’s a kind of overeating.
This conversation increasingly develops characteristics of group therapy, but so be it.
Regarding values: Yes, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding along with the experience and creation of meaning are among what I perceive as my core values. My understanding of power has a big intersection with positive freedom and because of that, I seek more power and influence mostly as means to act upon my values. So far, so good.
Now that I have thought enough about the last few weeks and my thoughts and actions, I think I have figured out what actually bothers me. My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation, leading to internal conflicts about the goals to aim at over the next years.
I carry responsibility for a small family and want to live up to it, that goes along with my plans to advance my career at bit further.
At the same time, I feel like I have not been able to become the person that I would like to be and that I was not able to realize my potential as an individual. Now, I have to put more energy into my most important and valued relationships than into myself as a distinct individual. The solution is easy: I just must not be an egocentric idiot and care more for my loved ones instead.
Another source of conflict is my increasing inability to endure the superficiality of the average social interaction. I moved to a small village in order to keep away my child from big city madness as long as possible. Though I consider myself well-integrated (I meet and sometimes hang out with neighbours), I feel deeply estranged from most people around me. Conservation is shallow, biased, uninformed and uninspiring if it is not about the topic of cars, which I am not very interested in. My sources of deep talk consist in three people, one of which happens to be my wife, so I probably should not consider myself unlucky. Nevertheless, my longing for social belonging has paradox effects which I cannot fully escape by isolating myself without harming my family‘s social life.
This relates to the over-objectiveness and over-rationality you mentioned.
So, now I‘ll stop with the personal perspective.
What is your concrete advice on becoming rationally irrational to better fit into society?
I didn’t even think about that, I just like talking about these things. I will try to be somewhat concise, if anything interest you in particular I can expand on that or refer to sources which align with it (unless it’s my original research)
I think power is a great thing to seek, as it’s perhaps the most versatile resource in existence. The overlap with freedom is true, but there’s a few important things to know about freedom. Perhaps you should try learning for a specific goal? Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but there’s always so much to learn. I don’t even learn knowledge much anymore, but underlying core concepts. Still, effort is best when it’s focused.
It would perhaps be difficult if I gave you a blank piece of paper and told you to write a 1000-word story. Writer’s block, etc. But if I told you to write 1000 words about power, then I think you could do that fairly quickly. People work best under some restrictions. Rules certainly helps creativity. Explaining this phenomenon is difficult, but I will make an attempt to figure it out in case it interests you.
>My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation
I’ll be honest, I’m in the exact same position. I’ve always said I liked freedom, but I just really hate the chains of commitment, especially when other people dump them on me in such a way that they will fall if I pull away.
Anyway, without commitment, you will never put 100% into anything, right? But that’s where you shine the brightest. It’s better to aim too high than too low, you need a goal that you won’t hesitate on.
These goals can be unified, you can improve yourself as you improve your relationship and career, and improve those so that you can improve yourself. But at least in my own case, social obligations makes it difficult to immerse myself in any of my own projects.
I used to hate most of human conversation, I considered it the most inefficient method of information transference possible until I came to appreciate that it’s not about information at all. Some people will have too little in common with you to cover your social needs, but like me, you might enjoy simply being around people who possess something which you lack? Even if that’s an inherent excitement about everything that you’ve long lost yourself.
I talk like an old professor with some friends, and like a teenager with others. Some are chill people who are always pleasant and lighthearted, and I don’t bother them with difficult things at all. Others want to be childish around me, and have me be the voice of reasons at times. Of course, the internet makes most of this possible. A small town wouldn’t offer a selection like this. Even the average users on this website are likely to be in the top 1% intellectually, they’re rare.
Fitting into society: Realize that people are extremely weak. They easily become afraid of you. Just be on their side or sort of vibe with them. This probably requires a greal deal of feigning ignorance and acting like you don’t realize your own value. This also helps mask your awareness, and thus other peoples realization that you might see right through them.
Realize that most of reality is just an agreement. You just have to align with the vibe, that much is probably not difficult. What’s difficult is improving yourself, standing out and yet fitting in. Being a great person and still having everyone support you. I even recommend the book “The Evolution of Desire”, so that you may understand traits of social selection. By doing so, I don’t have to risk you changing in ways that your wife will dislike, and being to blame for the consequences. On the bright side, you can get to have more fun now, having people like you more, and having more energy to improve yourself all at once—with controlled doses of incorporating your shadow. Being more self-centered can in fact make people like you more. Scholars are too objective and reactive, too afraid of voicing their own opinion, they might even be more like observers than participants. This is why most average people respect famous scientists, while other famous people tend to be both liked and disliked by many.
Self-development is noble, while alignment is herd-mentality. Having your own values is noble, but others might feel that you’re a threat to their values, right? So that’s a fun area of study.
By the way, there’s a short self-help book called “The greatest salesman in the world” with most of the principles required for actual success. I think it’s the best self-help I’ve ever read. You might feel silly reading it every day as a form of self-hypnosis, but taking ourselves too seriously in life is an expensive form of self-handicapping.
The social aspects of life are great, man. It’s a whole other world. I used to be like you but I’ve largely abandoned objective topics in favor of human things. Art is unbounded like self-improvement, and even if everything else stops, you can still expand your capacity to experience the world, to filter it less into inert mental models and learn how to see everything with beginners eyes indefinitely.
When my social skills sucked, my perverted jokes would be poorly received, while other people said far worse things with nobody ever thinking of them as not being pure and innocent. I eventually figured out the trick, and now I can see others struggle with it while I suffer zero consequences.
I was also terrified of being misunderstood in the past, so I was verbose and precise, while I saw other people use much more loose language with lots of potential for unfortunate misinterpretations. But it never bit them in the ass, in fact, they fared better than me. Could it be that skills like these betray a necessity for them? That those who are the best at excusing themselves are those who have needed explanations the most. Flipping the world upside down like this, non-intellectuals must be pleasant to me because they’ve had to learn how to get skilled people to assist them and treat them nicely.
This all said—there’s the single limitation which is time. Self-improvement correlates with youth. Settling at this point wouldn’t feel good. While I don’t recommend imposing limitations on yourself, the games you can play are likely to change as you get older
Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into practice.
I know how much energy and time I have to spend in order to reach the goals I set for myself.
I know how to place sufficient boundaries on myself to make use of my freedom (/power).
I know how to blend into my social surroundings while staying just authentic enough to be respected and trusted.
I know how to let go of intellectual OCD and have fun with the cards I am dealt in playful interaction.
And yet, my implementation of this knowledge in daily life feels poor. Maybe it is a luxury problem—objectively I am doing fairly well, I guess. But my success stems from a local optimum of adaptation that I semmingly cannot leave without developing serious mental health problems. Paradoxically, I feel stuck while reaching one important life goal after the other.
Maybe I should go see a therapist and work on my equanimity.
Do you know Nietzsche’s concepts of the apollonian and dionysian, or Jordan Peterson’s order/chaos duality? I think that rationalism often tends too much towards the former rather than a healthy combination of the two. Traditional wisdom is about warning and advice, which is about slowing down. This is healthier and safer for sure, but as your experiences with mania have shown, a little bit of chaos can be good. I say this because Klugheit seems to be regarded as a virtue, and all virtues tend to have these soft, calm qualities.
Could it be that you’re too theoretical and not practical enough? Knowing the answer is not the final step of the process, it’s around the middle. Knowing how to be social, and being social, are completely different. Your knowledge only helps you when you go from memorizing it to internalizing it, making it an automatic part of yourself that you’re no longer aware of. If you thought about every step you took, walking would be difficult.
The knowledge has to be digested and integrated properly. If you’re just learning more and more things without this process, it will appear like you know more and more, but you’d not see much benefits, which I’m sure would be discouraging. Indeed, this lack of observable benefits might make you lose faith in the knowledge that you have, so that you go searching for other knowledge, until you know the subject from so many angles and perspectives that you won’t even know where to start implimenting it, a sort of having too much knowledge. No blame if that’s the case, I learned all these things the hard way myself.
Can you expand on what you mean about local optimum of adaptation? And have you thought about what your feeling represent? Moving away from your goal, parallel to your goal, like you’re ignoring the main quest and clearing all the subquests instead, like you’re doing well but seeing your personal projects stagnate due to regular life taking up too much of your time and energy? Perhaps a branch between what’s valuable to yourself and what’s valuable to society?
I think that mental health problems stem from stress, frustration, and unmet needs. For example, we’re social creatures, so social isolation tends to be unhealthy for us, even if having time for ourselves is also a need. I have a feeling of stuckness stemming from a similar situation, my indecisiveness makes it so that I’m stuck between fulfilling need one and two, ultimately fulfilling neither. It’s similar to the problem that multi-tasking effectively is more or less impossible. A clear example of this type of problem is somebody who isn’t alert because they don’t sleep enough, and who don’t sleep enough because they they refuse to go to bed before they’ve done something productive.
I’m glad that you seem to have an affinity for my brand of craziness. I’m mostly just listing problems and solutions that I’ve personally gone through, so it’s quite the pleasant coincidence when I’m making sense to you.
I hope this helped! And perhaps therapy is good? I’m self-taught in all areas of life, so I haven’t tried it before myself. Equanimity seems to be a sort of peace of mind? It’s achievable and it feels good. But the gap that makes us frustrated and unhappy also helps motivate us towards our goals. I’m trying to recreate the overexcitability that I accidentally cured in myself when I got over my social trauma. Perhaps I had a negative experience here because I was used to so high levels of adrenaline that fixing myself made my experiences duller. If my brain was used to chronic strong stimulantion, then it’s possible that it will take years before my receptors return to normal, sort of like recovery stimulant abuse, you know?
Anyway, the correct amount of hardship with an contrasting amount of meaning seems to result in the perfect balance, like how the flow state is also a perfect balance. Have you ever found yourself thinking “bring it on” or “I wish this would suck even more”? I wish to recreate this state but it requires being more bounded in myself, being more subjective and immature. A sort of being “edgy” or “chuunibyou” if you know these terms.
Rational thought and sensibility easily destroy these mindsets, but I’m willing to bet that your willpower and mental sharpness was much better in your younger years. What I don’t know is if this goes away by itself, or if it’s a direct result of learning more and viewing the world in an outside-in sort of way, rather than the more egoistic inside-out thinking. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy jokingly uses the “Total Perspective Vortex” as a torture device. This idea allows us to play around with the idea of perspective, and how things like meaning and value seem to be divided over the area of our scope. Dumb people have smaller perspectives/scopes, which helps protects their ego and sense of importance.
So I went on various tangents here—but it has helped me to consider them as parameters that I can manipulate so that I can keep my mental health intact, or have it break in the right manner at least, while my knowledge and awareness keeps growing in ways which would normally exclude a whole lot of different personalities, mentalities and viewpoints.
To conclude, I won’t exclude that therapy could be a good idea, even if they only remind you of things you already know. The conversations might even fulfill your social and cognitive needs? Do my comments feel good to read? With the exception of that short-term high we get when we learn new things or listen to motivational quotes. I recommend not getting addicted to that feeling, or at least making use of it before it wears off. This is because the disappearance of excitement might cause you to believe that the advice wasn’t any good, before you get to try out the advice. I hope this makes sense? It’s in line with what I said earlier about learning without proper digestion/integration
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting.
Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though—I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at work, working on self-actualization, keeping a good standing with friends and acquaintances and pushing forward some projects of my own. When I am at normal energy levels, which are considerably higher than the ones I have right now, I seem to perform on my personal pareto frontier. Whenever I try to expand activity on one or two of said aspects, I fall short on the others, pushing even harder then leads to stress and regrets that in turn slow me down further on the totality of my efforts, until the point where it becomes problematic for my health. Whenever this happens, I also start to spend too much time dealing with and worrying about stuff that is beyond my control, such as politics and so on, which leads to a vicious cycle that often triggers depression. Once I have found my way out of it, the cycle repeats. For a couple of months, I hold my balance, than I try to push my limits and things start to fall apart again.
It could easily be the case that I am expecting too much from myself and maybe there is no way to become better at achieving my goals than completing my side projects and not replacing them with new ones after that.
Thinking about all you have said and trying to make sense of why it resonates so strongly, I have come to an intermediate conclusion that I will have to think about for some time: Perhaps it is a good idea for me to refrain from learning about the topics that I am most drawn to now, and rather go back to both theoretical and applied psychology. There is not that much to take away from quantum computing when it comes to dealing with other people. Or oneself.
Re-reading my comments, the ideas which appeal to me are directly related to my level of arousal (dopamine level compared to baseline). It maps pretty well to the hierarchy of needs. Everything below is “boring” or “mundane” and everything above is “irresponsible” or “wasteful”.
You can re-read them in the future if they ever become relevant, until then you don’t have to worry about them.
It can help to view energy as a limited resource, but there’s many kinds of energy, and fulfilling needs and building ‘momentum’ can give energy rather than using it. Maybe a good abstraction is the set “Physical/mental/spiritual”. Your mild depression and my 10mg of ritalin don’t change our actual levels of energy, but rather just our subjective feelings of energy. Worrying and stress does use energy though—thinking about work seems to use almost as much energy as actual doing the work.
But stress and too much effort create waste products in the brain, which is probably why our brains make us feel tired. It’s a defense against damage, like physical exhaustion. When we bypass this, with drugs or by a manic mood, we probably cause damage because we keep going without rest.
It’s easier said than done, but periodic effort and rest is more efficient than just the effort. The worst combination of these is pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
It’s possible that you’re pushing further and draining your limited resources (blood sugar and other cognitive resources), but there’s also the possibility that you’re draining other resources (neglecting seemingly less important things which help your mental health), that you’re tired because of what you don’t do rather than because of what you do.
While the engagement in politics could stem from needless worry, it could also be an outlet for your unmet need to communicate, and the reward of correcting other people about something that you’re knowledgeable about. In my own case, something drives me to websites like this one, and while I can’t feel it consciously, it’s just me chasing dopamine or fulfilling some less obvious need. If I don’t go here, I’ll catch myself going to similar places.
If I understand correctly, you believe that you should be able to do all these things at once, that you have less energy than you should have. I think that confidence and energy levels are extremely related, and that mania and depression are just changes in confidence, stemming from feedback loops (failure → failure or victory → victory). And if you’ve been able to do these things in the past, then it should theoretically be possible to do them still, and the transition between these states could be your beliefs and values changing.
But if you’ve experienced mania multiple times before, then it’s likely that you have bipolar, and that we should consider the neuroscience side of things (rather than focus on the psychological like I have until now). Diet, exercise, sunlight exposure, etc. could be factors too.
Perhaps you are taking on too much at once, but I personally don’t believe in these limitations. If I can play video games with friends for 15 hours straight, then I don’t believe that 2 hours of work will necessarily make me tired. Of course, learning new things requires effort for the encoding. Not so much new knowledge, mostly new mental structures that knowledge can fit into.
This will end up being a long message if I once again get into theoretical things, but I find that it helps to write things down (so that I can allow myself to clear them from my head), and to stick to my choices so that I don’t waste energy re-considering and questioning everything, and finally to keep things simple. In short, avoiding wasted energy like fighting myself and keeping track of things which aren’t relevant. Maybe this is one way to making more of each day, but perhaps you need solution which don’t have a big initial cost.
2 hours of socializing with constant self-censorship might equal 4 hours of socializing without worrying too much how you appear. A simpler and easier solution is meditation, but I personally like the idea of conditioning myself into only considering things which are directly relevant to what I care about, and eliminating cognitive waste like hypervigilance.
But yeah, I think that truth is found in simplicity. But hey, if quantum computing interests you, and the field pays well, then I think there is a lot of potential to be found.
I can’t say much about the core problem, as I don’t know the details (and it’s fine if they’re private), so I can only give general advice. I don’t know if your work is physical or not, or if you have a lot of work in your day which doesn’t appeal to you or not. I’m also biased towards what’s familiar to myself, you might not have anxiety and a poor working memory like I do, for instance. (but if you frequently consume stimulants because you feel tired, you should know this feeling well!). Again, take what you find to be of value, you can just discard the rest.
And I will let you reflect on things, maybe reflecting and collecting yourself again will do you some good. Keep in mind that most negativity and worries will be amplified by your mental state, so whatever you find, it’s not as bad as it appears to be.
Long story short, my doc and me tried methylphenidate despite my bipolar disorder.
I can‘t remember ever having had such an inner calm and structured motivation. I seem to be in some weird niche of the ADHD space. Let‘s see how this proceeds, I am fairly optimistic that I am able to perform better according to my self-expectations now.
Well, maybe my underlying motivation for this question was the wish for some shortcut to overcome what I perceive as personal deficiencies. Throughout my life, I‘ve hardly had to work as hard as most people around me to complete mental tasks, and that has led me to live a rather decent life by now. And I‘m still making progress in terms of achievements that secure my material situation.
But being completely honest, I feel lazy and having fallen behind what I could be. The things I value most are intelligence, knowledge and understanding, and I just know a small fraction of the things I could know if I had acquired more discipline (this feeling increases in the presence of highly knowledgeable people as here on LW). My strategy so far has been to externalize motivation by creating social obligations that force me to reach my most ambitious goals. This approach has its limits.
I’ve walked the same path for the most part, but I ultimately ended up elsewhere.
Do you really value intelligence and knowledge, or at these things that you think other people will enjoy seeing from you? And are these core goals, or the means to something more concrete like power or influence?
If your goal is actually knowledge and understanding, then my advice would be to set concrete goals, simply because vague goals confuses the brain, they prevent it from planning concrete actions, and the reward mechanism can’t kick in if you don’t have concrete sub-goal finish lines.
You seem to be at a conflict with yourself (look up articles on ‘Akrasia’ for more). This problem is familiar to me, I’ve had to exploit my own tendency to obsess about certain things in order to get myself to study. External motivation is sort of masochistic, and rather than “pushing” yourself like this, I feel it’s better to let yourself be “pulled” by something (carrot-and-stick, you know).
I’ve got 100s of suggestions of what to do about this, and some of them are a little out there and perhaps even offensive in a way. Consinder this as a light example: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dark-arts
You can use irrationality in a rational manner, just like you’re trying to improve yourself by inducting what is technically mental illness.
In any case, I feel like there’s no objective sources to rely on, everything must come from ourselves. You know how you might start watching a movie which doesn’t interest you at first, but then feel yourself getting carried away? Losing yourself in something specific might beat having a birds-eye view on things, in that the human sense of meaning is generally one of connectivity/immersion. I can write logical and objective advice, but there’s already plently of that out there, and chances are that you’ve read a lot of it already with limited success. What I focus on is mostly the psychological side of things. Nietzsche said “You must have madness in you to give birth to a dancing star” which is in line with my experiences and possibly the motivation behind your post. I was motivated to learn 10 years ago, and somehow learning more killed the parts of me which enjoyed learning, as this enjoyment was illogical/subjective.
May I add a few of my thoughts to this whole path? Keep in mind that the following text might be a cognitohazard:
I wanted others to think well of me, which is exactly why I stopped learning more. Rationality pushed me out of calibration with other people, and into an objective (rather than subjective) frame of mind. Human appeal seems to be about appearence and artistic skills, and in conflict with disillusionment and clear-sightedness. Social skills seem to rely on system 1 (intuition) rather than system 2 (manual thought).
I also dived into philosophy with the conclusion that one should live their life and experience things rather than live in an imaginary world of thought and reductionist models.
My knowledge of science and math has let me to believe that they’re both limited, and that no ultimate knowledge can exist, since “ultimate” means *to be of unlimited width*. If you consider specialization and generalization as scope and precision, then I think you’ll find that they’re inversely correlated. I believe that this is the “No free lunch” theorem.
Speaking of which, the hedonic treadmill, which also generalizes to all other pursuits, is best defeated by stopping the process of building tolerance, which requires a series of cognitive tricks. For this reason, it might be best to consider yourself less than you are (the opposite often results in the gifted-kid-burnout phenomenon)
I’ve become sufficiently wise that most of my advice and thoughts are the complete opposite of what’s intuitive, which is a good thing judging from my experience with ancient literature.
Less is more. I hope your approach beats mine. Since about 4 years ago nobody understands me anymore. You’re the first to reply to me on this website.
This was highly unexpected, mirroring my own experiences in a somehow unpleasant way and is indeed hazardous for me right now as I‘ve become a bit mentally unstable over the last weeks. Please give me some time to think this through and adjust.
My bad! Take your time.
I’m mostly okay myself, at least my mood is good, so if your troubles relate to my message I probably have an “antidote” or two. But I won’t write anymore unprompted, just in case I make it worse.
I hope everything works out for you!
Please go ahead, maybe it helps. I‘d just prefer not to give an answer before I‘ve figured out some stuff about myself.
Right. I’ll write some different things.
Apologizes in advance for writing too much—it tends to happen when I take methylphenidate. (Btw, if stimulants stopped working for you, you might be low on B vitamins. Not sure if stimulants are a good idea if you have bipolar disorder or cyclothymia, though!)
I think you might be feeling guilty because you aren’t motivated to do certain tasks. There’s a good reason you’re not doing them. Could be anxiety about the outcomes, that they’re vague tasks, that they don’t have personal value to you, or that you need a break or to fulfill other needs.
By the way, the hardest part is getting started, dopamine seems to sort of build up over time, rather than something which you collect before starting.
Do you connect your goals to things which have meaning for you? I’m using my flaws to my advantage. I’m sort of arrogant, so if a post online says that learning 60 new words in a day is the human limit, then I will teach myself 100. That’s more than I learned in an entire year in grade-school (I just couldn’t be bothered).
What do you actually enjoy? I enjoy experiments. I’ve studied while timing the impulses to stop, making a graph of these. Interestingly enough, the impulses slowed down. Turns out I can torture myself if only I’m making fun doing so.
You like video games, no? I do too. Finding exploits in them has helped me a lot. I think we both came up with the idea of exploiting mania because we both like video games. And don’t downplay the positive effects it has had on your spatial intelligence. A lot of what I do is actually optimize myself as a video-game character, and making your own life interesting is not much different from making a video game interesting—to disguise menial actions as meaningful fun. Virtual reality and AR is going to be big in the future, so I don’t think your video game experience has been wasted. If you consider self-actualization the next game to play, wouldn’t that be great? I bet you’re really good at games, and life is not much unlike a game! Don’t think things like “I’m only good at video games, not real life”, reverse these thoughts into positives—it’s a really useful skill, and even sort of fun.
A reason I try to limit my learning is that having more choices is dangerous. A knowledgable person might have to search through 5 or 10 times more possibilities, and the more alternatives we have, the more mental energy it will take to choose any one.
A way to lessen your mental burden is to consider your goals and the things that you like. There’s maybe 10 important items here. If you look at problems and things which could go wrong, then you have to juggle 1000s of things. It’s easy to navigate through a crowd of people in real life if you look at where you want to go—your brain takes care of the rest. This seems to apply for planning as well. I think that “manifesting” things in life is just priming the brain to navigate towards a desired future, rather than looking at potential problems (as we often end up where we look!)
Life is about living, and just living is good enough. It’s actually fairly simple to be happy, we just need to cover our physical and psychological needs. And while nobody is perfect, the bar is much much lower than that. Most animals probably have an IQ of less than 20, and they’re perfectly fine.
There’s few things we actually need to fear. Human beings just have a tendency to collect traumatic memories, and since the brain tries to protect us, it warns us every time an action might go wrong, based on past experiences. Most people don’t dare to speak up in public, which is probably just because a parent figure told them off when they were being loud as children. Simple fears like the fear of making mistakes can cause the brain to look for excuses to avoid doing work. Even taking ourselves less seriously, and laughing more, will help guard against this.
What to know my biggest issue? I’m arrogant, I don’t like being “forced” to do work because I feel its degrading. It feels like a loss whenever I do what I’m supposed to do, even though I choose this path in life myself. A change in perspective should fix this issue, though.
Not to downplay the value of things, of course. I just think we should trust our own evaluations since it’s difficult to find solid external validations. I personally think that we should hold onto our youth, even the confidence and silliness, and that even a healthy dose of egoism can be a good thing. Spontaneity is part of a healthy mentality, and of higher value than “motivation”. A strong personality tends to make characters better rather than worse. Maybe you’re just losing yourself from being objective all the time? It’s good to consume knowledge, but not to have knowledge consume you. Being more myself, even though it meant a reduction in perfection, did wonders for my social life.
These two quotes helped me, as explanations:
”Too many foreign words and values he loads upon himself – now life seems a desert to him!”
and
”The spirit wants its will, the one lost to the world now wins its own world”.
I think you’re focusing too much on reducing your bad aspects, and too little on cultivating your good ones. You might also want to look into the concept of oversocialization—your desire to be a good, while admirable, might be getting in the way of your self-actualization.
Did any of this help? If you have feelings of nausea or confusion, it might be because you’ve taken in too many new perspectives and ideas too fast. It’s a kind of overeating.
This conversation increasingly develops characteristics of group therapy, but so be it.
Regarding values: Yes, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding along with the experience and creation of meaning are among what I perceive as my core values. My understanding of power has a big intersection with positive freedom and because of that, I seek more power and influence mostly as means to act upon my values. So far, so good.
Now that I have thought enough about the last few weeks and my thoughts and actions, I think I have figured out what actually bothers me. My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation, leading to internal conflicts about the goals to aim at over the next years. I carry responsibility for a small family and want to live up to it, that goes along with my plans to advance my career at bit further. At the same time, I feel like I have not been able to become the person that I would like to be and that I was not able to realize my potential as an individual. Now, I have to put more energy into my most important and valued relationships than into myself as a distinct individual. The solution is easy: I just must not be an egocentric idiot and care more for my loved ones instead.
Another source of conflict is my increasing inability to endure the superficiality of the average social interaction. I moved to a small village in order to keep away my child from big city madness as long as possible. Though I consider myself well-integrated (I meet and sometimes hang out with neighbours), I feel deeply estranged from most people around me. Conservation is shallow, biased, uninformed and uninspiring if it is not about the topic of cars, which I am not very interested in. My sources of deep talk consist in three people, one of which happens to be my wife, so I probably should not consider myself unlucky. Nevertheless, my longing for social belonging has paradox effects which I cannot fully escape by isolating myself without harming my family‘s social life. This relates to the over-objectiveness and over-rationality you mentioned.
So, now I‘ll stop with the personal perspective.
What is your concrete advice on becoming rationally irrational to better fit into society?
I didn’t even think about that, I just like talking about these things.
I will try to be somewhat concise, if anything interest you in particular I can expand on that or refer to sources which align with it (unless it’s my original research)
I think power is a great thing to seek, as it’s perhaps the most versatile resource in existence. The overlap with freedom is true, but there’s a few important things to know about freedom.
Perhaps you should try learning for a specific goal? Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but there’s always so much to learn. I don’t even learn knowledge much anymore, but underlying core concepts. Still, effort is best when it’s focused.
It would perhaps be difficult if I gave you a blank piece of paper and told you to write a 1000-word story. Writer’s block, etc. But if I told you to write 1000 words about power, then I think you could do that fairly quickly.
People work best under some restrictions. Rules certainly helps creativity. Explaining this phenomenon is difficult, but I will make an attempt to figure it out in case it interests you.
>My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation
I’ll be honest, I’m in the exact same position. I’ve always said I liked freedom, but I just really hate the chains of commitment, especially when other people dump them on me in such a way that they will fall if I pull away.
Anyway, without commitment, you will never put 100% into anything, right? But that’s where you shine the brightest. It’s better to aim too high than too low, you need a goal that you won’t hesitate on.
These goals can be unified, you can improve yourself as you improve your relationship and career, and improve those so that you can improve yourself. But at least in my own case, social obligations makes it difficult to immerse myself in any of my own projects.
I used to hate most of human conversation, I considered it the most inefficient method of information transference possible until I came to appreciate that it’s not about information at all.
Some people will have too little in common with you to cover your social needs, but like me, you might enjoy simply being around people who possess something which you lack? Even if that’s an inherent excitement about everything that you’ve long lost yourself.
I talk like an old professor with some friends, and like a teenager with others. Some are chill people who are always pleasant and lighthearted, and I don’t bother them with difficult things at all. Others want to be childish around me, and have me be the voice of reasons at times.
Of course, the internet makes most of this possible. A small town wouldn’t offer a selection like this. Even the average users on this website are likely to be in the top 1% intellectually, they’re rare.
Fitting into society:
Realize that people are extremely weak. They easily become afraid of you. Just be on their side or sort of vibe with them. This probably requires a greal deal of feigning ignorance and acting like you don’t realize your own value. This also helps mask your awareness, and thus other peoples realization that you might see right through them.
Realize that most of reality is just an agreement. You just have to align with the vibe, that much is probably not difficult. What’s difficult is improving yourself, standing out and yet fitting in. Being a great person and still having everyone support you.
I even recommend the book “The Evolution of Desire”, so that you may understand traits of social selection. By doing so, I don’t have to risk you changing in ways that your wife will dislike, and being to blame for the consequences.
On the bright side, you can get to have more fun now, having people like you more, and having more energy to improve yourself all at once—with controlled doses of incorporating your shadow. Being more self-centered can in fact make people like you more. Scholars are too objective and reactive, too afraid of voicing their own opinion, they might even be more like observers than participants. This is why most average people respect famous scientists, while other famous people tend to be both liked and disliked by many.
Self-development is noble, while alignment is herd-mentality. Having your own values is noble, but others might feel that you’re a threat to their values, right? So that’s a fun area of study.
By the way, there’s a short self-help book called “The greatest salesman in the world” with most of the principles required for actual success. I think it’s the best self-help I’ve ever read. You might feel silly reading it every day as a form of self-hypnosis, but taking ourselves too seriously in life is an expensive form of self-handicapping.
The social aspects of life are great, man. It’s a whole other world. I used to be like you but I’ve largely abandoned objective topics in favor of human things. Art is unbounded like self-improvement, and even if everything else stops, you can still expand your capacity to experience the world, to filter it less into inert mental models and learn how to see everything with beginners eyes indefinitely.
When my social skills sucked, my perverted jokes would be poorly received, while other people said far worse things with nobody ever thinking of them as not being pure and innocent. I eventually figured out the trick, and now I can see others struggle with it while I suffer zero consequences.
I was also terrified of being misunderstood in the past, so I was verbose and precise, while I saw other people use much more loose language with lots of potential for unfortunate misinterpretations. But it never bit them in the ass, in fact, they fared better than me. Could it be that skills like these betray a necessity for them? That those who are the best at excusing themselves are those who have needed explanations the most. Flipping the world upside down like this, non-intellectuals must be pleasant to me because they’ve had to learn how to get skilled people to assist them and treat them nicely.
This all said—there’s the single limitation which is time. Self-improvement correlates with youth. Settling at this point wouldn’t feel good. While I don’t recommend imposing limitations on yourself, the games you can play are likely to change as you get older
Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into practice.
I know how much energy and time I have to spend in order to reach the goals I set for myself. I know how to place sufficient boundaries on myself to make use of my freedom (/power). I know how to blend into my social surroundings while staying just authentic enough to be respected and trusted. I know how to let go of intellectual OCD and have fun with the cards I am dealt in playful interaction. And yet, my implementation of this knowledge in daily life feels poor. Maybe it is a luxury problem—objectively I am doing fairly well, I guess. But my success stems from a local optimum of adaptation that I semmingly cannot leave without developing serious mental health problems. Paradoxically, I feel stuck while reaching one important life goal after the other.
Maybe I should go see a therapist and work on my equanimity.
Do you know Nietzsche’s concepts of the apollonian and dionysian, or Jordan Peterson’s order/chaos duality? I think that rationalism often tends too much towards the former rather than a healthy combination of the two.
Traditional wisdom is about warning and advice, which is about slowing down. This is healthier and safer for sure, but as your experiences with mania have shown, a little bit of chaos can be good. I say this because Klugheit seems to be regarded as a virtue, and all virtues tend to have these soft, calm qualities.
Could it be that you’re too theoretical and not practical enough? Knowing the answer is not the final step of the process, it’s around the middle. Knowing how to be social, and being social, are completely different. Your knowledge only helps you when you go from memorizing it to internalizing it, making it an automatic part of yourself that you’re no longer aware of.
If you thought about every step you took, walking would be difficult.
The knowledge has to be digested and integrated properly. If you’re just learning more and more things without this process, it will appear like you know more and more, but you’d not see much benefits, which I’m sure would be discouraging. Indeed, this lack of observable benefits might make you lose faith in the knowledge that you have, so that you go searching for other knowledge, until you know the subject from so many angles and perspectives that you won’t even know where to start implimenting it, a sort of having too much knowledge. No blame if that’s the case, I learned all these things the hard way myself.
Can you expand on what you mean about local optimum of adaptation? And have you thought about what your feeling represent? Moving away from your goal, parallel to your goal, like you’re ignoring the main quest and clearing all the subquests instead, like you’re doing well but seeing your personal projects stagnate due to regular life taking up too much of your time and energy? Perhaps a branch between what’s valuable to yourself and what’s valuable to society?
I think that mental health problems stem from stress, frustration, and unmet needs. For example, we’re social creatures, so social isolation tends to be unhealthy for us, even if having time for ourselves is also a need. I have a feeling of stuckness stemming from a similar situation, my indecisiveness makes it so that I’m stuck between fulfilling need one and two, ultimately fulfilling neither. It’s similar to the problem that multi-tasking effectively is more or less impossible. A clear example of this type of problem is somebody who isn’t alert because they don’t sleep enough, and who don’t sleep enough because they they refuse to go to bed before they’ve done something productive.
I’m glad that you seem to have an affinity for my brand of craziness. I’m mostly just listing problems and solutions that I’ve personally gone through, so it’s quite the pleasant coincidence when I’m making sense to you.
I hope this helped! And perhaps therapy is good? I’m self-taught in all areas of life, so I haven’t tried it before myself.
Equanimity seems to be a sort of peace of mind? It’s achievable and it feels good. But the gap that makes us frustrated and unhappy also helps motivate us towards our goals. I’m trying to recreate the overexcitability that I accidentally cured in myself when I got over my social trauma.
Perhaps I had a negative experience here because I was used to so high levels of adrenaline that fixing myself made my experiences duller. If my brain was used to chronic strong stimulantion, then it’s possible that it will take years before my receptors return to normal, sort of like recovery stimulant abuse, you know?
Anyway, the correct amount of hardship with an contrasting amount of meaning seems to result in the perfect balance, like how the flow state is also a perfect balance. Have you ever found yourself thinking “bring it on” or “I wish this would suck even more”? I wish to recreate this state but it requires being more bounded in myself, being more subjective and immature. A sort of being “edgy” or “chuunibyou” if you know these terms.
Rational thought and sensibility easily destroy these mindsets, but I’m willing to bet that your willpower and mental sharpness was much better in your younger years. What I don’t know is if this goes away by itself, or if it’s a direct result of learning more and viewing the world in an outside-in sort of way, rather than the more egoistic inside-out thinking.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy jokingly uses the “Total Perspective Vortex” as a torture device. This idea allows us to play around with the idea of perspective, and how things like meaning and value seem to be divided over the area of our scope. Dumb people have smaller perspectives/scopes, which helps protects their ego and sense of importance.
So I went on various tangents here—but it has helped me to consider them as parameters that I can manipulate so that I can keep my mental health intact, or have it break in the right manner at least, while my knowledge and awareness keeps growing in ways which would normally exclude a whole lot of different personalities, mentalities and viewpoints.
To conclude, I won’t exclude that therapy could be a good idea, even if they only remind you of things you already know. The conversations might even fulfill your social and cognitive needs? Do my comments feel good to read? With the exception of that short-term high we get when we learn new things or listen to motivational quotes. I recommend not getting addicted to that feeling, or at least making use of it before it wears off. This is because the disappearance of excitement might cause you to believe that the advice wasn’t any good, before you get to try out the advice. I hope this makes sense? It’s in line with what I said earlier about learning without proper digestion/integration
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting. Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though—I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at work, working on self-actualization, keeping a good standing with friends and acquaintances and pushing forward some projects of my own. When I am at normal energy levels, which are considerably higher than the ones I have right now, I seem to perform on my personal pareto frontier. Whenever I try to expand activity on one or two of said aspects, I fall short on the others, pushing even harder then leads to stress and regrets that in turn slow me down further on the totality of my efforts, until the point where it becomes problematic for my health. Whenever this happens, I also start to spend too much time dealing with and worrying about stuff that is beyond my control, such as politics and so on, which leads to a vicious cycle that often triggers depression. Once I have found my way out of it, the cycle repeats. For a couple of months, I hold my balance, than I try to push my limits and things start to fall apart again.
It could easily be the case that I am expecting too much from myself and maybe there is no way to become better at achieving my goals than completing my side projects and not replacing them with new ones after that.
Thinking about all you have said and trying to make sense of why it resonates so strongly, I have come to an intermediate conclusion that I will have to think about for some time: Perhaps it is a good idea for me to refrain from learning about the topics that I am most drawn to now, and rather go back to both theoretical and applied psychology. There is not that much to take away from quantum computing when it comes to dealing with other people. Or oneself.
Re-reading my comments, the ideas which appeal to me are directly related to my level of arousal (dopamine level compared to baseline). It maps pretty well to the hierarchy of needs. Everything below is “boring” or “mundane” and everything above is “irresponsible” or “wasteful”.
You can re-read them in the future if they ever become relevant, until then you don’t have to worry about them.
It can help to view energy as a limited resource, but there’s many kinds of energy, and fulfilling needs and building ‘momentum’ can give energy rather than using it. Maybe a good abstraction is the set “Physical/mental/spiritual”. Your mild depression and my 10mg of ritalin don’t change our actual levels of energy, but rather just our subjective feelings of energy. Worrying and stress does use energy though—thinking about work seems to use almost as much energy as actual doing the work.
But stress and too much effort create waste products in the brain, which is probably why our brains make us feel tired. It’s a defense against damage, like physical exhaustion. When we bypass this, with drugs or by a manic mood, we probably cause damage because we keep going without rest.
It’s easier said than done, but periodic effort and rest is more efficient than just the effort. The worst combination of these is pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
It’s possible that you’re pushing further and draining your limited resources (blood sugar and other cognitive resources), but there’s also the possibility that you’re draining other resources (neglecting seemingly less important things which help your mental health), that you’re tired because of what you don’t do rather than because of what you do.
While the engagement in politics could stem from needless worry, it could also be an outlet for your unmet need to communicate, and the reward of correcting other people about something that you’re knowledgeable about. In my own case, something drives me to websites like this one, and while I can’t feel it consciously, it’s just me chasing dopamine or fulfilling some less obvious need. If I don’t go here, I’ll catch myself going to similar places.
If I understand correctly, you believe that you should be able to do all these things at once, that you have less energy than you should have. I think that confidence and energy levels are extremely related, and that mania and depression are just changes in confidence, stemming from feedback loops (failure → failure or victory → victory). And if you’ve been able to do these things in the past, then it should theoretically be possible to do them still, and the transition between these states could be your beliefs and values changing.
But if you’ve experienced mania multiple times before, then it’s likely that you have bipolar, and that we should consider the neuroscience side of things (rather than focus on the psychological like I have until now). Diet, exercise, sunlight exposure, etc. could be factors too.
Perhaps you are taking on too much at once, but I personally don’t believe in these limitations. If I can play video games with friends for 15 hours straight, then I don’t believe that 2 hours of work will necessarily make me tired. Of course, learning new things requires effort for the encoding. Not so much new knowledge, mostly new mental structures that knowledge can fit into.
This will end up being a long message if I once again get into theoretical things, but I find that it helps to write things down (so that I can allow myself to clear them from my head), and to stick to my choices so that I don’t waste energy re-considering and questioning everything, and finally to keep things simple. In short, avoiding wasted energy like fighting myself and keeping track of things which aren’t relevant. Maybe this is one way to making more of each day, but perhaps you need solution which don’t have a big initial cost.
2 hours of socializing with constant self-censorship might equal 4 hours of socializing without worrying too much how you appear. A simpler and easier solution is meditation, but I personally like the idea of conditioning myself into only considering things which are directly relevant to what I care about, and eliminating cognitive waste like hypervigilance.
But yeah, I think that truth is found in simplicity. But hey, if quantum computing interests you, and the field pays well, then I think there is a lot of potential to be found.
I can’t say much about the core problem, as I don’t know the details (and it’s fine if they’re private), so I can only give general advice. I don’t know if your work is physical or not, or if you have a lot of work in your day which doesn’t appeal to you or not. I’m also biased towards what’s familiar to myself, you might not have anxiety and a poor working memory like I do, for instance. (but if you frequently consume stimulants because you feel tired, you should know this feeling well!). Again, take what you find to be of value, you can just discard the rest.
And I will let you reflect on things, maybe reflecting and collecting yourself again will do you some good. Keep in mind that most negativity and worries will be amplified by your mental state, so whatever you find, it’s not as bad as it appears to be.
Long story short, my doc and me tried methylphenidate despite my bipolar disorder. I can‘t remember ever having had such an inner calm and structured motivation. I seem to be in some weird niche of the ADHD space. Let‘s see how this proceeds, I am fairly optimistic that I am able to perform better according to my self-expectations now.