Last time I posted on one of these rationality journals it was about 9 months ago. I said I was going to go on a couple month long bike trip. I’d been having a lot of trouble setting and meeting goals, and after failing so many important goals ended up pretty depressed, so I decided to just not set goals anymore and just peddle my bike for a while.
My bike trip ended up being just three days, as I got bored rather quickly. It turns out that just biking all day was not as mentally stimulating as I had hoped it would be. The bike trip wasn’t a complete waste; biking to the ocean has been a life goal of mine, and I finally pulled it off. Also, I got lots and lots of exercise, which helped with my depression. Finally, I slept in a ditch on the side of the road, something I have never done before. I no longer fear being homeless. If you have food in your stomach, a warm coat, a place where you can rest undisturbed, and a deep exhaustion that makes worrying about social conventions impossible, it turns out that the rest of life will take care of itself. Of course, I was biking through a rural area, so that made sleeping undisturbed a lot easier. The other big thing was the ocean. Oceans and libraries always settle the thoughts in my head.
After all that, I went home and got a job. They don’t pay me much, but on the plus side expectations and stress are very low.
I went from generally depressed to generally happy all at once, when I got that low stress job I previously mentioned. It turns out that spending several months sending out tons of job applications, getting exactly 0 responses, and then having LOTS of free time to stew in your thoughts is not healthy. In the future, I will treat large blocks of free time as being a potential risk, and make sure to fill them up with productive activities.
I’ve had “find meaningful tasks to occupy my time” as a life goal since about age 7 or so, though back then I phrased it as “don’t be apathetic”. Basically, I want to be the sort of person who goes out and does things and has an interesting and meaningful life, but instead I do the easiest, laziest thing instead, which usually means browsing the internet. Up until now, my strategies have included (starting with my first strategy and ending in my last) praying to god to change me, swearing every night that I would totally be a different person, berating myself when I failed, using physical impediments to prevent myself from failing, reading lots of books about reason and psychology and keeping a journal in which I listed things like goals and reasons why goals were not being met, and using mind altering drugs to chemically force the emotions I wanted. All these plans failed, and as you can likely imagine by the time I was willing to use the mind altering chemicals I was pretty desperate and upset.
The thing that all these strategies have in common is that they are attempting to promote the positive emotion. I read some books on meditation, and one concept that stood out to me was this idea that happiness doesn’t exist; there is simply the absence of negative emotions. Remove all negative emotions, and you will discover that you are happy. My new strategy is that I am going to practice removing negative emotions. When I detect negative thoughts, I will focus all my attention on the sensations I am experiencing present moment, starving the negative emotions of the brainpower they need. It’s like that old question; “Quick, think of anything other than white elephants!”. The way to prevent your mind from thinking unwanted thoughts is to focus your mind so intently on another, different thought that there is no space left for the first thought. Poof! White elephant gone.
My new plan for “find meaningful activities to spend my time on” is to meditate until I eliminate the negative emotions that are preventing my from enjoying myself. Once my mind is a place of peace, I will being to naturally enjoy certain activities again, and find them more compelling and interesting then just browsing the internet.
So far this plan seems to be working well, and I have even had some success in starting a meditation habit. I’ll report back in a couple months.
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One last thing; I’ve often thought that flossing would be a good idea, but was too lazy to bother. Then I learned that the water in my district was not fluoridated, and that mouthwash actually works, so I went and bought some mouthwash. Swishing funny-tasting liquids around my mouth is a lot more fun then dragging a string between my teeth and having it sometimes come back bloody, so I’ve successfully added “use mouthwash” as a habit. That’s neat. And hopefully it’ll save on dentist bills. I’ve had a cavity pretty much every time I visited the dentist for as long as I remember, so if I suddenly stop getting cavities I’ll have clear proof that this works.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the quotes thread.
Doris Lessing, “Mara and Dann”