untitled

im feeling all the ways i dont want to feel
being all the ways i dont want to be

Stories vs Feelings

A friend of mine asked if I still think that jealousy doesn’t exist, as I mentioned in Laziness doesn’t exist.

They said

Jealousy appears to be a compound feeling, produced by fear, insecurity, unmet needs of safety, love etc. That also means that jealousy is a different experience for everyone. I guess I’d compare it to loneliness. Also compound by more primary feelings, also not actually about another person but in fact about your own unmet needs.

At the same time I don’t really subscribe to calling jealousy equally nonexistent as laziness. Laziness has more of a judgmental nature (as you state at the very beginning of your article), being a moral interpretation of a certain behavior. but I might miss something and I’ll probably think more about the entire topic. Very interesting whatsoever, thank you for the metal nudge!

I don’t think we disagree a lot; when they say “jealousy is a compound feeling that’s different for everyone”, that’s fairly close to my understanding of it. But I have a framing for things like that that I feel gives me a more nuanced idea of it, and highlights dynamics and limitations;

Basically, I make a distinction between direct feelings and “stories”. Direct feelings are pretty fundamental, “raw”, and in the moment; fear, pain, anger, joy, connection… They’re raw sensations, and while they usually happen in response to things, the thing is not inherently tied up in the sensation.¹

Digital and Analog Thought Processing

Someone on Facebook posted:

“The difference between verbal and non-verbal thinking seems similar to digital and analog computing to me. Coarse graining a state space removes degrees of freedom in the system and its richness, while gaining reliability and robustness to noise. For reliable and reproducible computations go digital, for interesting and rich go analog.”

Hmm that’s an interesting analogy! Humanity has a lot of advanced knowledge and experience in signal processing — most of which is not very well known or easily understandable though. Still, are there any things we could steal from that field?

Habits

Couple weeks to build a habit
Let’s say 5, make sure it sticks
You’ve been skipping it forever
This could be the perfect fix

Laziness doesn’t exist.

The word ‘lazy’ comes with an implicit judgement. “This person is so bad, look at them being lazy!”

People also apply that to themselves, and then feel like they’re a bad person.

The fuzzy gray blob of phonecalls

“Calling is terrrrrrrible!”

“But why?”

“It’s baaaaad!”

“Okay, imagine we’re going to call someone, what’s that like?”

“Aaaaaaaaaah!!”
*brain makes the pink ‘:O’ face of agony*

When they say your tower is wrong.

I
Imagine you’re a 4-year-old child. You’re playing with blocks, and building a tower. You’ve gotten a pretty nice height, and then another kid comes along and says, “You should put this other block there, and that one is the wrong color.”. You feel annoyed; it’s your tower, they should sod off.

Vulnerability, caring, attachment.

Edit: This post is from quite a while ago, and is in a bit of a different style than I’d write it now. Leaving it here because I haven’t written something to replace the insights in it yet.

Back in August and September, I was volunteering for The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in California. Originally I had gone there with the (verbal) intention of “becoming more productive” by hanging out with people that were productive. Whenever I tried to do something that felt like a bigger project, I would feel some kind of block, stopping me from working on it. I couldn’t figure out what the block was, why it was there, or what to do about it.

I had a talk with Anna Salamon, and she mentioned that my problem wasn’t that the block was there; it was that I couldn’t figure out what it was. This seemed true; I had had a sense for longer that I was out of touch with my emotions, that I didn’t know how to deal with them or how to figure them out.