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more precision: less "ahhh no free will!" and more "aaaahhh I can see nothing in myself of others that is meaningful and valuable, just a bunch of mechs habituated to respond to social scripts" i will describe how this came together https://t.co/9oSnAzMRRI
...which helped me feel more shitty when I concluded there was no free-will and was a miserable fuck I'll have you know it took quite a lot of mental gymnastics to live "aaaaah no free will!!!!!!!!" while never consciously thinking anything that looked like that sentence
1 part "The Truth" by neil strauss i got "get rid of all the bullshit shoulds implanted in your head by other people!!! it's ruining your life!!! living under their control is a fate worse than death!!" coincided with me realizing i'd been trying to be a superhero my whole life
1 part optimizationy vibes from the sequences i got "you need to know your terminal values and strictly optimize for those! you're probably chasing stale instrumental values! and if you don't know what your terminal values are, nothing you do could possibly be meaningful!"
1 part feeling very burned from having just lost my religion (courtesy of long yud via "belief in belief") "FUCK i can't believe I was gonna waste my life taking that shit seriously!!! I will never again let allow an easy 'well this is just important, duh' answer!"
with the moral imperative to rid myself of external influence from strauss, the burned rage to not stop at easy answers, and the new ratsy way of being able to see when explanations aren't pulling their weight, i set out on a quest to evict everything that wasn't me from my mind
as previously mentioned, i recently noticed that the unifying "goal" behind my entire personality and behavior was trying to be a hero from the fantasy novels i'd read as a kid i put this Hero Goal on trial. eviction! I never agreed to this! How could this possibly be justified?
as the evictions continued, i was left with less and less, doubting all my impulses, habits, and natural behaviors. I tried to retreat to something that I could ground and "justify" in some robust explicit way, but i COULDN'T DO THAT
this all came to a head one night when I had the startling experience of something *snapping* in my head i felt liked i'd been teetering on an edge and had just fallen into a void i remember laughing a lot. i remember being deadly convinced i'd never feel good ever again
i went to sleep, and woke up the next day with Dengue fever which managed to take my mind of things a little🙃 context: this whole arc was happening while i was biking thru south east asia, had stopped chatting with my biking partner, and had no one to talk to about any of this