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Before I started going to the gym, I think I had this idea as nerd me that life should never actually feel that hard or uncomfortable. And if it was, something was wrong. It’s . . . a hard idea to explain. But I’ll try. https://t.co/sEtOepPlhN
It’s like there are two versions of me alive. The scared, intertia, self-blaming, time-wasting version of me, that no amount of introspection can ever fix. And the proud, calm, just doing, working seamlessly version of me, that just does things. https://t.co/PtkVMycj9W
What I mean more is this: If I’m lying on bed, and I’m thirsty to get up for water on the across . . . part of me won’t be able to reconcile the discomfort of getting up with the complete desire to stay in bed. (This was the motivating example for the thread yesterday.) https://t.co/tU4xv4kIuX
The first version is too scared to even get up and grab water Not that it can’t. But it doesn’t know if it should. Or what’s going on When I think of moments I did something that I felt proud, I automatically find myself getting up to nourish & hydrate my body. Its so automatic
Or something like: If I have to go the gym every day, it might be fun the first few days because it’s novel, but once it stops being fun, and if it’s not contributing to a sense of visual or linear recorded progress, it stops feeling very good, and I want to stop doing it.
It’s not just discomfort: it’s just my entire body shuts down. “I don’t wanna!” is the cry. It doesn’t know why it’s doing anything anymore. It don’t make sense. https://t.co/lMkhKrRCDm
So, sharing the following (with permission) because its so perfect its basically a VIGNETTE for how inner work goes when it goes perfectly. Straddle on: First thing - a problem, in the form of a surprisingly intense emotional reaction https://t.co/4JCtj6Xas7
It’s like Bay Area rationalist/adjacent circles have this idea that outside of motivating things like novelty, mastery, and competition, life shouldn’t feel hard, and if it does, something is very very wrong; maybe I could fix it with introspection. https://t.co/VbXANgrBoI
And to be clear, just lying on my bed, trying to pick up the waterbottle, not being sure if I should, feels 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘺 bad. It’s one of the worst things I can experience, worse than a lot of physical pain. My mind torments me more than anything else can. https://t.co/chQa90Almm
Neurotic nerds are more internally wired. It allows for certain forms of brilliance, creativity—and it also means the biggest torment of nerds is their own heads. Normies might stress more about external situations; for nerds, the stress comes from internal expectation errors.
> not being sure if I should I think this is really indicative of something. What’s going on when I’m lying down in the bed is two very, very fucking strong shoulds grinding against each other: 1. I should go get the waterbottle, this is the sensible thing to do. https://t.co/g78m8sy6gw
2. I should not allow myself to do anything I don’t want to. If I am doing that, I am somehow mortally wounding myself by making my “happiness” or “success at life” score drop. https://t.co/gdcCNdgrCH
Both of these are incredibly high-stakes 1. If I don’t get the bottle, I am somehow mortally wounding myself by not doing something I so obviously should 2. If I do compromise on doing something I don’t want to, then . . . https://t.co/D2hEXGRgKo
Even just tolerating even the brief discomfort of getting out of my bed was enough to activate this huge mashup of grinding. This is what I mean by everything in my life felt high-stakes. https://t.co/dzsvJWrdjv https://t.co/hScp5XRq0o
I wonder if this is the same group of people that find everything so high-stakes that get neurotically inwired to Effective Altruism and AI Safety and such, that give them and meet them in that sense of high-stakeness. https://t.co/tzDoNm5Ees
When you’re working in AI safety, every moment feels high-stakes. You genuinely *can* ask every moment you’re deciding to stay extra at weekend brunch why you aren’t going back home to work, and what was formerly just trauma, you now have an ideological justification for.
You *can* come out with explanations like “being burned out makes me less productive in the long run!” and thus justify the weekend brunch and take more time. But you managed you justify it with a reason that coheres with the intensity you feel, and that feels really good.
These aren’t hypotheticals; these people were my peers and friends. They aren’t everyone, but they are some of core archetypes of the ecosystem. https://t.co/BRbxtrluli
in retrospect maybe a memetic advantage i don't talk or think much about having is that i was AGI-pilled for long enough that i know what having a totalizing narrative about the most important thing feels like from the inside and i know what it feels like to step out of it
So what we have here is a bunch of nerds who: 1. have no real sense of their body 2. no real sense of “wanting” (“what do you mean, which perfume do i want? which one optimises against something the most?” struggling with
3. this incredibly narrow, lens through the world, that filters everything through the Worrying mind, of shoulds and optimised plans, and it can never truly feel delight, although it can feel delight at correctness! and achievement! https://t.co/TdLslmycJj
It’s because of this that the Worrying Mind never actually is able to *experience* anything. A wonderful party, a wonderful summer, they’re both filtered, through many layers of symbols, and it’s kinda nice—“ayy, we had a party!”—but there’s never the sense of real delight. https://t.co/omCXAaBti1
4. applying this incredibly strong filter to a world then where time doesn’t really feel real, self doesn’t really feel real. this moment like every other moment exists in some sort of haze. each moment feels incredibly high stakes https://t.co/Hfm9d5EOky
I never felt like a real person. I didn’t entirely know what I meant by this, but I knew it had to do with how I only ever existed in two states - around other people, fake, like I was constructed for them - around myself, non-existence, like I wasn’t a real person to talk to
and the high stakes apply to 5. some real issues/need for autonomy. very strong Reactance (interestingly, does “resistance to riules and regulations, high desire for autonomy, high defensiveness, low concern for social norms” sound like a social group we’re talking about?) https://t.co/jU0auWjJZf https://t.co/HQ5Tj8xMsR
and 6. existential need to perform or be exceptional to feel like you have a place in this world, no identity or ability to relate to the world outside this https://t.co/zwU5iqWPqz
which then engage in very heavy conflict and make the person try to resolve it with 7. very heavy reliance on same set of tools of introspection that got them there 8. but that shit gets twisted in an endemic way to continue trying to execute the cognitively-visible should https://t.co/0mJYdG3Uxi
Do you see how what I said got subverted? I said 'just don't do it' it got parsed as 'just don't do it so that it wants to do it' and 'coerce it and call it irrational until it wants to do it'. This shit is ENDEMIC in the mind:
to “help the world” or “live life ‘better’”, instead of arriving at some integrated experience https://t.co/ahtXUkygCf
which will often involve giving up at the totalising sense of “an exceptional life” or “AGI” and running seemingly adrift into the new field of just being happy which is not to say those earlier things are unimportant but just that relationship is looser now https://t.co/jJre3SJsCI
a follow-up thread on what i was originally trying to say with this thread, before it morphed into the Overarching Psychoanalysis of high-strung bay area nerds https://t.co/utEZPEvfk6