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been thinking about this more, in conjunction with @visakanv's "focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of" which i increasingly believe is the most important talking point on twitter atm gonna thread several thoughts working towards a rough model of depression https://t.co/6FWNZa8saY
so, there's an idea i think i got from @Malcolm_Ocean, about a fundamental asymmetry between "approach" and "avoid" in high-dimensional state spaces: "avoid" is badly underspecified. there are many directions in which to run away from something
in order to guide action in a high-dimensional state space you need something more specific than that. "approach" focuses your attention on a specific destination and then you can try to work out how to get there, with your whole being
this is maybe excessively technical language but i think the technical metaphor is quite sharp and helpful for those who have a rough sense of it. to give a more phenomenological flavor: "approach" means good feels, happiness, joy, "avoid" means bad feels, fear, disgust
and to give a more phenomenological flavor of what i mean by avoidance being badly underspecified: if you spend a lot of time searching out new and exciting things to be afraid of and anxious about, you learn a lot about what *not* to do but not about what *to* do
so, next, i recently finally got around to reading @dschorno's "null call" and it's really good. i was very struck by his description of the signs of potential shamanism. this bit about being "wired for danger" especially https://t.co/hGFsTnTMKn https://t.co/CfjEPaV4am
i've seen versions of this idea elsewhere with different labels. i think "highly sensitive person" is pointing towards the same thing, as is gabor mate's analysis of ADHD, and i think "sensitive" is the word i want for now, it's descriptive and doesn't have too much baggage
so, let's imagine that there is some kind of "sensitivity" spectrum along which people can vary, with probably a large genetic component. sensitive children will be impacted more by anything that happens to them, good or bad; they feel it more, they "overupdate" on it
there is a particular thing that i think happens when something bad happens to a sensitive child, which i had previously been using the word "trauma" to describe but i think that word is increasingly loaded with baggage so i want to try a different tack for now
so instead i want to thread in another idea / frame i got from @Malcolm_Ocean, sarah peyton's "unconscious contracts." there are other ways you could talk about this like schemas, i like this language because it feels respectful and true to the experience https://t.co/sZcA26m9zt https://t.co/DNRCA1AFbF
here's an example that came out of my mouth before i ever heard about unconscious contracts. iirc the "at all costs" is characteristic of this sort of thing although i can't locate a quote of sarah peyton saying that https://t.co/xhFzmufTDn
what i did instead was roar "I WILL NEVER TREAT ANYONE THE WAY MY FATHER TREATED ME. I WILL BE A BETTER MAN THAN MY FATHER AT ALL COSTS." then i burst into tears the workshop lead said "take a knee, gentlemen." and everyone else - staff, participants - knelt around me
so, the vague picture is that a sensitive child, especially one who's been somewhat neglected and/or abused by caregivers, who experiences bad things is especially likely to react by making a lot of unconscious contracts to protect themselves: "avoid THIS at ALL COSTS"
an individual unconscious contract in isolation can seem heroic or noble. i still want to treat other people better than my father treated me the problem, and the connection with depression, is when you accumulate so many "avoid at ALL COSTS" that no actions feel possible
when every action that occurs to you feels like it runs the risk of violating one of your unconscious contracts then you kinda can't do anything, or nearly when i get particularly deep in this i'm basically limited to books, video games, and TV, and the occasional tweet
sometimes it feels like i'm trapped in a straitjacket constricting almost all of my degrees of motion, and i can like only wiggle my pinky, metaphorically speaking. and so i've pondered quite a lot how to get out of this sort of trap
the stuff about crying and feeling feelings i used to tweet a ton about was a major piece of the puzzle for me and unblocked a ton of stuff *and* in retrospect i was missing a huge huge thing around what you might call reconnecting to joy https://t.co/FXnKUV1y7O
i didn't focus on that because mostly joy naturally became more accessible after crying a lot, but it left me really stuck when it became more inconvenient to find a good place to cry, i was a little too dependent on that one outlet
so one of the several things i tried was this: i noticed that i wasn't really paying attention to the video games i was using to self-soothe. so, even though it felt extremely self-indulgent and kinda cringe, i tried enjoying them more on purpose
in a small way this accumulated over several months. i gradually started looking for TV shows and movies i thought i would genuinely enjoy instead of just stuff that was comfortably familiar and mind-numbing, and some of them even made me cry a little which was great
i tried several other things, like shaking / wiggling. i continued to feel like i had very few degrees of freedom available to me but if metaphorically moving my pinky was all i could do i was going to see whether i could leverage that into opening up new actions
it's unclear what effect if anything all of this had but yesterday morning i woke up feeling very bad about myself and my life. just felt like a total failure, out of options. i really needed a place to scream and cry but the nearby hill was too cold
extremely fortunately i had finally worked up to driving again (after 4 months of being too scared - i actually have my mom to thank for this, for giving me an easy opportunity to try driving a little on our way back from the booster appointment)
(lol i ran out of tweets) anyway a few days earlier i was doing a little bit of driving around and i realized cars are pretty sound-insulated, and i could talk to myself and yell and sing without anyone really being able to hear, and this was AMAZING
that was already great. i felt like 70% better but also nothing felt really resolved. and then i managed to do another thing i've been too scared to do for months and ask for help https://t.co/buaxoXMvtx
even considering writing that tweet made me tear up a bit so it felt like the right way to go. i've been holding back on tweeting like this for awhile, it's felt a lot less safe than it used to, gradually over the last year and then suddenly in the aftermath of the acid thread
but i guess i have gotten more desperate or something 😅 anyway the response was just incredible, thank you all so so much, you really came through for me. it was exactly what i was hoping for - you all reminding me that i did things that mattered to you
it's hard for me to describe how useless i felt yesterday because i'm not really in it atm but my life felt like such a wreck. there's a specific kind of rando on the internet that mostly regards me as a failed mathematician and that kind of thing was really getting to me
the glory days on twitter where we were all opening our hearts to each other felt far away and i feel a lot more connected to them now. what we were doing was good and i'm glad we did it. and maybe we could continue a little more in that vein too
sorry, this ended up being *really* long, i should probably have separated the theory and the personal bit into two threads. i have a lot of pent up tweets okay. this is all really rough drafts and several poorly connected pieces, idk how easy this is to follow at all
so, connecting back to "focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of": part of what i've been doing lately is not reading the twitter TL, because too much of it felt like it was fear and anxiety and things to avoid and i had way too much of that already
twitter can easily become a machine that gives you more reason to not do things, more things to be afraid of, more connections between things you were already afraid of and new things. it can entrench the paralysis of depression and that was not what i wanted or needed
what i needed was the tiniest accessible slivers of joy, to remember that it was possible for things to feel good, to remember that this was a thing people wanted. a few movies on netflix were surprisingly good for this, for me. this one is very charming: https://t.co/LAGaO9rUIJ
narnia was another thing i was looking at in the same vein. c.s. lewis was increasingly striking me as a very rare sort of writer who embodied so much of what i cherished, and reading him felt nourishing in a way i really appreciated https://t.co/cyBnkQq9Zq
and it's hard for me to convincingly establish any kind of causality even to myself let alone to someone else but maybe some of that stuff helped inspire me to take the leap and ask you guys for help yesterday, and trust that that was something you'd want to do
phew, so many tweets, this feels like a good place to stop. if you managed to make it this far thanks for listening 🙏 AND PLEASE REMEMBER https://t.co/yghQBj5h56
i’m probably gonna break this up into multiple threads and try to describe some stuff better, i think i was trying to connect too many ideas and didn’t quite stick the landing 😅 but at least none of these tweets are gonna get me main character’d
one more thread that served as inspiration here https://t.co/Js8lLXpNHv
When skills and tasks are learned and deployed the attentional schema is busy paying attention to negative examples and generalizing across them. But now your attention is taken up by a bunch of things to avoid, which generalizes to 'avoid' and ultimately to dissociation. 4/
My decision-making phenomenology used to be extremely fucky in a way that I expect to be shared between most rats: deciding was VERY HARD because one wrong decision might make EVERYTHING BAD FOREVER them. No slack at all. Just BIG BAD. This came out in multiple ways:
find the tiniest slivers of joy https://t.co/a8iUUsMfjY
@QiaochuYuan Yup: her phrase is "no matter the cost to myself" (source: I recently listened to Sarah Peyton on a podcast called "Life Interrupted"; I wouldn't really recommend the episode because, true to its name, it was interrupted by godawful commercial breaks every 15mins)
@QiaochuYuan Her template: > “I (your name here) solemnly swear (to myself, or my parent, or to the universe) to (self-sabotaging behaviour) in order to (meet a deep need for survival, or to accompany, or to honour, or…..) no matter the cost to myself.” https://t.co/E9OXbmYYiv
@QiaochuYuan yeah this is from me; I have a messy sorta-thread over here in someone's replies: https://t.co/1ymCCuhjFw
@cosimia_ > difference between negative and positive motivation? Have thought lots about this. Seems there is, both inherently to any feedback system and specifics to human psychology implementation. It's adaptive for fear to overpower desire: those who don't flee don't survive.
@QiaochuYuan hmm this point would benefit from a tiny game / interactive thingy https://t.co/KGdmq0PawU
@cosimia_ But in 2D, you can already see that "away" is basically everywhere. Whereas with towardsness, you can hone in. As the # of dimensions gets large (and it's huge for most interesting things) the relative usefulness of awayness feedback gets tiny.
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv many people only experience belonging in subcultures that define themselves entirely by negative space. reacting against an existing thing is easier than booting up a new thing without external reference points
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv if you get lucky you find a scene defined by positive space, and wow hello agency! I have wishes and needs and creative capacity oh boy! good discovery! (much easier to flick this switch in a group than alone)
@QiaochuYuan @RichDecibels @visakanv makes me think of the notion of an "against againstness" scene "avoid avoidance" "tolerant of everything except intolerance" there's something to it, though also bad ways to reify it
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv also what you're saying fits well with vervaeke's description of depression as a kind of 'parasitic processing', thought processes that have self reinforcing loops so they keep themselves going despite being of negative utility to the host