Skip to main content

Help Yourself


I haven't made a blog post for a while.  I'm not interested in recording my thoughts and feelings.  These are flashes.  When I have insight, it's not worth imparting.  I observe for my own edification, and my observations only work for me, as far as I know.  My therapist tells me that I have good insights and that I should compile a book of them.  I don't know whether my insights are good for others or not.  Because I don't know what other people's insights are, I have nothing to which to compare my own to evaluate any assessment of them.

Most of the observations I make about people are blind grabs made in desperation as I flail for purchase in a world that doesn't want to stop me from falling out of it.  I'm not grasping for handholds that I might instruct others to use.  I'm trying to make sense of the world for myself.  I presume that my specific confusions are limited to me.  But is there something I could say about people or life that might help someone?  Which, if any, of my ideas are special?

I am a situation.  "Me" refers to an ongoing series of events of perception.  There's no situation exactly like me.  My insight applies to my experiences alone, and those are few.  I avoid experiences.  I've tried to engage with the world, and I'm not a fan.  I don't want to engage with it anymore.  My best advice is to remain small and quiet.  Do little, expect nothing.  See what happens and react only as and to the extent that you must.  This is how I live my life.  I don't know how you want to live yours.  If you want to collect experiences, if you abhor restraint, then my advice isn't for you.  My insight into how one might best conduct an anhedonic life would, I imagine, be of no use to a determined hedonist.

I do have insights.  I don't care about them.  I don't need them to amount to anything.  One of my insights is that it doesn't matter what one chooses.  Life can't be wasted.  It is burned up as it passes whether one engages with it or not.  Be mindful of the sunk cost fallacy; no matter how well you spend your life, your life is spent.  Good things and bad things are the same.  Whether one is satisfied or not has no bearing on what unfolds beyond one's measurements of satisfaction.  Mine is the way of no way.  My self help book would have one page and two words: "Help yourself."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
Post a Comment
Read more