Esther and I are both having sad days and if we lived together we would both be able to make each other feel better simply by being there and it would be an immense improvement (I imagine, on the basis of recently collected evidence).
We are both more effective for one another than the psychological medications we have respectively tried.
I always say “stimulants make me less anxious rather than more,” but really I think I’ve realized that lower doses of any stimulant will make me more anxious, while higher doses make me less anxious. This can be very confusing, because my knee-jerk response to an unwanted side effect is “decrease the dose,” and, well
(What it feels like is that lower doses cause me to think more but not focus more, so that I just end up thinking more intensely about the same old worries, while with a high enough dose I’m like “I could think about worries but I could also just focus on this one thing I’m doing”)
I don’t really give a shit, not on the level of actually living my life, but I have a psychological quirk that makes me obsess over things like this.
I have a tendency to get fixated on the fact that I’m not able to convince everyone on earth that I’m a good person (whatever that means) or that I’m not doing [bad things I don’t think I’m doing], and this tends to make me think a lot about what sort of rhetoric or reasoning I could use to “get inside” closed (mostly closed?) systems of thought that say I’m bad.
My earlier example “how can I convince PUAs I don’t actually want to be a PUA” is representative – I don’t think I’ve ever directly interacted with a PUA, I have no real reason to care what they would think of me if they did think anything of me, etc. But there’s a part of my mind that makes me sometimes look up PUA blogs and then obsess over how I could convince their authors that I’m not “doing anything wrong.” I was in this kind of mood last night, hence all those posts
(stupid brainstuff)
The phrase “fucked up” as a term of criticism (specifically the “gross and/or morally wrong, probably both” definition) really messes with my head, because it’s very vague and gets used by lots of different kinds of people for lots of different things, and so if my mind wants to convince me that I am “fucked up” (or that anyone or anything else is) it is pretty easy for it to do so. After all, someone would no doubt make that judgment, there being so many different worldviews out there.
The reason this doesn’t happen with terms like “immoral” is that people realize those are contested. “That’s wrong!” But wait, is it? According to who? What even is morality, maaaaaan? Let’s talk about it! Where if you just say “that’s fucked up,” everyone tends to nod their heads and move along. It’s like the phrase is a “make-a-negative-moral-judgment-for-free” card.
(This is not to condemn anyone in particular for using the phrase, which for better or for worse is out there; it’s more that I wish it didn’t exist at all, and its function were replaced by other terms with somewhat different pragmatics.)
I finished The Divine Invasion. It was really good, though not quite as good as VALIS.
The type of paranoia that suffuses the book was very #relatable – the sense that anyone you run into might really be God or Belial, that great forces of Good and Evil exist and take mundane forms and that it’s both very important and very difficult to discern whether any given mundane thing is Good or Evil. Not that I “really” believe these things, but it sure does feel that way sometimes.
Brain is not so great today, distractions welcome. (I am trying to lower my SSRI dose again so it’s probably that. I do not think I need this SSRI at all but coming off of it is somewhat tough)
Phenibut is another Russian anti-anxiety medication, but it’s very addictive and dangerous. Even the fearless people of r/nootropics stay away from this one. Highly un-recommended.
-SSC post on anxiety treatments
This is the one I’ve been on and off of for seven years. I’m a winner!
(In fairness, it does appear to have actually cured my father’s mood issues, in the long term, without substantial side effects, which is why he recommended it to me. So it worked for someone.)
I want to try to recreate the burning enthusiasm for achievement I had when I was maybe age 17-22. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to do so. (Also, I’m worried that dissatisfactions with life I had at the time may have been necessary. (Also also, I’m not sure it would actually serve me that well in the not-very-well-defined tasks I face these days. (But I still want to have it back.)))
Like, I’ve really been proud of my progress toward not being a person with “something to prove,” because it was unpleasant both for me and for other people. (Sometimes I think a lot of what is frustrating in human behavior comes from people having “something to prove”?) But having something to prove also made me get things done.
Fools! I’ll show them all! But I’ve already shown them, and now I just can’t get up the same passion for maintaining my orbital fortress and improving the efficiency of my death ray.
I had the opposite experience: I felt like nothing had ever shown them, or even once “they’d” been shown (I guess I was 21 or 22 when that arguably happened), I still hadn’t shown myself. I doubt I ever will. But it doesn’t seem like that’s your issue.
In my case a lot of what I needed to “show” involved pretty low bars, so it longer retains the same drama now that I have a less extreme, more ordinary view of myself / my life.
This is going to sound really emo (or something in that territory) but: I used to feel a need to prove that I was “a real person,” or if not that, at least “a valuable non-person.” I had this sense that I was really, really weird and “off” and differnet from other people in ways that were obvious, and so I needed to either hide these, or establish myself as some sort of accomplished badass so I could be a “cool weirdo” rather than a “pathetic weirdo.”
And over time I’ve accepted that not everyone has the same responses to how I talk or act, and that a lot of this feeling could be removed via a combination of “hanging out with people I’m compatible with” and “realizing that a lot of this involves irrational preconceptions that I can talk myself out of” and so forth. Which has all been healthy. But there’s no longer that need to “compensate for the fact that I’m a machine without a soul and everyone else knows it” or any similar black-and-white self-centric nonsense.
Well, I can’t guarantee IRL friendship (depends on, among other things, where you live) but at least we can follow each other on here!
I guess the SSC post told you this already, but if you liked TNC, you should give Floornight a try.
I’m not really nostalgic for algebra, but the username came to me in a flash one summer day in 2011 and I liked it because it sounded kind of like a Homestuck chumhandle (I had been reading Homestuck, for the first time) and because it sort of implies some combination of reason and emotion, or breakdown of the dichotomy between reason and emotion, and I’m into that sort of thing. (Or was – these days I seem to run into fewer people who take that dichotomy seriously, in a straightfoward/unsubtle way?)
I just downloaded floornight on my kindle, and promoted it past several layers of my reading list.
I think the reason/emotion dichotomy has a lot going for it, but in part that’s because it’s sort of the first blush presentation of a lot of really interesting dichotomies, like system 1 vs 2 cognition. Homestuck definitely plays with it (the aspects of heart/mind) but striking a balance and looking past the surface is I think sort of necessary to live as an adult.
I noticed a couple of algebraic topology posts on your dash, mind if I ask what your current relationship with math is?
also re:IRL I am moving to San Jose soon.
I live in NYC, though I visit the west coast sometimes.
A lot of my frustration with the emotion/reason dichotomy has to do with the way I derive a lot of emotional comfort from subjects like math that have a minimal “human element” (as some people would put it) – it can often feel (rationally or not!) like the “human elements” of others parts of life tend to align in ways that are threatening to me, or imply I’m a bad person, or whatever, and it’s nice to retreat to a world where 2+2=4 rather than 2+2=“nostalgebraist is shit.” But framings like “math is ‘unemotional’ ” ignore all of this.
My current relationship with math is “undergrad physics degree, a number of years into an applied math Ph.D. program doing stuff so applied that calling it ‘math research’ is kind of misleading.” I’m kind of a Fake Math Boy :P But I’m already interested, at least in principle, about learning more and purer math.
(The “algebraist” part of the handle is especially misleading because I know very little algebra, in the real math sense of the word.)
My father sent me a dietary supplement which describes itself as an “Adrenal Energy Formula” that “Enhances Energy, Stamina and Quality of Life*
*These statements have not been evaluated by the etc. etc.”
Two days ago I took half the recommended dose and felt very unpleasantly anxious for about 4 hours. But hey, I thought, maybe I was just feeling weird that day, may as well give it one more try. So this morning I took it again – half the recommended dose, again – and now I feel really keyed up and nervous and have butterflies in my stomach and I feel repeated impulses to jerk my arms and legs and can’t really concentrate on anything.
So, probably not a keeper, then.