I have been feeling sad in the evenings a lot this winter, and it’s been especially bad the last few nights – a bad mood will come on suddenly, sometime in the evening, and I’ll spend the rest of the evening trying unsuccessfully to think of ways to fix or salve it.  My best guess is that this is something like SAD, since it’s close to the winter solstice, and the bad moods have a 24-hour periodicity.

Usually I’ve noticed the bad mood coming on at maybe 6 or 7 PM, but today I started to feel kinda bad around 4.  I noticed that the sun happened to be setting outside, and that f.lux had just started to make the colors on my computer more orange.

So I turned f.lux off and closed the blinds, and now I don’t feel sad.

Could be placebo or coincidence, but it’s an interesting angle on the problem.  I completely forget i have f.lux most of the time, but given how much I use my computer, it’s having a big impact on the kind of light I am exposed to.

And it’s deliberately synching up that light with the light outside, so if the light outside is making me depressed, well … that seems obviously bad.

I know a lot of people have f.lux installed, and people generally talk about it like it’s an unalloyed good, so I thought I would post about to encourage others to think about whether f.lux might be screwing with them.

(I’d expect there to be multiple patterns here – people who get depressed in winter because their circadian rhythms get delayed may benefit from f.lux since it stops the computer from advancing their phase when used at night, but if some people who get depressed in the winter due to an overall decrease in blue light exposure, f.lux will only make that worse.)

nostalgebraist:

not-even-even

replied to your post

“Without realizing what I was doing, I just binge-read a bunch of posts…”

that’s the kind of thing that can only be hacked by “this stranger is an idiot and I have the full right to not give a shit about their delusions.”

I do give a shit, though, not because I owe anything to a stranger (I don’t) but because it feels like it exposes how little I truly know.

The writer I was talking about almost certainly knows more information relevant to the “civilization question” that I will ever know, period*.  This is disquieting.  I don’t care about the guy but I do care about my own (always precarious!) sense that I know more than nothing about the world I live in.

(*I want to say “just trust me on this,” but: this follows from what I know of my own reading speed and memory, plus some very limited principle-of-charity stuff to the effect that this guy has actually read most of the books he says he has read on Goodreads [faking this would be quite an achievement, as the dates of reading-completion are distributed in a realistic way, he regularly writes very long reviews that cite many specific details, and these details check out in the cases where I have read the book in question])

FWIW, the spell I was under last night seems to have been broken.  I still don’t have a knock-down argument against the guy, but I feel comfortably certain that this is because his (implicit) position isn’t even coherent enough to enter the figurative ring and get knocked down.

I mean, I was pretty sure of that last night too, but my emotional response was lagging behind my actual opinion.

For anyone who is curious and/or masochistic: the learned-yet-still-horribly-confused reactionary I was reading last night has a blog here and a Goodreads account here (n.b. most of the blog consists of cross-posted reviews from the GR account, and the reviews can be more accessibly browsed on the latter).

If nothing else, this stuff is worth reading as a testament to the fact that you can acquire vast quantities of legitimately valuable historical knowledge (cf. the many long reviews of history books) and still, through the magic of compartmentalization and partisanship, end up writing shit like this:

Second, extreme ignorance and irrationality characterize the vast majority of political discourse today. In any prior American era, an uneducated person who offered neither reasoning nor evidence would not have dared to offer his opinion in the public square, for he would have been laughed at and humiliated by all other participants. “Delete your account,” or its 19th Century equivalent, was not considered a suitable riposte in the days when thousands came to see, follow, and discuss the hours-long Lincoln-Douglas debates. Nobody thought the opinions of ignorant and unintelligent entertainers were of any importance or consequence. Nobody would have thought, much less put forward, the idea that traits such as skin color or activity in the bedroom were qualifications for societal acclaim and reward, while accomplishments by those with the wrong skin color or wrong social views were the mere happenstance of their supposed “privilege.” If you did voice such ideas, you would have been punched in the face to general applause, or sent for psychiatric evaluation (by a doctor who recognized gender dysphoria not as a sign of virtue, but rather as a severe mental illness). Failure to follow basic logic was a one-way ticket to ignominy and obscurity in any national political actor—or it would have been, had any such mental defectives aspired to national office. Today, all these gross defects are the norm, further reducing any common ground.

that’s the kind of thing that can only be hacked by “this stranger is an idiot and I have the full right to not give a shit about their delusions.”

I do give a shit, though, not because I owe anything to a stranger (I don’t) but because it feels like it exposes how little I truly know.

The writer I was talking about almost certainly knows more information relevant to the “civilization question” that I will ever know, period*.  This is disquieting.  I don’t care about the guy but I do care about my own (always precarious!) sense that I know more than nothing about the world I live in.

(*I want to say “just trust me on this,” but: this follows from what I know of my own reading speed and memory, plus some very limited principle-of-charity stuff to the effect that this guy has actually read most of the books he says he has read on Goodreads [faking this would be quite an achievement, as the dates of reading-completion are distributed in a realistic way, he regularly writes very long reviews that cite many specific details, and these details check out in the cases where I have read the book in question])

Here’s a trait I have which could be common or rare, I have no idea: one of my strongest moral emotions is “I shouldn’t do that, because my childhood self would not have wanted to become an adult who did things like that.”

When written out like that, it sounds overly constraining.  Why should kid-Rob be the final arbiter of morality?  He’s a kid – what does he know?

What it feels like is a strong desire to avoid “value drift,” a feeling that value drift is an especially sad or tragic thing, a horrible waste of potential.  “Go out into the world and learn and grow, but don’t let the world make you forget why you’re doing all this in the first place.”

It goes without saying that I don’t have a perfect recollection of what kid-Rob was really like, and so when I think this way, I’m consulting an adult ideal I label “kid-Rob’s values.”  (A moral discussion with my actual childhood self would go quite differently, I’d expect.)  The practical upshot is, mostly, an especially emphatic insistence on the “children’s book morality” I described in this post:

At the same time, the complex of feelings lingers.  The ones from the old morality tales of childhood have this vast potency for me.  The stuff of kindergarten morality.  Be kind and patient.  Don’t be a bully.  Don’t be quick to judge.  The good kids in the stories were quiet and hesitant, the bullies brash and supercilious.

These are not exactly uncommon values, but they have a special force for me, because when I think about violating them, a special set of Red Alert klaxons start blaring in my mind: “WARNING!! POSSIBLE VALUE DRIFT DETECTED!!”  I don’t claim that this is the right way to be, necessarily, but it’s the way I am.

I don’t think about it much anymore, but it’s astonishing to me that the norm of “heterosexual men ask women out, not vice versa” is still so strong everywhere.  Including in places that are gender-nonconformist in other ways (e.g. young liberal urbanites on OKCupid, your average liberal arts college).

Like, I had some agonized times in college wondering why I could never get a date, and yeah there were various reasons, but one of them was just this hilariously trivial misunderstanding: I figured, since I was in this super-progressive environment, stuff like that had already been evened out to 50-50 and so a typically attractive guy could expect to get propositioned by a woman at least once in a while, and so I must have been less than typically attractive.  Again, in some ways I probably was, but I think that was much less than half of the problem.

It was pretty weird when, much later, I was trying to figure out how to use a dating website and people would tell me, yeah, you’ve gotta send out lots of messages out of the blue, after all no woman is ever gonna message you, and that’s not about you it’s just how it is – and I would think, “even in these crowds?”  Yes, in these crowds, in every crowd on this vast variegated earth.

You’d think this would be such a heartwarming, across-the-aisle issue, too!  And maybe there are deep obstacles here involving, I don’t know, male/female size/strength disparities, or the ~biotruths~ of desire, or something?  But if we’re already going around smashing things that look like they might be social constructs to see what happens, why not give this one a try, right?

When I start typing one of these deep learning posts it always ends up taking longer to write than I thought, and this is becoming a time sink.  So: no deep learning posts for the next week.

(No offense meant to anyone who engaged with my posts, I just get easily fixated on things.)

trickytalks:

nostalgebraist:

Heard Philip Pullman on the radio the other day promoting his new book, and he was talking about how he didn’t like A. A. Milne (in his role as editor of Punch) because he promoted a nostalgic adult vision of childhood, whereas, you see, actual children are not innocent and content with childhood, actual children want to grow up quickly and do adult things, apparently

What is it with this dude and the idea that every human being goes through the exact same developmental trajectory, seriously, between this and the daemons??

Wanting to be adult and do adult things describes my childhood experience, and I’m actually pretty surprised it doesn’t describe yours since I thought it was more common. Especially considering how often it appears in fiction.

How were you different? And do you know how common your perspective is, or of any other perspectives?

I don’t know how common any of these patterns actually are.  So, much of my frustration is not with inaccuracy so much as insufficient concern with accuracy, I guess?

The worry is that “kids wants to be adults” is just another cultural narrative that “everyone knows,” the way “everyone knew” kids were innocent and happy with childhood in an earlier (Victorian to Edwardian?) age.  You mention that it appears in fiction a lot, which is one of the ways that “things everyone knows” can be established.  Pullman was complaining about the sort of cutesy cartoons that Milne would publish in Punch; I’m worried that fiction using this trope is our age’s equivalent of those cartoons.  In neither case do we really know how common one pattern is relative to another; we just have our narrative.

I think I’ve most often heard the “wanting to be adults” theory invoked to explain stereotypical teenage behavior, but I’ve also heard it challenged (I remember some psychologist saying, “if teenagers really wanted to be adults they’d be fascinated by office jobs and doing taxes”).  My own best guess is that adolescence makes people act differently because they’re flooded with new quantities of certain hormones, and the psychological gloss (“wanting to be an adult” or something else) is determined by how these hormones interact with the teenager’s particular psyche.  There may be general trends in what this interaction looks like, but the psychological part isn’t causal; one takes more risks (say) because of the hormones, then interprets that behavior after the fact in one way or another.  But that’s just my own guess.

In my own case, well, we should probably split things into before and after puberty.  (IIRC the cutesy cartoons involved prepubescent children, so before puberty is probably the most directly relevant.)  Before puberty, I don’t remember any specific drive to grow up.  Adulthood was strange and mysterious, and I knew it would come with more freedom, but I also knew it would come with responsibilities whose nature I didn’t grasp.  And more importantly, the only way to become an adult was to go through adolescence first, and I’d heard all about how “teenagers” were these horrible goblins who took stupid risks and became unreasonably rude to everyone.  So when I thought about this at all, it was mostly to hope that I wouldn’t go through this goblin-metamorphosis I’d heard about.  (Not that I would never hit puberty, just that puberty wouldn’t be like that.)

Then, when I really did hit puberty, things were unusual because I was already on Risperdal, and it (or perhaps some inherent tendency of mine, who knows) prevented me from adapting to new social circumstances.  I still hung around my old friends, but they themselves had changed a lot, and I found this alienating and withdrew into myself.  At this time, I was mostly scared that I wouldn’t be able to get a college degree (since I already found high school so hard), that I wouldn’t be able to thrive on my own and would have to live with my parents forever, etc.  So I was scared of becoming an adult, but due to some specific personal circumstances (Risperdal) that don’t generalize.

It’s possible that there is some normal trajectory that is overwhelmingly common without outside interference like Risperdal.  But if so, well, I imagine “outside interference” of some kind is very common.  And even then, I didn’t yearn for adulthood even before I started taking Risperdal.

I wrote this post in February 2014 and (as far as I can tell) never posted it publicly, probably because of all the talk about my family.  I recently discovered it sitting on my hard drive and was like “wow, this is one of the best things I’ve ever written,” so I’m going to post it.

OK to reblog despite all the family talk, because you know what, I’m 29 years old and treading oh-so-carefully is probably not as adaptive as habit as it once was.  What was it they said back in 2014 – “you only live once”?  Something like that

(All of this is still cosigned, but words below this line are by 2014!me)

As a child I was told many things about myself, but one embedded itself more deeply than the others: my defining quality is my obliviousness, and this quality morally taints any action I might choose to take, no matter how small.

I learned this from two sources, unrelated in origin but conspiratory in effect: one familial and one pharmacological.  The latter is easier to sum up.  I was on Risperidone for five years and it prevented me from reliably paying sustained attention to anything for more than a few minutes.  I couldn’t pay attention in class.  I couldn’t read books.  I was dependably incapable of paying attention for the duration of a movie, and when I would see movies with people – even the kind of movies people would call “dumb” and “brainless” – I would find myself having to bullshit afterwards, saying as little as possible to avoid letting on that I hadn’t followed the plot.

I forgot things and forgot about forgetting them.  Forgetting is an especially frustrating error for the one who commits it, because by definition it isn’t willed.  You can write yourself notes, you can turn something into a mantra that you repeat over and over … but, ultimately, if you forget something, you don’t feel like you made a choice to forget.  You can chastise yourself for bad choices, and resolve to do better next time.  But how do you resolve to “not forget next time”?  The choice to “not forget” was never presented to you, you weren’t mentally “there” to take it – that’s the whole problem!  To be told you’ve forgotten something is to feel as though you’ve fallen afoul of so-called “moral luck”: you’ve done something truly wrong, but purely by accident, not by choice.  This is the worst kind of guilt, because you still feel bad, but there is no way to take steps toward ensuring that you won’t err again.

I wasn’t so stupid as to not learn from experience.  I soon learned to forecast before the fact that, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I probably would soon be told I had forgotten or neglected something.  This didn’t help me remember – it just produced a completely general sense of ironic resignment toward the probable wrongness of any action I took.  It  didn’t matter how seemingly unassailable the choice was, because all sins of honest omission feel that way until you remember what it is you’ve left out.  Getting out of bed, putting one foot in front of the other, brushing my teeth: any of these could secretly be sins.  Yes, their sinful nature would have to inhere in occult, subtle reasons.  But to be a person in an antipsychotic haze is to be forever confronted with reasons that seem occult and subtle to you and perfectly obvious and ordinary to everyone else.

No motion, however tiny, is without the potential for harm.  The Whos were people, and they lived on a mote of dust.  The oblivious person is a clumsy giant in a world of inhabited specks.

All this only emphasized, though, what I had already learned from my father.  My father is the sort of person who views other people fundamentally as obstacles to his own goals.  That’s not to say he’s amoral or selfish; in fact, his own goals are often altruistic ones.  But his altruism is of a purely, well, “paternalistic” kind.  He believes firmly that he is more qualified to make decisions for other people than they are.  (I’m not sure there is anyone in his personal life who is an exception to this rule.)  He believes that everyone but him is essentially a dumb machine, acting on simple and unsubtle rules – and he believed this long before I went on Risperidone and began in fact to approximate such a creature.  Discussing and negotiating with the machines is pointless; he can only try to predict their unthinking behavior and then plan around it.

Like a noble villain from a sci-fi cartoon, he devises secret, elaborate plans, which depend on numerous shaky predictions about the behavior of people around him.  Since the plans are secret – too subtle for the robots’ understanding – none of his predictions can be guaranteed by turning them into explicit requests or demands.  So he lives in a world of endless disappointment, and to know him is to find yourself endlessly disappointing him for, yes, occult and subtle reasons.  You were just minding you own business, yes – but he had expected you to mind your own business outside the house (let’s say) rather than in it, and his plans – never mentioned to you – depended on you being outside.  No choice presented itself to you, and yet you have failed: moral luck.

When this happens he always takes the high ground, paints himself as a stoic martyr.  It’s not your fault, he reassures you (paternal, oracular, exuding warm Dumbledorean wisdom somehow even as he seethes with finally released, delirious rage – you can’t know how bizarre this is until you’ve experienced it).  It’s his fault, because he should have anticipated that you would fail.  You simply aren’t reliable in the way he wanted you to be, which is fine (the voice conciliatory, finely controlled, oozing paternal virtue, the sort of perfectly pitched speech you’d expect to see excerpted on TV right after the family drama it’s from wins Best Picture).  He should have known better.  He screwed up.  But of course he’s really praising himself and insulting you.  The sci-fi villain’s tragic flaw was his too large heart; he simply had too much faith in humanity.  His Rube Goldberg utopia failed because we failed him.

When I was 12 or 13, my parents and I went to the bar mitzvah of the son of one of their friends.  The party after the ceremony was a dance party designed for 13-year-olds, with terrible, blaring pop music.  We left after a little while.  When we got home, it became clear that my father was very angry with my mother, because he had asked her if she wanted to leave several times before we finally left, and she had said she wanted to stay for a bit longer.  This was bad because my father had an ear infection and, as it happened, the loud music was causing him incredible physical pain.  Every moment was virtually unendurable.

Any normal person would have simply said this to his wife at the time, and ended the pain instantly.  But to expect sympathy from a robot like my mother would be, according to my father’s principles, futile.  Instead he merely asked her if she’d like to leave and then, when she said no, stoically endured the pain while lamenting that his wife did not just intuit the problem – lamenting life in a world of robots incapable of moral action, where he was the only one with empathy, the only one who saw hidden pains, who heard Whos.  At home he and my mother had a shouting match in which he told her that anyone who was really in love with him would have known he was in pain without being told.  But (of course) that was all right.  "We’re not in a love relationship, but a lot of married couples aren’t, and they can still have basically happy and harmonious households.“  This kind of reassurance is clever, because if its addressee denies the premise – as my mother did, by suggesting that she and my father might be in love after all – they can be accused of being ungrateful.  I’m being so nice; I’m trying so hard to help you accept the truth – why would you be so callous as to send us back to square one?

And so the kind of mentality produced by living with such a person is a grim fatalism, a sense that you are – not in a cold thoughtless cosmos – but in the worst of all possible worlds.  The gods exist, and they hate us.  Every outcome is fined-tuned for maximum irony.  No step is safe; demons lurk in the marshes around our feet.  As in a dream, the most mundane of actions – like saying you might want to stay at a party for a little while longer – reveals through a sudden knight’s move of logic that you actually do not love your loved ones.  The motions by which you get out of bed, take one step after another, brush your teeth and make your breakfast, are – by an occult principle of identity too subtle for robots and the Risperidoned – also the motions by which you nail Christ’s body to the cross.  The patronizing say: "forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  But this only seems to underscore the speaker’s large-heartedness.  It doesn’t really exonerate you.

As someone defined by obliviousness, I’ve never liked ambiguity.  Into any space left for interpretation, I can read my own hideousness.  And I’ve always been terrified of logical jumps, massive claims, sweeping ideologies.  I can’t even trust the smallest steps, so any giant leap is bound to seem like a trap set by the snickering gods to ensnare the foolish.  Believing in small things already makes me feel horrible.  I’m trying to work my way up to big things, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

But there was a moment of salvation, a moment where I began to feel as though I could own my own hideous flaw.  As though obliviousness could be made into a virtue.

I never considered myself especially good at math.  I’d fallen one or two years behinds my friends in the subject while on Risperidone, and it’d become something of a sore spot for me.  When I stopped taking Risperidone, I noticed I was becoming much better at it.  This fit fairly well into my narrative about obliviousness and my own worthelessness.  After all, math at the high school level is just a set of simple operations, something even a robot or a moron can train himself to do.  They permitted no ambiguity, involved no humanity.  (The rhetoric of “humanity” seems very closely related to the rhetoric of “obliviousness.”  I’ve often thought that my father views himself as the only really human person in the world.)  These equations, these vapid sentences of arithmetic, these tautologies, were the native tongue of the oblivious.  No wonder I had acquired a passing competence.

But then, on a whim, I signed up for 12th grade physics.  The class required calculus, which I hadn’t taken, and which I had always thought of as the kind of Real Math that real, non-oblivious humans do.

I bought a calculus book and read it over the summer.  It was easy, astonishingly so.  Calculus was just another set of idiot rules to learn.  I could teach myself rules.  But that didn’t really mean anything.

But here is what I learned in 12th grade physics: the fundamental logic of the oblivious is the fundamental logic of the universe.

I’m not sure how to convey just how surprising this is, how much of a unexpected boon it is.  It could have been otherwise.  It’s often said that the laws of classical physics are so simple they can “fit on a t-shirt.”  There was no reason to expect, at the outset, that the motions of the planets and of our own nerves and muscles could be described at the most basic level by a set of statements short enough to fit on a t-shirt.  Attempts at scientific psychology and sociology have failed to find such simple laws.  Fundamental physics is a happy accident: we tried the simplest ideas, and they worked.

This was astonishing.  Theorems and equations seemed like an escapist world, safe because of their lack of ambiguity – no crevices for demons to lurk in – but unreal for precisely the same reason.  What my high school physics class taught me was that the very same equations I’d thought of as an escapist paradise were in fact the fundamental logic of our world.

When you eat of the fruit of calculus-based physics, you do not become like gods.  The gods become like you.

“Escapism and reality are simply one in the same after all.  You’ve felt inferior your whole life, but your inferiority comes with a special gift.  You can bend material reality to your will.”  It was the closest thing a real teenager can get to a letter from Hogwarts.

In The Fever, his masterpiece of queasy self-loathing, Wallace Shawn wrote:

Shouldn’t we decorate our lives and our world as if we were having a permanent party? Shouldn’t there be bells made of paper hanging from the ceiling, and paper balls, and white and yellow streamers? Shouldn’t people dance and hold each other close? Shouldn’t we fill the tables with cake and presents?

Yes, but we can’t have celebrations in the very same room where groups of people are being tortured, or groups of people are being killed. We have to know, Where we are, and where are the ones who are being tortured and killed? Not in the same room? No—but surely—isn’t there any other room we can use? Yes, but we still could hear the people screaming. Well, then—can’t we use the building across the street? Well, maybe—but wouldn’t it feel strange to walk by the window during our celebrations and look across at the building we’re in now and think about the blood and the deaths and the testicles being crushed inside it?

It’s hard to truly have a party when you can’t ever stop thinking about the horrible things you might not know about.

My 12th-grade physics teacher was one of the funniest, most exuberant people I’ve ever met.  Talking to him was like having the kind of joyous party Shawn’s protagonist is talking about.  To most of his students this seemed an endearing contradiction – how funny it was, that this weird old guy was so passionate about something so boring.  But to me it made perfect sense.  He was exuberant because he had learned that he could be.

We can’t have celebrations in the very same room where groups of people are being tortured.  We can’t forget that the gods hate us, and that our expressions of joy are offensive to the wise and the righteous.  Unless, perhaps, we erect some sort of a magic sigil by which we can ward off the demons …

In mathematics, when you finish a proof – having finally written out the conclusion, now inescapably and logically demonstrated for all time – you write the letters “QED,” which stand for quod erat demonstrandum, “which was to be shown.”  Or, if you want to be more stylish, you can just write a little rectangle, like this:

□

A closed shape, for a closed system.  By justifying our steps we justify our joy; having said only what any thinking mind must be allowed to say, we achieve a sort of perfect legitimacy.  We have proceeded dumbly, obliviously, one foot in front of the other, eschewing ambiguity and complexity.  Reasoning that can be capped with a □ has no crevices for demons and no dust habitable to Whos.  With this magic we can create a place into which fatalist guilt cannot intrude.  Occult rules of the heart cannot be invoked.  Oscar-worthy performances cannot be cashed in for logical errors.  (Yes, dad, but which of the steps in the proof is wrong?)  The clear light of reason banishes all dream logic.

This would all be a sterile and escapist game – simply a way for people like me and my physics teacher to not feel like shit once in a while – if it weren’t for the correspondence between it and fundamental reality.  When I descended into escapism and sighed with relief, people didn’t say I was running away from the world.  They said, “wow, physics?  Now there’s a major you can make money with.”

Blessed are the oblivious, for we have already inherited the earth.

The reason I write things like this is that I’ve never felt at home in the usual rhetoric surrounding concepts like “reason,” “emotion” and “humanity.”  There’s a default assumption, buried so deep it’s hard to get rid of it even in my own speech, that ambiguity = human = warm = pleasant.  The universe of fundamental physics is popularly described as “cold” and “unfeeling,” presumably in contrast to a warm Christian God who loves you.  What’s left out is the other alternative.  A mechanical universe means that the gods can’t hate us, because they don’t exist.  It means we’re not rubes in a story written by a cruel satirist.

The most common modern version of the Christian God have never really been a possible part of my emotional landscape.  I see something a lot more recognizable in some of the stories I read in other mythologies – including the Old Testament – in which the gods seem like monsters.  An unfeeling universe has no secret reasons of its own and thus it can be comprehended, progressively, by any plodder who puts one foot in front of the next.  If your life is not a story, because physical law is not narrative, then it does not have to be a story of ironic failure.

I know what I look like: another nerdy white guy with a science fetish.  I suppose that is what I am.  And, because of my emotional investment, I sometimes go too far in the defense of these things.  But I’m trying to convey that it’s an emotional investment, that to me the ideas of science, logic and reason are the best therapies in existence.  They’re responsible for any self-confidence I have as an “oblivious” person, and I feel a kinship with people who go further than me in their science fetishes.  It can feel good to, for once, celebrate your obliviousness – to simplify things down to equations and logical implications.  The conventional wisdom is that this is cold and inhuman, but try as I might I can’t help but hear that as “you are cold and inhuman.”

You’re not supposed to leave anything out; you’re supposed to be subtle and complex.  That’s the way to be nice, decent, welcoming.  But subtlety and complexity and the insistence on not leaving anything out have always been the things that make me feel horrible.

It feels so, so good to be able to leave something out, once in a while, and not have a trapdoor immediately open beneath me.

I’m finally getting off of SSRIs entirely (after having been prescribed Prozac to help me get off Lexapro, which did the trick).  Last dose of Prozac was 8 days ago.

I keep thinking I’m noticing things like increased emotional lability and general sense of “passion” (both positive and negative), which would make sense but could easily just be me imagining things.  But one thing I definitely am experiencing – whether because of discontinuation effects or for some other reason – is increased anger and irritability, relative to my very low baseline even before the SSRIs.

I feel like this so rarely that it’s kind of novel, honestly.  Especially the way that justified anger mixes with “anger with no object” so that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.  I keep thinking about certain subjects that make me angry for reasons I could explain, but when I ask myself “if those things didn’t exist, would I feel differently?”, the answer is “no, I’d still have this feeling that I ought to punch a wall for some reason (if not any specific reason).”

chill

There is something really wonderful about the word “chill.”

Long long ago, I was telling a friend that I didn’t like certain of my parents’ behavior patterns, and doing so in very formal nerdy language full of phrases like “behavior patterns,” and after a lot of verbiage he just replied, “you wish they were more chill.”  And I said, “huh, yeah,” and he said something about how it’s great that colloquial language can be so efficiently expressive, and I nodded along, and it seemed like one of those feel-good sentiments that’s true but not all that deep, and that was that.  But maybe it was deeper than I gave it credit for?

So, a few things about “chill.”  First, the boring one: it’s a positive thing.  Describing someone as “chill” is almost always praise, and when someone tells someone else to “chill out,” they are telling them “do this good thing you aren’t currently doing.”  So far, so obvious.

But “chill” is unusual as terms of praise go.  It has a certain contextless quality; it doesn’t feel like something you can discard the moment some other value becomes more important.  Sure, you can have arguments about whether being chill is appropriate – if your house is on fire and someone tells you to chill out, you’ll probably say this isn’t the time for that.  But the very concept of “chilling out” contains the notion that we are frequently less chill than we should be – that there are lots of times when our minds are telling us our houses are metaphorically on fire, and we need to see them for the liars they are.

I’m not just talking about anxiety here, although it’s a clear-cut example of the dynamic.  The bigger point is that by treating “chill” as a generically good thing – by taking “they’re chill” as praise even if nothing else is said about “them” – we’re acknowledging that stepping back, taking a wider perspective, asking whether you maybe should chill out, is a good thing to do in virtually any situation.  Sure, sometimes you ask the question and the answer is “nope, my house is on fire.”  But you don’t get to circumvent the question entirely because the matter at hand is just so serious; that itself is un-chill.

Compare this to something like “kindness.”  Kindness is also a “generically good thing.”  But while we have the concept of kindness as generally good, we don’t have the concept of “making sure to ask whether you ought to be kind, even if it seems like you shouldn’t” as generically good.  (We could have a word like “chill” for this, but I don’t think we do.)  Chill isn’t just a state of relaxation, it’s the trait of being able to notice when relaxation is called for, even though we didn’t realize it at first.  Hence “chilling out”: if it were just a matter of having a high average level of relaxation, we wouldn’t have this special associated verb for becoming more relaxed, because there would just be relaxed people (who never have to “chill out”) and non-relaxed people.  (Back in the kindness comparison, there’s no analogous term like “kinding out.”)

This is all pretty abstract, so I should give you the concrete example that got me thinking about it, which was this @porpentine​ post:

the most important advice i give to people who write me about being in abusive activist cults / hot allostatic load situations is to dis-identify with their language and leave their universe …getting invested in that po-faced neo-1950′s pious language and the culture makes you a huge target…i don’t know if i made that clear enough in the original but yeah…then resist the urge to join some polarized faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt you but for different stupid reasons, and make friends who are real people and know how to chill the fuck out lol

And like, I can imagine a version of this post that ends with some theoretical language about why it’s important to value a certain kind of “asking whether one should relax” in all contexts even highly fraught contexts because you see etc etc, and ends up sounding like it’s taking some “political” “position” … but porpentine just says “know how to chill the fuck out,” and we all know what that means.