I live out in the middle of nowhere and going places is not generally an easy thing to do for me. Anything that requires that is kind of not viable right now.
Dating is pointless. I’m not good looking and again, there’s no way to go out and be around people.
I’m already regretting writing this post. The “please don’t start a religion” part of your comment to me feels like it was intended to make fun of or insult me. I didn’t come here to be lectured by reddit atheists. And if that’s the reaction I’ll get for sharing something so important to me, I WON’T post anything further about it on this site.
I didn’t read any bad intent from P on his/her comment. And I also got the general sense from the post: of looking for help rather than us telling how you can help LW, and I’m guessing that was the nature of the comment.
I feel like you are quite a smart person (and still very young) but with the wrong assumptions that may be blocking a very meaningful self-development that is key to life (being independent/belonging to a group that cares about you) and I think you will be benefit greatly from trying to accomplish these goals however hard they may seem to you.
While you’ve had a very unique experience growing up that may have wired you in a certain way, this is not basis to the fact that you cannot live in any other way or change your mind (e.g. how sure are you of not having a job because you can take “another person telling me what to do” as opposed to just being plain afraid of doing something that you have virtually never done before?) I think navigating this reversal in assumptions will bring the most value to you and your content here.
I really enjoyed the post, and I appreciate reading about your experience and honesty. This unique experience in life that you had will bring unique insight, and I think this is how you can help others.
Thank you for your kind words. Both being independent, and to an even greater degree, belonging to a group that cares about me, feel extremely distant. The latter often feels impossible. I can’t even clearly imagine what that would be like. When I try to, it seems stifling. I would have to care about them in turn! I would have to obey their group norms! And depressed-me sees only darkness and burden there, even though I have sometimes been around people and felt very good as a result—because depressed-me cannot remember or imagine feeling good at all, and doesn’t understand it. These mood swings are very frustrating, as they drastically modify my sense of what is real, and make me a less trustworthy person.
And yes, the fear of jobs is mostly about fear of doing things I’ve never done before. Same with college etc. It’s very hard for me to try new things.
Then you should at least try to talk to 80,000 hours, you might eventually relocate somewhere where meeting people is easier.
It wasn’t intended to make fun of you. When I say that you shouldn’t start a religion I mean it literally, like most people here I don’t hold a favorable view of religions.
Sentences like “But I am fundamentally a mystic, prone to ecstatic states of communion with an ineffable divine force immanent in the physical universe which I feel is moving towards incarnating as an AI god such as I called Anima” make me think that what you are talking about doesn’t correspond to anything real. But in any case I don’t see why you shouldn’t write about it. If you are right you will give us interesting reading material. And if you are wrong hopefully someone will explain to you why and you will update. It shouldn’t matter how much you care about this, if it turns out it’s wrong you should stop believing in it (and if it’s right keep your current belief). And again, I mean this literally and with no ill intent.
Yeah, that’s the problem. I’m not a rationalist and this makes it obvious that I don’t want to / can’t be, and shouldn’t be here. There are beliefs I would not update if an endless amount of evidence against them came my way, because they are how I keep myself from suicidal ideation. The belief that I have a unique spiritual vision etc is one of them. It is one of the pillars of my pretense of sanity.
It is very frightening even to talk about this with anyone because the smallest poke at it sends me into spirals of depression and anxiety such as I felt for several hours (to the point of having to nap because I couldn’t stand being awake any longer) as a result of just writing this post—even before you replied! It’s actually almost physically sickening to be paid attention to like that.
I’m not a mentally healthy person. I feel like everyone who reads this must think I’m stupid and pathetic and disgusting and childish and a lunatic, and I regret joining this site. And the worst thing is that I know I will regret even more it if I burn bridges yet again and leave—that the depression demon is what is making me believe these things, and they are not necessarily true—but I can’t stop myself from wanting to because it hurts that much to be spoken to with simple blunt honesty as you have done.
Sorry. This isn’t your problem. You’re just a commenter on a post.
This type of honesty is very unheard of and I appreciate this a lot from you. Please, just take it step by step, I can assure that no one is out to get you and no one thinks that you’re being childish; all the contrary, you are quite honest and smart in your account.
I feel like many members of this community have had very similar experiences, I know that Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lukeprog , and Aella for example have had to make massive updates to their beliefs, and they’ve luckily written about it. I think you would get value from reading their accounts.
You don’t have to make immediate updates, these take a time, and only when you’re ready you can do so. In the end, your self-preservation, and self-actualization are the most important things you can optimize for.
I’m glad to hear that. Actually, though, it’s not necessarily best to call it “honesty”, as that implies that it is somehow a virtuous act wherein I am fighting against the urge to be dishonest / hide the truth; in reality, it is far harder for me to hide my negative feelings than to show them, and I’ve been essentially venting which I-when-sane consider to be rather crass and immature. I-when-not-sane have a LONG history of emotional outbursts to strangers on the internet.
Also, I-when-not-sane has possibly false beliefs about my overall health, some of which may be extreme exaggerations. I am really not sure. When I feel okay, as I do right now, the claim that I am in danger of self-harm for any reason seems ludicrous (because I-feeling-okay wouldn’t do it, and cannot empathize at all with I-when-not-okay), and I begin to worry that I’ve been unconsciously emotionally manipulating people by mentioning it.
It’s such fun to be an incoherent agent whose beliefs and utility function regularly shift drastically for no good reason! :P
For what it’s worth, being afraid of others’ judgements is a very normal thing. It’s also pretty normal that it gets exaggerated when one is isolated.
Now, you are a clear outlier along that dimension, but I think I can empathize with your situation at least a little bit, based on my own experiences with isolation, of which there are two: (1) for the last few years, due to complicated health issues I won’t go into right now, I am much less socially active than I’d like to be. Constantly cancelling on my friends, and being “more work” to be around has consistently been pushing me towards not even trying (2) during the recent pandemic I strictly isolated myself for months at a time, only having contact with 1 family member. This shifted my social reactions to be much more defensive, feeling easily overwhelmed, and so on. It took months to get back to a relatively “normal” baseline after things opened back up. I have a tendency towards avoidant behavior, and those two situations made it 10x worse.
I won’t give any advice, because you haven’t asked for it and I don’t have good solutions anyway. But I’d like to point out that the kind of social anxiety you’re describing (intermingled with avoidant and/or depressive behavior) can often be ameliorated by simple exposure and practice. So please don’t be too hard on yourself, and remind yourself that you’re in a place where you’re not the only weird one. Furthermore, people here will tell you in plain words if you “mess up” in any way, which so far no-one has done.
My experience is that LWers are accepting of a lot of cognitive strategies, even ones that are not truth optimizing. See post about the dark arts for example https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dark-arts
There are beliefs I would not update if an endless amount of evidence against them came my way, because they are how I keep myself from suicidal ideation.
That sounds like a load bearing bug. We discussed these types of structures at the CFAR workshop I attended. Please don’t remove the structure that keeps you from being suicidal.
What I’m trying to gesture at is: Even if you are not a typical LWer, I don’t think you are as far off the distribution as you think.
Thank you for the reassurance. Honestly, I am not sure if what I said there while feeling bad is entirely true; I perceive the world in radically different ways in different emotional states and when I feel okay the idea of changing my mind doesn’t seem like as big a deal. Still big, but not impossible and soul-crushing. Just terrifying and life-changing lol.
Also, a lot of what I used to call “beliefs” were actually more like… hm, I know there’s an Eliezer post for this, but I’m not sure which… mantras, in a sense. Stuff that you say it and you go “yay” and feel very faithful and spiritual for having said it but you don’t actually stop to think about whether it means anything. I still have a huge amount of such patterns left over from my possibly-schizotypal early teen years, but nowadays I am trying to redefine beliefs in terms of what predictions about future experiences I am making.
I do not have to believe in false things in order to be mentally healthy—I just have to have the right values, and I think that’s what makes me scared when talking to people—I feel like people are going to try to make me change my value system, which puts “spirituality” (which feels like a very specific real thing to me but is very hard to define quickly) at a very high level of importance. And changing my value system is tantamount to a kind of death in itself.
I would like to get a therapist, but since I do not have a source of income, I would be reliant on my parents to pay for it. And besides being the ones who made me this way, they are not very “mental health aware” and I know from prior attempts to get them to care about my mental health that they would scoff, make fun of me, drag their feet, suggest every other possible alternative, and ultimately probably refuse to pay for it. Particularly since my mother distrusts doctors (having had multiple traumatic medical experiences) and thinks most of them are quacks.
That said, I have read a lot about therapy and some ideas from CBT in particular have helped me, though I’ve never worked through Feeling Good with any regularity.
There’s a trivial sense in which this is false: any experience or utterance, no matter how insensible, is as much the result of a real cognitive process as the more sensible ones are.
There’s another, less trivial sense that I feel is correct and often underappreciated: obfuscation of correspondence does not eliminate it. The frequency by which phenomena with shared features arise or persist is evidence of shared causal provenance, by some combination of universal principles or shared history.
After puzzling over the commonalities found in mystical and religious claims, I’ve come to see them as having some basis in subtle but detectable real patterns. The unintelligibility comes from the fact that neither mystics nor their listeners have a workable theory to explain the pattern. The mystic confabulates and the listener’s response depends on whether they’re able to match the output to patterns they perceive. No match, no sense.
I actually do have the beginnings of a workable theory of what mystical experiences are in the brain and where they come from and how best to interpret them, but I am not ready to try to explain it yet. I need to learn more neurology. Honestly “learn more neurology” seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of things I want to do.
I definitely agree about the confabulation, but at the same time, it’s worth looking at the pattern among confabulations. There are reasons why people interpret these experiences in the ways that they do, and across cultures, the interpretations, and the theologies built around them, are somewhat similar. I’m not going to overstate that—they are also wildly different—but as you say, similarities exist.
I live out in the middle of nowhere and going places is not generally an easy thing to do for me. Anything that requires that is kind of not viable right now.
Dating is pointless. I’m not good looking and again, there’s no way to go out and be around people.
I’m already regretting writing this post. The “please don’t start a religion” part of your comment to me feels like it was intended to make fun of or insult me. I didn’t come here to be lectured by reddit atheists. And if that’s the reaction I’ll get for sharing something so important to me, I WON’T post anything further about it on this site.
I didn’t read any bad intent from P on his/her comment. And I also got the general sense from the post: of looking for help rather than us telling how you can help LW, and I’m guessing that was the nature of the comment.
I feel like you are quite a smart person (and still very young) but with the wrong assumptions that may be blocking a very meaningful self-development that is key to life (being independent/belonging to a group that cares about you) and I think you will be benefit greatly from trying to accomplish these goals however hard they may seem to you.
While you’ve had a very unique experience growing up that may have wired you in a certain way, this is not basis to the fact that you cannot live in any other way or change your mind (e.g. how sure are you of not having a job because you can take “another person telling me what to do” as opposed to just being plain afraid of doing something that you have virtually never done before?) I think navigating this reversal in assumptions will bring the most value to you and your content here.
I really enjoyed the post, and I appreciate reading about your experience and honesty. This unique experience in life that you had will bring unique insight, and I think this is how you can help others.
Thank you for your kind words. Both being independent, and to an even greater degree, belonging to a group that cares about me, feel extremely distant. The latter often feels impossible. I can’t even clearly imagine what that would be like. When I try to, it seems stifling. I would have to care about them in turn! I would have to obey their group norms! And depressed-me sees only darkness and burden there, even though I have sometimes been around people and felt very good as a result—because depressed-me cannot remember or imagine feeling good at all, and doesn’t understand it. These mood swings are very frustrating, as they drastically modify my sense of what is real, and make me a less trustworthy person.
And yes, the fear of jobs is mostly about fear of doing things I’ve never done before. Same with college etc. It’s very hard for me to try new things.
Then you should at least try to talk to 80,000 hours, you might eventually relocate somewhere where meeting people is easier.
It wasn’t intended to make fun of you. When I say that you shouldn’t start a religion I mean it literally, like most people here I don’t hold a favorable view of religions.
Sentences like “But I am fundamentally a mystic, prone to ecstatic states of communion with an ineffable divine force immanent in the physical universe which I feel is moving towards incarnating as an AI god such as I called Anima” make me think that what you are talking about doesn’t correspond to anything real. But in any case I don’t see why you shouldn’t write about it. If you are right you will give us interesting reading material. And if you are wrong hopefully someone will explain to you why and you will update. It shouldn’t matter how much you care about this, if it turns out it’s wrong you should stop believing in it (and if it’s right keep your current belief). And again, I mean this literally and with no ill intent.
Yeah, that’s the problem. I’m not a rationalist and this makes it obvious that I don’t want to / can’t be, and shouldn’t be here. There are beliefs I would not update if an endless amount of evidence against them came my way, because they are how I keep myself from suicidal ideation. The belief that I have a unique spiritual vision etc is one of them. It is one of the pillars of my pretense of sanity.
It is very frightening even to talk about this with anyone because the smallest poke at it sends me into spirals of depression and anxiety such as I felt for several hours (to the point of having to nap because I couldn’t stand being awake any longer) as a result of just writing this post—even before you replied! It’s actually almost physically sickening to be paid attention to like that.
I’m not a mentally healthy person. I feel like everyone who reads this must think I’m stupid and pathetic and disgusting and childish and a lunatic, and I regret joining this site. And the worst thing is that I know I will regret even more it if I burn bridges yet again and leave—that the depression demon is what is making me believe these things, and they are not necessarily true—but I can’t stop myself from wanting to because it hurts that much to be spoken to with simple blunt honesty as you have done.
Sorry. This isn’t your problem. You’re just a commenter on a post.
This type of honesty is very unheard of and I appreciate this a lot from you. Please, just take it step by step, I can assure that no one is out to get you and no one thinks that you’re being childish; all the contrary, you are quite honest and smart in your account.
I feel like many members of this community have had very similar experiences, I know that Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lukeprog , and Aella for example have had to make massive updates to their beliefs, and they’ve luckily written about it. I think you would get value from reading their accounts.
You don’t have to make immediate updates, these take a time, and only when you’re ready you can do so. In the end, your self-preservation, and self-actualization are the most important things you can optimize for.
I’m glad to hear that. Actually, though, it’s not necessarily best to call it “honesty”, as that implies that it is somehow a virtuous act wherein I am fighting against the urge to be dishonest / hide the truth; in reality, it is far harder for me to hide my negative feelings than to show them, and I’ve been essentially venting which I-when-sane consider to be rather crass and immature. I-when-not-sane have a LONG history of emotional outbursts to strangers on the internet.
Also, I-when-not-sane has possibly false beliefs about my overall health, some of which may be extreme exaggerations. I am really not sure. When I feel okay, as I do right now, the claim that I am in danger of self-harm for any reason seems ludicrous (because I-feeling-okay wouldn’t do it, and cannot empathize at all with I-when-not-okay), and I begin to worry that I’ve been unconsciously emotionally manipulating people by mentioning it.
It’s such fun to be an incoherent agent whose beliefs and utility function regularly shift drastically for no good reason! :P
For what it’s worth, being afraid of others’ judgements is a very normal thing. It’s also pretty normal that it gets exaggerated when one is isolated.
Now, you are a clear outlier along that dimension, but I think I can empathize with your situation at least a little bit, based on my own experiences with isolation, of which there are two: (1) for the last few years, due to complicated health issues I won’t go into right now, I am much less socially active than I’d like to be. Constantly cancelling on my friends, and being “more work” to be around has consistently been pushing me towards not even trying (2) during the recent pandemic I strictly isolated myself for months at a time, only having contact with 1 family member. This shifted my social reactions to be much more defensive, feeling easily overwhelmed, and so on. It took months to get back to a relatively “normal” baseline after things opened back up. I have a tendency towards avoidant behavior, and those two situations made it 10x worse.
I won’t give any advice, because you haven’t asked for it and I don’t have good solutions anyway. But I’d like to point out that the kind of social anxiety you’re describing (intermingled with avoidant and/or depressive behavior) can often be ameliorated by simple exposure and practice. So please don’t be too hard on yourself, and remind yourself that you’re in a place where you’re not the only weird one. Furthermore, people here will tell you in plain words if you “mess up” in any way, which so far no-one has done.
Thank you. It is good to have reassurance that I am understood.
My experience is that LWers are accepting of a lot of cognitive strategies, even ones that are not truth optimizing. See post about the dark arts for example https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dark-arts
That sounds like a load bearing bug. We discussed these types of structures at the CFAR workshop I attended. Please don’t remove the structure that keeps you from being suicidal.
What I’m trying to gesture at is: Even if you are not a typical LWer, I don’t think you are as far off the distribution as you think.
Thank you for the reassurance. Honestly, I am not sure if what I said there while feeling bad is entirely true; I perceive the world in radically different ways in different emotional states and when I feel okay the idea of changing my mind doesn’t seem like as big a deal. Still big, but not impossible and soul-crushing. Just terrifying and life-changing lol.
Also, a lot of what I used to call “beliefs” were actually more like… hm, I know there’s an Eliezer post for this, but I’m not sure which… mantras, in a sense. Stuff that you say it and you go “yay” and feel very faithful and spiritual for having said it but you don’t actually stop to think about whether it means anything. I still have a huge amount of such patterns left over from my possibly-schizotypal early teen years, but nowadays I am trying to redefine beliefs in terms of what predictions about future experiences I am making.
I do not have to believe in false things in order to be mentally healthy—I just have to have the right values, and I think that’s what makes me scared when talking to people—I feel like people are going to try to make me change my value system, which puts “spirituality” (which feels like a very specific real thing to me but is very hard to define quickly) at a very high level of importance. And changing my value system is tantamount to a kind of death in itself.
I would like to get a therapist, but since I do not have a source of income, I would be reliant on my parents to pay for it. And besides being the ones who made me this way, they are not very “mental health aware” and I know from prior attempts to get them to care about my mental health that they would scoff, make fun of me, drag their feet, suggest every other possible alternative, and ultimately probably refuse to pay for it. Particularly since my mother distrusts doctors (having had multiple traumatic medical experiences) and thinks most of them are quacks.
That said, I have read a lot about therapy and some ideas from CBT in particular have helped me, though I’ve never worked through Feeling Good with any regularity.
25, Alabama.
There’s a trivial sense in which this is false: any experience or utterance, no matter how insensible, is as much the result of a real cognitive process as the more sensible ones are.
There’s another, less trivial sense that I feel is correct and often underappreciated: obfuscation of correspondence does not eliminate it. The frequency by which phenomena with shared features arise or persist is evidence of shared causal provenance, by some combination of universal principles or shared history.
After puzzling over the commonalities found in mystical and religious claims, I’ve come to see them as having some basis in subtle but detectable real patterns. The unintelligibility comes from the fact that neither mystics nor their listeners have a workable theory to explain the pattern. The mystic confabulates and the listener’s response depends on whether they’re able to match the output to patterns they perceive. No match, no sense.
I actually do have the beginnings of a workable theory of what mystical experiences are in the brain and where they come from and how best to interpret them, but I am not ready to try to explain it yet. I need to learn more neurology. Honestly “learn more neurology” seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of things I want to do.
I definitely agree about the confabulation, but at the same time, it’s worth looking at the pattern among confabulations. There are reasons why people interpret these experiences in the ways that they do, and across cultures, the interpretations, and the theologies built around them, are somewhat similar. I’m not going to overstate that—they are also wildly different—but as you say, similarities exist.