I didn’t really need any program or epiphany to change. The change came gradually as my general sense of self-acceptance grew from the knowledge that there is no free will and that I am who I am—a product of my genes and my surroundings and nothing more nor less.
There’s nothing worth feeling guilty about. If I think about myself and try to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, I simply try to identify the causes of my behavior, instead of finding ways to guilt myself into my desired behaviors (which works hardly at all). I think the key to changing oneself is to non-judgementally observe yourself and to try to understand the reasons for your behavior and your thoughts—but it takes a lot of knowledge about psychology and evolutionary psychology to make introspection a worthwhile endeavor. The second step would then be to find working remedies for your identified problems, which is a problem all on its own, as one must locate non-BS instructions which can sometimes be hard to come by.
From what I’ve read from lukeprog so far, he’s quite into “self-help” (the non-BS type), so it may be worth looking into what he has written on certain subjects. He usually adds a ton of references that can be a goldmine.
I simply try to identify the causes of my behavior, instead of finding ways to guilt myself into my desired behaviors (which works hardly at all).
This strikes me as excellent.
but it takes a lot of knowledge about psychology and evolutionary psychology to make introspection a worthwhile endeavor
This strikes me as dubious, but I’m curious about how it’s worked out for you.
In my case, I find it’s more useful to work on accurate observation of what I’m feeling and thinking, and thinking about whether the methods I’m using are getting me what I want.
For example, I used to try to stabilize negative emotions so that I could work on them. This was a bad strategy—I was spending more time in negative emotions than I needed to, and a stabilized-from-memory emotion probably isn’t the same thing as a spontaneous emotion.
but it takes a lot of knowledge about psychology and evolutionary psychology to make introspection a worthwhile endeavor
This strikes me as dubious, but I’m curious about how it’s worked out for you.
I’m not sure which part is the dubious one in your eyes—that evolutionary psychology is needed to understand one’s own behavior, or is it my opinion that for the vast majority of people introspection is at best a waste of time and at worst can be a real drawback for their mental health?
It’s pretty clear from what is known about psychology, that people who think a lot about themselves aren’t very happy in general. That’s because they don’t actually think in a rational manner and thus won’t succeed in identifying and addressing their problems. Instead, they actually do what is known as ruminating—which is more akin to an endlessly looping pattern of thought, that rarely yields any real insights, let alone tangible changes for the better. For a ruminating person it usually feels like they are thinking, but they are really not… it’s just one messy out-of-control thought-stream that is endlessly looping. But even without rumination-loops… if you took a hundred people and looked at what they come up with, when they are tasked with some kind of introspection you’d probably get mostly deluded nonsense out of them.
As far as evolutionary psychology goes… well let me give you an example how that can be useful. I’m a young male who’s understandably very status-driven in this stage of life, but unlike many people I’ve been quite aware of this for a long time and way back I’ve framed it to myself as having a character trait of “a huge ego”. I was very aware of how practically everything that I (and others) said carried an undercurrent that was really all about social status. So I had the futile idea that I should somehow extinguish this character trait… which is of course nonsense, because it simply cannot be done. People don’t have that kind of malleable access to “character traits”, that were deeply ingrained and hardwired by evolution. I felt bad about being status-driven, because it seemed to be such a silly and unworthy thing… and so I was completely wasting my time with the idea that it could somehow be outgrown. And there is a whole array of other evolutionary hardwired things, that people regularly misidentify as something undesirable that they should try to outgrow—when in reality they most certainly can’t. Someone wants to stop worrying about social status...? he or she might as well try to disable their breathing reflex.
I think evolutionary psychology includes a lot of guesswork.
Your distinction between rumination and thinking is excellent.
As for your specific example, I don’t think evolutionary psychology is needed to realize that concern about status is a common preoccupation, and that there aren’t many people (if any) who don’t care about it at all, and that therefore, it doesn’t make sense to expect oneself to be free of it.
I’m interested in why such an inhuman standard is so popular. I’ve got two possible angles. I’ve heard that Wilhelm Reich thought having rules about sex that people can’t follow is a very convenient tool for controlling them. I’ve extended the theory to include the more modern issue of having morality and status very entangled with what people eat.
Karen Horney (an early psychoanalyst) thought that if a child is abused, neglected, or had early development much interfered with (I think being pushed to walk early would be an example), they conclude that being a human being isn’t good enough, and invent inhuman standards (always right, always virtuous, always victorious, etc.) and attempt to live by them. I don’t know whether she looked at the implications of cultures where such standards become dominant.
I don’t really believe that superhuman standards have anything to do with a faulty upbringing. Let’s get back to the social status thing… there are people in this world who are perceived by many (if not most) as humans who do not worry or tend to their own status at all, which is but one component that makes up their irresistibly charismatic pull.
Think Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, even Einstein- these people are generally not perceived as being concerned about lowly things like social status, but as hardliners for their high causes. Or just look at some gurus who are still alive and revered. Even self-help guys like Tony Robbins are widely perceived that way. For anyone with a streak of perfectionism or simply high standards it would only be natural to try to emulate the “best”. But of course such people do not actually exist and evolutionary psychology tells you exactly why they can’t. (Sure you don’t need Ev.Psy. to tell you that, but it’s one way of becoming aware of the kinds of tricks your mind and perception can play on you.)
There are still a lot of people out there who hold onto the ludicrous “blank slate” model of malleable personality, because they simply can’t bear the thought that life is severely impacted by our genetic make-up. They are stuck in what is called the “fair world fallacy”—the delusion that somehow we all have equal chances from birth and that life is somehow a fair race, and that you can become anything. It’s basically a complimentary model of psychology that plays into the fantasy of “The American Dream”. Some people invent karma or the afterlife to satisfy their deep need for a sense of fairness, and others simply deny that there is a problem to begin with and start believing in a highly delusional version of the American Dream. They think they can shape themselves into whatever person they desire.
In retrospect, my example was poorly chosen, because you are perfectly right when you say that being aware of our neediness for social status doesn’t require an understanding of EvPsy at all. A perhaps better example where an understanding of EvPsy is much more useful to make sense of our own thoughts may be the problem of rationality and being aware of our numerous psychological biases.
I didn’t really need any program or epiphany to change. The change came gradually as my general sense of self-acceptance grew from the knowledge that there is no free will and that I am who I am—a product of my genes and my surroundings and nothing more nor less.
There’s nothing worth feeling guilty about. If I think about myself and try to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, I simply try to identify the causes of my behavior, instead of finding ways to guilt myself into my desired behaviors (which works hardly at all). I think the key to changing oneself is to non-judgementally observe yourself and to try to understand the reasons for your behavior and your thoughts—but it takes a lot of knowledge about psychology and evolutionary psychology to make introspection a worthwhile endeavor. The second step would then be to find working remedies for your identified problems, which is a problem all on its own, as one must locate non-BS instructions which can sometimes be hard to come by.
From what I’ve read from lukeprog so far, he’s quite into “self-help” (the non-BS type), so it may be worth looking into what he has written on certain subjects. He usually adds a ton of references that can be a goldmine.
This strikes me as excellent.
This strikes me as dubious, but I’m curious about how it’s worked out for you.
In my case, I find it’s more useful to work on accurate observation of what I’m feeling and thinking, and thinking about whether the methods I’m using are getting me what I want.
For example, I used to try to stabilize negative emotions so that I could work on them. This was a bad strategy—I was spending more time in negative emotions than I needed to, and a stabilized-from-memory emotion probably isn’t the same thing as a spontaneous emotion.
I’m not sure which part is the dubious one in your eyes—that evolutionary psychology is needed to understand one’s own behavior, or is it my opinion that for the vast majority of people introspection is at best a waste of time and at worst can be a real drawback for their mental health?
It’s pretty clear from what is known about psychology, that people who think a lot about themselves aren’t very happy in general. That’s because they don’t actually think in a rational manner and thus won’t succeed in identifying and addressing their problems. Instead, they actually do what is known as ruminating—which is more akin to an endlessly looping pattern of thought, that rarely yields any real insights, let alone tangible changes for the better. For a ruminating person it usually feels like they are thinking, but they are really not… it’s just one messy out-of-control thought-stream that is endlessly looping. But even without rumination-loops… if you took a hundred people and looked at what they come up with, when they are tasked with some kind of introspection you’d probably get mostly deluded nonsense out of them.
As far as evolutionary psychology goes… well let me give you an example how that can be useful. I’m a young male who’s understandably very status-driven in this stage of life, but unlike many people I’ve been quite aware of this for a long time and way back I’ve framed it to myself as having a character trait of “a huge ego”. I was very aware of how practically everything that I (and others) said carried an undercurrent that was really all about social status. So I had the futile idea that I should somehow extinguish this character trait… which is of course nonsense, because it simply cannot be done. People don’t have that kind of malleable access to “character traits”, that were deeply ingrained and hardwired by evolution. I felt bad about being status-driven, because it seemed to be such a silly and unworthy thing… and so I was completely wasting my time with the idea that it could somehow be outgrown. And there is a whole array of other evolutionary hardwired things, that people regularly misidentify as something undesirable that they should try to outgrow—when in reality they most certainly can’t. Someone wants to stop worrying about social status...? he or she might as well try to disable their breathing reflex.
I think evolutionary psychology includes a lot of guesswork.
Your distinction between rumination and thinking is excellent.
As for your specific example, I don’t think evolutionary psychology is needed to realize that concern about status is a common preoccupation, and that there aren’t many people (if any) who don’t care about it at all, and that therefore, it doesn’t make sense to expect oneself to be free of it.
I’m interested in why such an inhuman standard is so popular. I’ve got two possible angles. I’ve heard that Wilhelm Reich thought having rules about sex that people can’t follow is a very convenient tool for controlling them. I’ve extended the theory to include the more modern issue of having morality and status very entangled with what people eat.
Karen Horney (an early psychoanalyst) thought that if a child is abused, neglected, or had early development much interfered with (I think being pushed to walk early would be an example), they conclude that being a human being isn’t good enough, and invent inhuman standards (always right, always virtuous, always victorious, etc.) and attempt to live by them. I don’t know whether she looked at the implications of cultures where such standards become dominant.
I don’t really believe that superhuman standards have anything to do with a faulty upbringing. Let’s get back to the social status thing… there are people in this world who are perceived by many (if not most) as humans who do not worry or tend to their own status at all, which is but one component that makes up their irresistibly charismatic pull.
Think Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, even Einstein- these people are generally not perceived as being concerned about lowly things like social status, but as hardliners for their high causes. Or just look at some gurus who are still alive and revered. Even self-help guys like Tony Robbins are widely perceived that way. For anyone with a streak of perfectionism or simply high standards it would only be natural to try to emulate the “best”. But of course such people do not actually exist and evolutionary psychology tells you exactly why they can’t. (Sure you don’t need Ev.Psy. to tell you that, but it’s one way of becoming aware of the kinds of tricks your mind and perception can play on you.)
There are still a lot of people out there who hold onto the ludicrous “blank slate” model of malleable personality, because they simply can’t bear the thought that life is severely impacted by our genetic make-up. They are stuck in what is called the “fair world fallacy”—the delusion that somehow we all have equal chances from birth and that life is somehow a fair race, and that you can become anything. It’s basically a complimentary model of psychology that plays into the fantasy of “The American Dream”. Some people invent karma or the afterlife to satisfy their deep need for a sense of fairness, and others simply deny that there is a problem to begin with and start believing in a highly delusional version of the American Dream. They think they can shape themselves into whatever person they desire.
In retrospect, my example was poorly chosen, because you are perfectly right when you say that being aware of our neediness for social status doesn’t require an understanding of EvPsy at all. A perhaps better example where an understanding of EvPsy is much more useful to make sense of our own thoughts may be the problem of rationality and being aware of our numerous psychological biases.