What are the actual goals which are important to me, that being super-effective could help me with? What do I actually want my life to be like? What dangers do I expect to encounter and would like to avert, and which awesome opportunities would I like to realize? What kind of social interactions and benefits do I want to achieve, that being impressive would be useful for?
I’ve tried to answer these questions and I always tend to come up with either no answer at all or with goals that I think are unachievable in practice. Advice?
If your goals are unachievable in practice, maybe it’s because they are defined as “yes | no”, as opposed to “more | less”. The goals defined as “more | less” are usually achievable; there is usually something you can do to get “more” of something.
Is there perhaps some goal or a part of a goal than could be converted to the “more | less” type? Or “better | worse” or any other continuous scale. (Make more money than now. Donate to charity more than now. Have better social relationships than now. Have more and better sex than now. Learn Chinese more fluently. …)
Unfortunately I’m guessing that you already put in some really solid thinking on this, and that there’s not anything easy I can offer to either suggest a desirable thing you’ve overlooked or to provide more evidence for achievability. I put together the supplementary post but I’m guessing (if you’re asking this question) that you read it and it didn’t help much, and that you have good reason to expect that LOTR won’t help (and that for a variety of reasons it might well not).
But a few ideas that seem fairly easy for us to see the appeal in, and that we can generally do something to increase. Maybe you’ll find something here that strikes you.
Human beauty and sex. (To anyone reading this, I don’t go in for manipulative PUA, but do endorse mutually positive, happy interactions.)
Children. This one is kind of a stretch if you don’t see the appeal already, but you might try exploring it. I didn’t get this appeal for a long time, and then I imagined in concrete detail raising a son or daughter in a happier world, where I could devote my time to them (if it’s appealing in this world too, then by all means). Showing them the world, teaching them things, seeing them grow, them running to me and showing me things, I thought to myself “holy shit, that sounds awesome”. People sometimes mention incredible joy in the birth and existence of a child, and that they would give their lives for their kids, and these things don’t seem to be bugs. (Not to say other feelings are wrong—there are different unconscious strategies for different assessments about our situation—but that this answer isn’t flawed.)
Survival, being alive. Life being way better than not-living, even if we don’t see anything spectacular about it at the moment.
I’ve tried to answer these questions and I always tend to come up with either no answer at all or with goals that I think are unachievable in practice. Advice?
If your goals are unachievable in practice, maybe it’s because they are defined as “yes | no”, as opposed to “more | less”. The goals defined as “more | less” are usually achievable; there is usually something you can do to get “more” of something.
Is there perhaps some goal or a part of a goal than could be converted to the “more | less” type? Or “better | worse” or any other continuous scale. (Make more money than now. Donate to charity more than now. Have better social relationships than now. Have more and better sex than now. Learn Chinese more fluently. …)
Unfortunately I’m guessing that you already put in some really solid thinking on this, and that there’s not anything easy I can offer to either suggest a desirable thing you’ve overlooked or to provide more evidence for achievability. I put together the supplementary post but I’m guessing (if you’re asking this question) that you read it and it didn’t help much, and that you have good reason to expect that LOTR won’t help (and that for a variety of reasons it might well not).
But a few ideas that seem fairly easy for us to see the appeal in, and that we can generally do something to increase. Maybe you’ll find something here that strikes you.
Human beauty and sex. (To anyone reading this, I don’t go in for manipulative PUA, but do endorse mutually positive, happy interactions.)
Children. This one is kind of a stretch if you don’t see the appeal already, but you might try exploring it. I didn’t get this appeal for a long time, and then I imagined in concrete detail raising a son or daughter in a happier world, where I could devote my time to them (if it’s appealing in this world too, then by all means). Showing them the world, teaching them things, seeing them grow, them running to me and showing me things, I thought to myself “holy shit, that sounds awesome”. People sometimes mention incredible joy in the birth and existence of a child, and that they would give their lives for their kids, and these things don’t seem to be bugs. (Not to say other feelings are wrong—there are different unconscious strategies for different assessments about our situation—but that this answer isn’t flawed.)
Survival, being alive. Life being way better than not-living, even if we don’t see anything spectacular about it at the moment.