I am certainly no expert on this, but isn’t this a central tenet of Buddhism? The idea that life is characterized by what has variously been translated as “suffering” and “unsmoothness”—a vague feeling of dissatisfaction or discomfort?
Tactically, I think your suggestions are useful and have found many of them helpful in my own life.
Not an expert on Buddhism either, but I’m not sure that the feeling characterizes life itself. I feel none of it when baking a cake, solving an interesting math problem, or going down a waterslide :-) It could be that it characterizes a certain state of mind, but wouldn’t that suggest we should spend less time in that state of mind?
I think that this nonspecific discomfort could be fractal: You believe that it’s not always there, but there’s a version of it that’s always in the background, and you have learned to tune it out in everyday life (like e.g. a tinnitus that you tune out 99% of the time, but which you hear when lying in bed at night). Once you start investigating deeper and deeper, it becomes apparent in a wider range of states of mind.
I would also wager that especially strong nonspecific discomforts are the ones first identified once people start a little bit of meditation (those then are often resolved or at least made specific/their cause is identified) and the whole process is started on a more subtle & refined level.
I’m probably biased towards seeing meditation as a panacea, but if I was restricted to naming the three largest advantages of moderate practice, it would probably be “identifying nonspecific discomforts and showing their causal structure/source”.
I don’t know, meditation is very inward and mental, the opposite of the stuff I’d recommend. And people who meditate a lot tend to change their affect in a way that’s kinda off-putting to me; while people who live “outward” in the way I describe tend to have pretty attractive (to me) manner.
I am certainly no expert on this, but isn’t this a central tenet of Buddhism? The idea that life is characterized by what has variously been translated as “suffering” and “unsmoothness”—a vague feeling of dissatisfaction or discomfort?
Tactically, I think your suggestions are useful and have found many of them helpful in my own life.
Not an expert on Buddhism either, but I’m not sure that the feeling characterizes life itself. I feel none of it when baking a cake, solving an interesting math problem, or going down a waterslide :-) It could be that it characterizes a certain state of mind, but wouldn’t that suggest we should spend less time in that state of mind?
I think that this nonspecific discomfort could be fractal: You believe that it’s not always there, but there’s a version of it that’s always in the background, and you have learned to tune it out in everyday life (like e.g. a tinnitus that you tune out 99% of the time, but which you hear when lying in bed at night). Once you start investigating deeper and deeper, it becomes apparent in a wider range of states of mind.
I would also wager that especially strong nonspecific discomforts are the ones first identified once people start a little bit of meditation (those then are often resolved or at least made specific/their cause is identified) and the whole process is started on a more subtle & refined level.
I’m probably biased towards seeing meditation as a panacea, but if I was restricted to naming the three largest advantages of moderate practice, it would probably be “identifying nonspecific discomforts and showing their causal structure/source”.
I don’t know, meditation is very inward and mental, the opposite of the stuff I’d recommend. And people who meditate a lot tend to change their affect in a way that’s kinda off-putting to me; while people who live “outward” in the way I describe tend to have pretty attractive (to me) manner.