I could easily spin either a narrative where I’m totally missing this or totally good at it. I’m a bit confused at that.
I have a very strong identity and continuity over time. I recently re-read the SSC review of House of God—that’s the post where Scott talks about how he recalls high school fondly despite knowing he felt differently about it at the time (and mentions that as a teen he was surrounded by adults who recalled their own high school experiences fondly). I don’t seem to have any delusions about high school: I remember that at the time, I wanted to write a manifesto about why it sucks so much (modeled after the communist manifesto). My recollection remains consistent with that.
My opinion about living in cities remains the same over time; no difference of opinion upon leaving.
One possibility is that I never break out of my narrative. This is consistent with how consistent my identity tends to be over time.
The other possibility is that I “pre-break-out” of my narrative. This is consistent with the feeling of unease I have about following some social scripts, especially ones which “balance cons with pros” like you mention. It’s also more consistent with the fact that I occasionally do explicit thought experiments about leaving places.
But I think my thought experiments are “abstract” rather than “concrete” in some sense, like taking the outside view, what a person hearing the story might say. Reading your post made me try the inside view version, which felt much different.
It’s plausible that a lot of my thinking about cities, high school, etc, was and remains “outside-view” in this way, and my resistance to participate in narratives such as high-school-was-great is actually based on outside-view thinking (“that sounds like something someone might say regardless of whether it was true”).
So, yeah, my new narrative is that I have a really hardcore outside-view version of this thing, which I execute kind of constantly, but was lacking the inside-view version of the thing, which your post somehow prompted me to try.
Excellent post.
I could easily spin either a narrative where I’m totally missing this or totally good at it. I’m a bit confused at that.
I have a very strong identity and continuity over time. I recently re-read the SSC review of House of God—that’s the post where Scott talks about how he recalls high school fondly despite knowing he felt differently about it at the time (and mentions that as a teen he was surrounded by adults who recalled their own high school experiences fondly). I don’t seem to have any delusions about high school: I remember that at the time, I wanted to write a manifesto about why it sucks so much (modeled after the communist manifesto). My recollection remains consistent with that.
My opinion about living in cities remains the same over time; no difference of opinion upon leaving.
One possibility is that I never break out of my narrative. This is consistent with how consistent my identity tends to be over time.
The other possibility is that I “pre-break-out” of my narrative. This is consistent with the feeling of unease I have about following some social scripts, especially ones which “balance cons with pros” like you mention. It’s also more consistent with the fact that I occasionally do explicit thought experiments about leaving places.
But I think my thought experiments are “abstract” rather than “concrete” in some sense, like taking the outside view, what a person hearing the story might say. Reading your post made me try the inside view version, which felt much different.
It’s plausible that a lot of my thinking about cities, high school, etc, was and remains “outside-view” in this way, and my resistance to participate in narratives such as high-school-was-great is actually based on outside-view thinking (“that sounds like something someone might say regardless of whether it was true”).
So, yeah, my new narrative is that I have a really hardcore outside-view version of this thing, which I execute kind of constantly, but was lacking the inside-view version of the thing, which your post somehow prompted me to try.