i have often considered making a post like this, but with examples. The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn’t of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
Some examples just as I think of them:
Pascal freaked out about the emptiness of infinite space.
Everett’s daughter felt free to kill herself because she was happy in a parallel universe.
Legions of young materialist nihilists in recent centuries have felt like they are dead inside or otherwise detached from life or “unable to live” (etc., with many variations), and attribute this to epiphenomenalism, determinism, or some other belief about the nature of mind, matter, and cause-and-effect.
There are numerous extreme responsibilities that a person may take on in life—ending death for all humanity, really ending starvation/poverty/war in the world, doing the best possible thing at all times, countering “existential risk”—which may lead to a harrowing existence because society and culture do not support this effort or understand it.
Even just possessing a simple insight, or apparent insight, into the nature of reality, regarding which everyone around you is oblivious, can lead to the sort of isolating obsessive internal monologue that your post seems to hint at. And this could really be anything—atheism in a religious society, a paranoid supposition about some routine aspect of human experience that you have not yet personally experienced (thus that one is more frequent in the young), some mindbreaking philosophical concept like solipsism.
The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn’t of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
I would draw the line at regular obsessions, mostly because cognitive behavioural therapy at least offer some options. I have some experience with obsessions, and those were self contained, situationally. Not a personal example, but a pre-occupation with staying away from sharp objects for fear of committing suicide, despite not having depression or violent impulses, is local to that situation of being around sharp objects, not triggered by simply thinking about sharp objects in a room completely devoid of sharp objects.
Anything within the line would be subjects whose trigger is their being facts, whose consequences are reacted to quite quickly, and are not specific to any physical situation a person may be in at the time. I’m not so sure about Pascal (based on that sentence alone I mean), but Everett’s daughter would fit the bill, assuming her belief compelled her to commit suicide, rather than gave her freedom to do it. I recall one person who actually had a similar problem here at Lesswrong, not two months ago actually. I’m surprised that I forgot about it. I guess I would call these “abstract obsessions” as opposed to “personal obsessions”.
I apologize for not fleshing this out in better detail in the original post; I wasn’t expecting this to generate interest from anywhere outside the hypothetical target audience, though in retrospect, I would probably have dug into it too.
EDIT: I’m reading the transcription of XiXiDu’s psychology session, and this looks exactly like the class of problem I’m talking about.
i have often considered making a post like this, but with examples. The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn’t of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
Some examples just as I think of them:
Pascal freaked out about the emptiness of infinite space.
Everett’s daughter felt free to kill herself because she was happy in a parallel universe.
Legions of young materialist nihilists in recent centuries have felt like they are dead inside or otherwise detached from life or “unable to live” (etc., with many variations), and attribute this to epiphenomenalism, determinism, or some other belief about the nature of mind, matter, and cause-and-effect.
There are numerous extreme responsibilities that a person may take on in life—ending death for all humanity, really ending starvation/poverty/war in the world, doing the best possible thing at all times, countering “existential risk”—which may lead to a harrowing existence because society and culture do not support this effort or understand it.
Even just possessing a simple insight, or apparent insight, into the nature of reality, regarding which everyone around you is oblivious, can lead to the sort of isolating obsessive internal monologue that your post seems to hint at. And this could really be anything—atheism in a religious society, a paranoid supposition about some routine aspect of human experience that you have not yet personally experienced (thus that one is more frequent in the young), some mindbreaking philosophical concept like solipsism.
Here is a relevant earlier discussion.
I would draw the line at regular obsessions, mostly because cognitive behavioural therapy at least offer some options. I have some experience with obsessions, and those were self contained, situationally. Not a personal example, but a pre-occupation with staying away from sharp objects for fear of committing suicide, despite not having depression or violent impulses, is local to that situation of being around sharp objects, not triggered by simply thinking about sharp objects in a room completely devoid of sharp objects.
Anything within the line would be subjects whose trigger is their being facts, whose consequences are reacted to quite quickly, and are not specific to any physical situation a person may be in at the time. I’m not so sure about Pascal (based on that sentence alone I mean), but Everett’s daughter would fit the bill, assuming her belief compelled her to commit suicide, rather than gave her freedom to do it. I recall one person who actually had a similar problem here at Lesswrong, not two months ago actually. I’m surprised that I forgot about it. I guess I would call these “abstract obsessions” as opposed to “personal obsessions”.
I apologize for not fleshing this out in better detail in the original post; I wasn’t expecting this to generate interest from anywhere outside the hypothetical target audience, though in retrospect, I would probably have dug into it too.
EDIT: I’m reading the transcription of XiXiDu’s psychology session, and this looks exactly like the class of problem I’m talking about.