The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode.
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”
The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
Yes, thanks for adding precision to that statement :) I only have a small familiarity with Buddhism.
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”