Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into practice.
I know how much energy and time I have to spend in order to reach the goals I set for myself.
I know how to place sufficient boundaries on myself to make use of my freedom (/power).
I know how to blend into my social surroundings while staying just authentic enough to be respected and trusted.
I know how to let go of intellectual OCD and have fun with the cards I am dealt in playful interaction.
And yet, my implementation of this knowledge in daily life feels poor. Maybe it is a luxury problem—objectively I am doing fairly well, I guess. But my success stems from a local optimum of adaptation that I semmingly cannot leave without developing serious mental health problems. Paradoxically, I feel stuck while reaching one important life goal after the other.
Maybe I should go see a therapist and work on my equanimity.
Do you know Nietzsche’s concepts of the apollonian and dionysian, or Jordan Peterson’s order/chaos duality? I think that rationalism often tends too much towards the former rather than a healthy combination of the two. Traditional wisdom is about warning and advice, which is about slowing down. This is healthier and safer for sure, but as your experiences with mania have shown, a little bit of chaos can be good. I say this because Klugheit seems to be regarded as a virtue, and all virtues tend to have these soft, calm qualities.
Could it be that you’re too theoretical and not practical enough? Knowing the answer is not the final step of the process, it’s around the middle. Knowing how to be social, and being social, are completely different. Your knowledge only helps you when you go from memorizing it to internalizing it, making it an automatic part of yourself that you’re no longer aware of. If you thought about every step you took, walking would be difficult.
The knowledge has to be digested and integrated properly. If you’re just learning more and more things without this process, it will appear like you know more and more, but you’d not see much benefits, which I’m sure would be discouraging. Indeed, this lack of observable benefits might make you lose faith in the knowledge that you have, so that you go searching for other knowledge, until you know the subject from so many angles and perspectives that you won’t even know where to start implimenting it, a sort of having too much knowledge. No blame if that’s the case, I learned all these things the hard way myself.
Can you expand on what you mean about local optimum of adaptation? And have you thought about what your feeling represent? Moving away from your goal, parallel to your goal, like you’re ignoring the main quest and clearing all the subquests instead, like you’re doing well but seeing your personal projects stagnate due to regular life taking up too much of your time and energy? Perhaps a branch between what’s valuable to yourself and what’s valuable to society?
I think that mental health problems stem from stress, frustration, and unmet needs. For example, we’re social creatures, so social isolation tends to be unhealthy for us, even if having time for ourselves is also a need. I have a feeling of stuckness stemming from a similar situation, my indecisiveness makes it so that I’m stuck between fulfilling need one and two, ultimately fulfilling neither. It’s similar to the problem that multi-tasking effectively is more or less impossible. A clear example of this type of problem is somebody who isn’t alert because they don’t sleep enough, and who don’t sleep enough because they they refuse to go to bed before they’ve done something productive.
I’m glad that you seem to have an affinity for my brand of craziness. I’m mostly just listing problems and solutions that I’ve personally gone through, so it’s quite the pleasant coincidence when I’m making sense to you.
I hope this helped! And perhaps therapy is good? I’m self-taught in all areas of life, so I haven’t tried it before myself. Equanimity seems to be a sort of peace of mind? It’s achievable and it feels good. But the gap that makes us frustrated and unhappy also helps motivate us towards our goals. I’m trying to recreate the overexcitability that I accidentally cured in myself when I got over my social trauma. Perhaps I had a negative experience here because I was used to so high levels of adrenaline that fixing myself made my experiences duller. If my brain was used to chronic strong stimulantion, then it’s possible that it will take years before my receptors return to normal, sort of like recovery stimulant abuse, you know?
Anyway, the correct amount of hardship with an contrasting amount of meaning seems to result in the perfect balance, like how the flow state is also a perfect balance. Have you ever found yourself thinking “bring it on” or “I wish this would suck even more”? I wish to recreate this state but it requires being more bounded in myself, being more subjective and immature. A sort of being “edgy” or “chuunibyou” if you know these terms.
Rational thought and sensibility easily destroy these mindsets, but I’m willing to bet that your willpower and mental sharpness was much better in your younger years. What I don’t know is if this goes away by itself, or if it’s a direct result of learning more and viewing the world in an outside-in sort of way, rather than the more egoistic inside-out thinking. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy jokingly uses the “Total Perspective Vortex” as a torture device. This idea allows us to play around with the idea of perspective, and how things like meaning and value seem to be divided over the area of our scope. Dumb people have smaller perspectives/scopes, which helps protects their ego and sense of importance.
So I went on various tangents here—but it has helped me to consider them as parameters that I can manipulate so that I can keep my mental health intact, or have it break in the right manner at least, while my knowledge and awareness keeps growing in ways which would normally exclude a whole lot of different personalities, mentalities and viewpoints.
To conclude, I won’t exclude that therapy could be a good idea, even if they only remind you of things you already know. The conversations might even fulfill your social and cognitive needs? Do my comments feel good to read? With the exception of that short-term high we get when we learn new things or listen to motivational quotes. I recommend not getting addicted to that feeling, or at least making use of it before it wears off. This is because the disappearance of excitement might cause you to believe that the advice wasn’t any good, before you get to try out the advice. I hope this makes sense? It’s in line with what I said earlier about learning without proper digestion/integration
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting.
Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though—I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at work, working on self-actualization, keeping a good standing with friends and acquaintances and pushing forward some projects of my own. When I am at normal energy levels, which are considerably higher than the ones I have right now, I seem to perform on my personal pareto frontier. Whenever I try to expand activity on one or two of said aspects, I fall short on the others, pushing even harder then leads to stress and regrets that in turn slow me down further on the totality of my efforts, until the point where it becomes problematic for my health. Whenever this happens, I also start to spend too much time dealing with and worrying about stuff that is beyond my control, such as politics and so on, which leads to a vicious cycle that often triggers depression. Once I have found my way out of it, the cycle repeats. For a couple of months, I hold my balance, than I try to push my limits and things start to fall apart again.
It could easily be the case that I am expecting too much from myself and maybe there is no way to become better at achieving my goals than completing my side projects and not replacing them with new ones after that.
Thinking about all you have said and trying to make sense of why it resonates so strongly, I have come to an intermediate conclusion that I will have to think about for some time: Perhaps it is a good idea for me to refrain from learning about the topics that I am most drawn to now, and rather go back to both theoretical and applied psychology. There is not that much to take away from quantum computing when it comes to dealing with other people. Or oneself.
Re-reading my comments, the ideas which appeal to me are directly related to my level of arousal (dopamine level compared to baseline). It maps pretty well to the hierarchy of needs. Everything below is “boring” or “mundane” and everything above is “irresponsible” or “wasteful”.
You can re-read them in the future if they ever become relevant, until then you don’t have to worry about them.
It can help to view energy as a limited resource, but there’s many kinds of energy, and fulfilling needs and building ‘momentum’ can give energy rather than using it. Maybe a good abstraction is the set “Physical/mental/spiritual”. Your mild depression and my 10mg of ritalin don’t change our actual levels of energy, but rather just our subjective feelings of energy. Worrying and stress does use energy though—thinking about work seems to use almost as much energy as actual doing the work.
But stress and too much effort create waste products in the brain, which is probably why our brains make us feel tired. It’s a defense against damage, like physical exhaustion. When we bypass this, with drugs or by a manic mood, we probably cause damage because we keep going without rest.
It’s easier said than done, but periodic effort and rest is more efficient than just the effort. The worst combination of these is pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
It’s possible that you’re pushing further and draining your limited resources (blood sugar and other cognitive resources), but there’s also the possibility that you’re draining other resources (neglecting seemingly less important things which help your mental health), that you’re tired because of what you don’t do rather than because of what you do.
While the engagement in politics could stem from needless worry, it could also be an outlet for your unmet need to communicate, and the reward of correcting other people about something that you’re knowledgeable about. In my own case, something drives me to websites like this one, and while I can’t feel it consciously, it’s just me chasing dopamine or fulfilling some less obvious need. If I don’t go here, I’ll catch myself going to similar places.
If I understand correctly, you believe that you should be able to do all these things at once, that you have less energy than you should have. I think that confidence and energy levels are extremely related, and that mania and depression are just changes in confidence, stemming from feedback loops (failure → failure or victory → victory). And if you’ve been able to do these things in the past, then it should theoretically be possible to do them still, and the transition between these states could be your beliefs and values changing.
But if you’ve experienced mania multiple times before, then it’s likely that you have bipolar, and that we should consider the neuroscience side of things (rather than focus on the psychological like I have until now). Diet, exercise, sunlight exposure, etc. could be factors too.
Perhaps you are taking on too much at once, but I personally don’t believe in these limitations. If I can play video games with friends for 15 hours straight, then I don’t believe that 2 hours of work will necessarily make me tired. Of course, learning new things requires effort for the encoding. Not so much new knowledge, mostly new mental structures that knowledge can fit into.
This will end up being a long message if I once again get into theoretical things, but I find that it helps to write things down (so that I can allow myself to clear them from my head), and to stick to my choices so that I don’t waste energy re-considering and questioning everything, and finally to keep things simple. In short, avoiding wasted energy like fighting myself and keeping track of things which aren’t relevant. Maybe this is one way to making more of each day, but perhaps you need solution which don’t have a big initial cost.
2 hours of socializing with constant self-censorship might equal 4 hours of socializing without worrying too much how you appear. A simpler and easier solution is meditation, but I personally like the idea of conditioning myself into only considering things which are directly relevant to what I care about, and eliminating cognitive waste like hypervigilance.
But yeah, I think that truth is found in simplicity. But hey, if quantum computing interests you, and the field pays well, then I think there is a lot of potential to be found.
I can’t say much about the core problem, as I don’t know the details (and it’s fine if they’re private), so I can only give general advice. I don’t know if your work is physical or not, or if you have a lot of work in your day which doesn’t appeal to you or not. I’m also biased towards what’s familiar to myself, you might not have anxiety and a poor working memory like I do, for instance. (but if you frequently consume stimulants because you feel tired, you should know this feeling well!). Again, take what you find to be of value, you can just discard the rest.
And I will let you reflect on things, maybe reflecting and collecting yourself again will do you some good. Keep in mind that most negativity and worries will be amplified by your mental state, so whatever you find, it’s not as bad as it appears to be.
Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into practice.
I know how much energy and time I have to spend in order to reach the goals I set for myself. I know how to place sufficient boundaries on myself to make use of my freedom (/power). I know how to blend into my social surroundings while staying just authentic enough to be respected and trusted. I know how to let go of intellectual OCD and have fun with the cards I am dealt in playful interaction. And yet, my implementation of this knowledge in daily life feels poor. Maybe it is a luxury problem—objectively I am doing fairly well, I guess. But my success stems from a local optimum of adaptation that I semmingly cannot leave without developing serious mental health problems. Paradoxically, I feel stuck while reaching one important life goal after the other.
Maybe I should go see a therapist and work on my equanimity.
Do you know Nietzsche’s concepts of the apollonian and dionysian, or Jordan Peterson’s order/chaos duality? I think that rationalism often tends too much towards the former rather than a healthy combination of the two.
Traditional wisdom is about warning and advice, which is about slowing down. This is healthier and safer for sure, but as your experiences with mania have shown, a little bit of chaos can be good. I say this because Klugheit seems to be regarded as a virtue, and all virtues tend to have these soft, calm qualities.
Could it be that you’re too theoretical and not practical enough? Knowing the answer is not the final step of the process, it’s around the middle. Knowing how to be social, and being social, are completely different. Your knowledge only helps you when you go from memorizing it to internalizing it, making it an automatic part of yourself that you’re no longer aware of.
If you thought about every step you took, walking would be difficult.
The knowledge has to be digested and integrated properly. If you’re just learning more and more things without this process, it will appear like you know more and more, but you’d not see much benefits, which I’m sure would be discouraging. Indeed, this lack of observable benefits might make you lose faith in the knowledge that you have, so that you go searching for other knowledge, until you know the subject from so many angles and perspectives that you won’t even know where to start implimenting it, a sort of having too much knowledge. No blame if that’s the case, I learned all these things the hard way myself.
Can you expand on what you mean about local optimum of adaptation? And have you thought about what your feeling represent? Moving away from your goal, parallel to your goal, like you’re ignoring the main quest and clearing all the subquests instead, like you’re doing well but seeing your personal projects stagnate due to regular life taking up too much of your time and energy? Perhaps a branch between what’s valuable to yourself and what’s valuable to society?
I think that mental health problems stem from stress, frustration, and unmet needs. For example, we’re social creatures, so social isolation tends to be unhealthy for us, even if having time for ourselves is also a need. I have a feeling of stuckness stemming from a similar situation, my indecisiveness makes it so that I’m stuck between fulfilling need one and two, ultimately fulfilling neither. It’s similar to the problem that multi-tasking effectively is more or less impossible. A clear example of this type of problem is somebody who isn’t alert because they don’t sleep enough, and who don’t sleep enough because they they refuse to go to bed before they’ve done something productive.
I’m glad that you seem to have an affinity for my brand of craziness. I’m mostly just listing problems and solutions that I’ve personally gone through, so it’s quite the pleasant coincidence when I’m making sense to you.
I hope this helped! And perhaps therapy is good? I’m self-taught in all areas of life, so I haven’t tried it before myself.
Equanimity seems to be a sort of peace of mind? It’s achievable and it feels good. But the gap that makes us frustrated and unhappy also helps motivate us towards our goals. I’m trying to recreate the overexcitability that I accidentally cured in myself when I got over my social trauma.
Perhaps I had a negative experience here because I was used to so high levels of adrenaline that fixing myself made my experiences duller. If my brain was used to chronic strong stimulantion, then it’s possible that it will take years before my receptors return to normal, sort of like recovery stimulant abuse, you know?
Anyway, the correct amount of hardship with an contrasting amount of meaning seems to result in the perfect balance, like how the flow state is also a perfect balance. Have you ever found yourself thinking “bring it on” or “I wish this would suck even more”? I wish to recreate this state but it requires being more bounded in myself, being more subjective and immature. A sort of being “edgy” or “chuunibyou” if you know these terms.
Rational thought and sensibility easily destroy these mindsets, but I’m willing to bet that your willpower and mental sharpness was much better in your younger years. What I don’t know is if this goes away by itself, or if it’s a direct result of learning more and viewing the world in an outside-in sort of way, rather than the more egoistic inside-out thinking.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy jokingly uses the “Total Perspective Vortex” as a torture device. This idea allows us to play around with the idea of perspective, and how things like meaning and value seem to be divided over the area of our scope. Dumb people have smaller perspectives/scopes, which helps protects their ego and sense of importance.
So I went on various tangents here—but it has helped me to consider them as parameters that I can manipulate so that I can keep my mental health intact, or have it break in the right manner at least, while my knowledge and awareness keeps growing in ways which would normally exclude a whole lot of different personalities, mentalities and viewpoints.
To conclude, I won’t exclude that therapy could be a good idea, even if they only remind you of things you already know. The conversations might even fulfill your social and cognitive needs? Do my comments feel good to read? With the exception of that short-term high we get when we learn new things or listen to motivational quotes. I recommend not getting addicted to that feeling, or at least making use of it before it wears off. This is because the disappearance of excitement might cause you to believe that the advice wasn’t any good, before you get to try out the advice. I hope this makes sense? It’s in line with what I said earlier about learning without proper digestion/integration
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting. Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though—I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at work, working on self-actualization, keeping a good standing with friends and acquaintances and pushing forward some projects of my own. When I am at normal energy levels, which are considerably higher than the ones I have right now, I seem to perform on my personal pareto frontier. Whenever I try to expand activity on one or two of said aspects, I fall short on the others, pushing even harder then leads to stress and regrets that in turn slow me down further on the totality of my efforts, until the point where it becomes problematic for my health. Whenever this happens, I also start to spend too much time dealing with and worrying about stuff that is beyond my control, such as politics and so on, which leads to a vicious cycle that often triggers depression. Once I have found my way out of it, the cycle repeats. For a couple of months, I hold my balance, than I try to push my limits and things start to fall apart again.
It could easily be the case that I am expecting too much from myself and maybe there is no way to become better at achieving my goals than completing my side projects and not replacing them with new ones after that.
Thinking about all you have said and trying to make sense of why it resonates so strongly, I have come to an intermediate conclusion that I will have to think about for some time: Perhaps it is a good idea for me to refrain from learning about the topics that I am most drawn to now, and rather go back to both theoretical and applied psychology. There is not that much to take away from quantum computing when it comes to dealing with other people. Or oneself.
Re-reading my comments, the ideas which appeal to me are directly related to my level of arousal (dopamine level compared to baseline). It maps pretty well to the hierarchy of needs. Everything below is “boring” or “mundane” and everything above is “irresponsible” or “wasteful”.
You can re-read them in the future if they ever become relevant, until then you don’t have to worry about them.
It can help to view energy as a limited resource, but there’s many kinds of energy, and fulfilling needs and building ‘momentum’ can give energy rather than using it. Maybe a good abstraction is the set “Physical/mental/spiritual”. Your mild depression and my 10mg of ritalin don’t change our actual levels of energy, but rather just our subjective feelings of energy. Worrying and stress does use energy though—thinking about work seems to use almost as much energy as actual doing the work.
But stress and too much effort create waste products in the brain, which is probably why our brains make us feel tired. It’s a defense against damage, like physical exhaustion. When we bypass this, with drugs or by a manic mood, we probably cause damage because we keep going without rest.
It’s easier said than done, but periodic effort and rest is more efficient than just the effort. The worst combination of these is pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
It’s possible that you’re pushing further and draining your limited resources (blood sugar and other cognitive resources), but there’s also the possibility that you’re draining other resources (neglecting seemingly less important things which help your mental health), that you’re tired because of what you don’t do rather than because of what you do.
While the engagement in politics could stem from needless worry, it could also be an outlet for your unmet need to communicate, and the reward of correcting other people about something that you’re knowledgeable about. In my own case, something drives me to websites like this one, and while I can’t feel it consciously, it’s just me chasing dopamine or fulfilling some less obvious need. If I don’t go here, I’ll catch myself going to similar places.
If I understand correctly, you believe that you should be able to do all these things at once, that you have less energy than you should have. I think that confidence and energy levels are extremely related, and that mania and depression are just changes in confidence, stemming from feedback loops (failure → failure or victory → victory). And if you’ve been able to do these things in the past, then it should theoretically be possible to do them still, and the transition between these states could be your beliefs and values changing.
But if you’ve experienced mania multiple times before, then it’s likely that you have bipolar, and that we should consider the neuroscience side of things (rather than focus on the psychological like I have until now). Diet, exercise, sunlight exposure, etc. could be factors too.
Perhaps you are taking on too much at once, but I personally don’t believe in these limitations. If I can play video games with friends for 15 hours straight, then I don’t believe that 2 hours of work will necessarily make me tired. Of course, learning new things requires effort for the encoding. Not so much new knowledge, mostly new mental structures that knowledge can fit into.
This will end up being a long message if I once again get into theoretical things, but I find that it helps to write things down (so that I can allow myself to clear them from my head), and to stick to my choices so that I don’t waste energy re-considering and questioning everything, and finally to keep things simple. In short, avoiding wasted energy like fighting myself and keeping track of things which aren’t relevant. Maybe this is one way to making more of each day, but perhaps you need solution which don’t have a big initial cost.
2 hours of socializing with constant self-censorship might equal 4 hours of socializing without worrying too much how you appear. A simpler and easier solution is meditation, but I personally like the idea of conditioning myself into only considering things which are directly relevant to what I care about, and eliminating cognitive waste like hypervigilance.
But yeah, I think that truth is found in simplicity. But hey, if quantum computing interests you, and the field pays well, then I think there is a lot of potential to be found.
I can’t say much about the core problem, as I don’t know the details (and it’s fine if they’re private), so I can only give general advice. I don’t know if your work is physical or not, or if you have a lot of work in your day which doesn’t appeal to you or not. I’m also biased towards what’s familiar to myself, you might not have anxiety and a poor working memory like I do, for instance. (but if you frequently consume stimulants because you feel tired, you should know this feeling well!). Again, take what you find to be of value, you can just discard the rest.
And I will let you reflect on things, maybe reflecting and collecting yourself again will do you some good. Keep in mind that most negativity and worries will be amplified by your mental state, so whatever you find, it’s not as bad as it appears to be.