One thing to consider is not just the effect that lighting has on you, but what it has on others. For example, when I think of the quality of different friends and family members’ houses, one of the defining components is how and how well they are lit. My aunt with giant windows and balanced, bright lights easily beats out my friend who has two reading lamps and a kitchen light that get turned on during game nights.
One thing I would ask, Richard, is how do you manage your lights? My current set up has me turn on four different pairs of lights across my room (plus a giant window which I leave always open). Turning the lights off at night is easy- I just go down in temperature because otherwise it makes the TV/monitors annoying to look at- but actually turning on four different lights when I wake up is hard to do. I’m tired.
Buying is easy! Managing is hard!
When a person changes their way of thinking radically, it is normal for them to want to tell everybody about them. This happens even if the change is what people here might consider irrational- think becoming religious. There’s even a Wikitionary phrase for it, “passion of a convert”.
So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”
If you want to speed up getting over it, it might be useful to practice two things. The first is to really focus on personal improvement and realize you’re still a newb. The second is to deeply empathize with why other people do and believe the things they do, and realize that you were that way even a few weeks, months, years ago.
A sophomore in engineering can’t feel angry that an undecided freshmen doesn’t know calculus. A senior in aerospace engineering can’t feel angry that a senior in mechanical engineering doesn’t know anything about wing design. Who are you to get angry that a person hasn’t memorized yourbias.is when you can’t even differentiate the Many Worlds interpretation from the Copenhagen interpretation?
Everybody is still building out their map, and just because you’ve luckily found yourself on a part of elevated territory and you’re able to make a better map, doesn’t mean those with a lesser view are worse.
Secondly, it would help to read about how people come to their world views, and also specifically read about how people came to the rat-community. Basically, read people’s personal “testimonies” and you’ll find that a lot of it is driven by a mixture of personal and cultural facts. Also read testimonies of people that converted into different religions, or even the testimonies of people who didn’t convert at all.
For example, I have a Jehovah’s Witness friend. She got very close to deconversion 10 years ago to the point of listing out reasons that the JWs were wrong. Yet, last I saw on Instagram she was going to the JW headquarters and performing missionary work. Her family, her extended family, and most of her friends were all religious. Can I really be angry that her brain said, “Yeah, I’m going to believe what gives me massive amounts of comfort or am I going to believe something that could literally cause my death?”
As far as books, I would encourage reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. The book attempts to look at the evolutionary background for humans’ moral systems, and is very good at injecting a large dose of empathy into its readers.