classical_Liberal's Semi-ERE

[classical_Liberal]

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[classical_Liberal]

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[RoamingFrancis]

Wow, glad you're getting some rest.

I love South Dakota! Badlands and the Black Hills are beautiful. Devil's Tower isn't far from there either; I would 100% recommend it! It'd be cool to check out some of the indigenous history while you're there.

[classical_Liberal]

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[classical_Liberal]

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[fingeek]

Glad to hear that your semi-retirement is working out well, and you're able to fend off that "lack of purpose" reaction! For me last year I got it after ~6 months, but I needed the extended time off to exompress... I'd expect for me now I'd get it after 2 months of no work and waffling about

[RoamingFrancis]

Man, sounds like a great trip. Good luck with Devil's Tower on the next run through

[classical_Liberal]

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[AnalyticalEngine]

Which, finally, brings me to my point. I’m going to become more optimistic again. Not just about the things I can control, but also about the things I can’t. Although I’ll stop myself from living in complete delusions, I’ve decided to begin to focus on the positive progress humans are making, along with all the great things my life has to offer. This probably means a bit less forum participation, because, sorry ERE, outside of the journals we tend to be negative Nancy’s on here.

This is an extremely important point. I've fallen into this trap myself, and the end result is nihilism. And the problem with nihilism is it cripples your ability to make decisions or enjoy anything in life because suddenly everything is the same.

Which isn't to say one should be pollyanna or irrational, but there's a certain need not to focus on the negative all of the time. There will always be problems with the world, many of them horrible and devastating. But it is important to stay grounded and have enough optimism about life's projects that one can function.

I've found that, for me at least, simply not focusing on negative things as much helps a lot. To that end, avoiding parts of this forum and the social media sphere at large helps a ton. Things have gotten much more negative everywhere lately.

[7Wannabe5]

It’s also possible that you are in a good mood even though everything is going to crap simply due to your recent uptick in physical conditioning? When I did my experiment in tracking my happiness levels, it was mostly stuff like that which made the biggest difference.

[classical_Liberal]

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[Tyler9000]

I've found that, for me at least, simply not focusing on negative things as much helps a lot. To that end, avoiding parts of this forum and the social media sphere at large helps a ton. Things have gotten much more negative everywhere lately.

Amen. I've also found myself getting dragged into excessive mental negativity lately, and I attribute it mostly to toxic politics & CV talk. Social media today is a dumpster fire of virtue signaling, propaganda, echo chambers, and mob rule. Sadly, mainstream news is no better. And yes, even some threads here get tiresome and repetitive after a while. While it's normal to want to stay informed, at some point you've gotta stop drinking the poison.

But while moderating the negativity is prudent, I'm also trying to be more conscious about seeking out positive inputs and activities. So your shift towards intentional, proactive optimism really resonates with me, CL! Just know that some of us really value your contributions in our little community and find them inspiring. Share more, not less.

[Hail_Diogenes]

Amen. I've also found myself getting dragged into excessive mental negativity lately, and I attribute it mostly to toxic politics & CV talk. Social media today is a dumpster fire of virtue signaling, propaganda, echo chambers, and mob rule. Sadly, mainstream news is no better. And yes, even some threads here get tiresome and repetitive after a while. While it's normal to want to stay informed, at some point you've gotta stop drinking the poison.

But while moderating the negativity is prudent, I'm also trying to be more conscious about seeking out positive inputs and activities. So your shift towards intentional, proactive optimism really resonates with me, CL! Just know that some of us really value your contributions in our little community and find them inspiring. Share more, not less.

+1

As a forum noob who made a ton of life changes based on CL's story, I have to agree.

[CS]

Speaking of pondering, I’ve had plenty of time for it. One thing that’s really been bugging me over the entire past decade, although I'm not sure I realized it until now. I’d mostly given up on the future for humanity. Coming to grips with Climate Change, the eventual loss of cheap energy, etc has been tough. This is coming from a guy who grew up watching reruns of Star Trek and new episodes of TNG each week, painting a rosy picture for humanity’s future. I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid and often wished I had been born 100 years into the future. All of that optimism mostly collapsed.

There is no future for anything if the scale is right. The Universe either dies a heat death or smashes back together again.

The sad part for me is not that it ends, but that I'm not around to see what's next. Or to see what it was like in ancient Rome. Or the people who had such amazing shoes 2300 years ago. Or what it was like when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Also, if humans lasted forever, then something cooler might not ever have room to evolve.

I guess I gave up on humanity at around 17 yrs. My take then was it didn't matter so I should do what I want (not destructively, but there is 'no right career' and all that.) Now that I'm older it is more focused on what cool things are going to happen. Things will go on.

Until they don't.

That's what I always loved about physics - the possibility of learning more. It always made me sad to meet other students who thought the laws of physics were laws, and not just descriptions. Or perhaps they thought more like I did, but we were not able to communicate those thoughts in words - something that has also occurred to me as I get older.

Yes, more exercise. Nothing like some feel good chemicals.

[AxelHeyst]

Great update and realizations. The macro (as seen through the lens of the internet) is grim indeed, but real and wonderful experiences with other humans (let's call it the micro level) are still happening, possible, and these are what is basically the whole point of being human anyways.

I wonder, though, if there isn't a possibility for an optimism for the 'future of humanity' at the macro level, just not the commonly accepted vision of the future of humanity. I think a lot of people say "the future of humanity" when they mean "the future of this society I grew up in where TNG provided me with my vision of the future". And so a lot of people go through denial/grief/depression/etc when they grapple with the thought of the collapse of this particular vision of how the story of humanity was going to play out. But, I think, people hit a dead end if they've made that swap, and view the Star Trek vision as the only possible future for humanity. The (one?) way through the grief dead-end is to accept the possibility of some future for humanity that is full of good things, even though it's not the vision we all grew up believing in as the rightful trajectory of our world.

(And to be clear, I am super not trying to restart a civ/anticiv debate. I don't think it's necessarily relevant to this.) My question is, put a little clearer: are you choosing optimism even though if asked frankly, you consider the macro to be an irredeemable dumpster fire, and so are choosing to find joy and goodness at the micro level? Or is it because you have gotten to a place of allowing space for optimism at the macro level as well in some way?

[jacob]

To repeat/add to what AxelHeyst is saying, the denial/grief/depression/acceptance process wrt to the TNG future almost always refers to giving up an imaginary and imagined future. Nothing real is lost. It's just that expectations are redialed into a new reality. Similarly, when, say, old ecologists bitterly lament the state of the world, the cause of their bitterness is not the world as it is now but the loss of the world as they imagine/calculate it could have been. Again, it's a mismatch of expectations vs reality.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Count me in as another one who lost their TNG vision. This was back in 2000-01 and it took me 6 months of long lonely walks to work through it. However, instead of jumping back into the matrix, it became the start of ERE while simultaneously being the beginning of the end of my astrophysics career. When life gives you lemons ...

From my perspective, I find the least emotional upheaval---the most stoic or welladjusted state---to originate in having expectations match optimally with reality as it is. I therefore find it difficult to understand the strategy of putting on rose-colored glasses or deliberately avoiding bad news. It seems like a kind of denial that's bound to disappoint in the long run even if it makes things look better now. I suspect there are lessons to be learned from how people deal with terminal diseases or disabilities. Do they ignore them? Fight them (even when hopeless)? Accept them?

One more point before you tune out https://www.amazon.com/Future-Not-What- ... 262019248/ contains a good discussion of the calculus of denial. Much depends on which quadrant of (tractable/intractable)x(permanent/escalating) a problem and its solution falls into. For example, it makes sense to ignore a permanent intractable problem because it's not getting worse and there's nothing you can do about it anyway. For example, I'm in denial about chemical pollution in the sense that I'd rather not know what kind of air I'm breathing in or what's in the water around here because short of moving there's little I can do about it. Conversely, it would be a terrible idea to ignore an escalating tractable problem. While it might feel pleasant now, ignoring it will make it worse later on. For example, it's not smart to be in denial about a smoking or excessive drinking habit or rising oceans when owning a beach front property on a flat coastline. An intractable escalating problem is something you can make your peace with and even strategize about. For example, knowing that we're in the middle of the sixth extinction, it would be wise not to develop a love for all things nature as such would lead to much bitterness down the line. You can cut your losses now but then be done with it. Something like COVID would fall under the umbrella of tractable permanent problems in that you can wear a mask to reduce risk but you can't make the disease go away. Pretending it's not a thing also leads to unnecessary suffering.

So being selective in what one tunes out can be a deliberate strategy.

[classical_Liberal]

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[Tyler9000]

From my perspective, I find the least emotional upheaval---the most stoic or welladjusted state---to originate in having expectations match optimally with reality as it is. I therefore find it difficult to understand the strategy of putting on rose-colored glasses or deliberately avoiding bad news.

I don't disagree. For me, it's not about avoiding bad news but avoiding emotional echo-chambers that revel in bad news. Anger, fear, victimhood, righteous indignation -- we've all seen people lose themselves in non-constructive mindsets. And from my perspective, even with so many rational people the emotional weakness of the ERE community is that it seems to attract a certain type of personality prone to nihilism. I get it intellectually, but it wears me out sometimes.

BTW, I think the fact our daily lives suck so much less today in rich countries than they have in other parts of recorded history, is the main reason religion is out of favor.

The idea that people in wealthy countries have it so easy today that religion has less of a void to fill certainly has some merit, although I'd argue that politics today largely fulfills the same role with all of the judgment but none of the grace and forgiveness. And I'm personally much more open to religion, but I'll save that discussion for my journal instead of yours.

[classical_Liberal]

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[IlliniDave]

A turning point for me is when I realized that "man vs nature" is sort of a false dichotomy. We tend to place ourselves above and outside of nature, at least in our more developed civilizations, often codified in religion and mythology (or ancient astronaut theory) that we have a supernatural (i.e., unnatural) aspect built into us. Whether or not there is truth in that may not make all that much difference. Our great sin against nature is primarily gathering substances (many from deep in the ground) and scattering them or their components over the surface or in some cases returning them to the atmosphere, and secondarily having a recent population explosion. Neither of those are unnatural. A million years from now it's likely new critters and some subset of existing critters will be exploiting our leavings. That's not to say we should be slovenly and reckless, I believe the opposite, and hope humans and all our current co-inhabitants except mosquitoes are among those still on the planet ten or a hundred million years down the road. But if we're not it won't mean the span of human occupation was completely meaningless. I guess in a sense that idea occupies a religious-like niche in my psyche. Like many, from my adolescence in the 70s through college and a time beyond, I had a lot of the angst about the present and future, and wishfulness about the past described above. Realizing I'm fundamentally no more special or important than the bird singing outside my window right now soothes that. Dabbling in Zen philosophy helps too. Though once as real as this moment our past exists only in memory and (to jacob's point) the future is just an imagined construct unlikely to be accurate.

Also agree with Tyler9000's observation that traditional religions seem to be in process of being replaced with political religions. I remember being taught that about Communism/Socialism and Fascism back in high school. The government being the high priest of new religions is sort of scary, and that phenomena seems to be on the rise in the US. But maybe it's just the next evolutionary twist.