Ego wrote: ↑Tue Jun 28, 2022 7:42 pm
I can't say I have a solution (and definitely not a razor sharp mind) but I can venture a guess that a bunch of individuals prone to encouraging one another to burrow deeper and deeper and deeper down extreme rabbit holes may benefit from someone saying, "Hey, do you think it is possible that this is not healthy?"
I agree. I'm glad and benefit from you being around asking such questions.
I guess my main thing is that we all live in a world that constantly barrages us with a certain narrative about how to live. Every single day, if you do anything other than just stare at a tree, you are doing the dog-paddle through Swamp Consumerland. Buy shit, YOLO, work till you die, shopping therapy, shallow takes on current events, SPORTSBALL, etc. I feel like putting a fair amount of energy into creating and maintaining intentional mental paradigms is one of only a few methods for not drowning in the muck and just going along with it all.
My experience of letting go of the process of gardening my little ecosystem of mental paradigms (which includes frequent contact with reality!) is to slip deeper and deeper into the signs and bedazzlements of this simulacra of a culture that I don't like. Staying just afloat takes a certain output of cognitive energy. Getting ahead of the tide requires greater pushes of effort.
I have friends who seem able to have an authentic experience of themselves without as much intellectualization. I envy them to a degree, but I haven't managed to figure out how they do it. When I attempt to copy what I think they do, I sink. Maybe their construction of mental models of the world is just more implicit or intuitive than mine? So they generate functional models on the fly while interacting in the world, in a way that I can't? Not sure.
I largely credit my mental paradigms as the generative force that gets me out into the real world. I'm kaffic, prone to melancholy, mildly agoraphobic, etc.
Every mental paradigm I've ever spun up for myself includes lots and lots of instructions for getting out into the real world and Doing Stuff. That's pretty much the whole point of my mental paradigms, to get me off my ass and out of my head and into the world.
I think it's this dynamic that can make me a little confused when people encourage me to intellectualize less in order to experience the world more. That often backwards from my experience. The less I think, the less I do, up to a certain threshold that I haven't hit in a very long time. Can I use thinking as an excuse, a place to get lost in and avoid the real world? Totally, and I used to do that a lot when I was younger, but I think I do a pretty good job these days of being able to sense when I'm using thinking as avoidance and when I'm using thinking as my doorway to the world.
The nut I haven't cracked yet is serendipity though, your original point. My plans are often good enough that I have the experience I planned to have, or close to it. I'm not good yet at planning for serendipity. I tend to plan an experience that's more like being on rails - very linear. I'm not so good at delivering myself to a hub and letting the whim of the breeze direct my path from there. Thinking and planning is a requirement for me - otherwise I'll just stay home and read books - but I'm sure I can improve or change up the way I do things.
I'll have to think about it.
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Okay I thought about it a little:
It might be worth noting that I find the world of humans a generally terrifying and confusing place. When I'm in a situation I don't understand, it scares me. I feel unsafe, and everything in my being screams at me to get somewhere safe. The only way I've figured out how to be out in the world is to use my mind to build mental representations of it that are as accurate as possible so I have some confidence that I understand the risks and consequences I'm dealing with. This is the only way I keep the terror down at a level that allows me to function. I generally don't find the unknown to be exciting or exhilarating. I find it threatening. Now, I enjoy novel experiences... but I need to have a mental representation in place that will assure me that the novel experience I'm about to engage in won't kill me. That I'm not being a doofus and running into traffic.
To be clear, it's not the physical world that scares me, it's the world of humans. I'm terrified of human minds I don't understand. Intellectualization (mental model building based on observation loops) is how I make the world safe enough for me to go be in it. I've done it enough times to be well aware of the trap of spinning off into my own head. It's very important that my mental maps are accurate, and this means I need to frequently check them against reality. My model-building process is a process that mostly operates in realtime with unfolding actions in the world. Observations get incorporated into the model as they occur.
In other words, I don't - can't? - jump headfirst into an unknown social world. I have to slip in quietly and steadily increase my level of engagement over time, in pace with the quality of my mental models. No mental model, no engagement. I've not found a durable way around this for myself. Even most drugs actually cause me to shut down even harder, because I lose control of my model-building process.
This is why I think serendipity is hard for me to nail. Any unknown with a social risk profile over some threshold scares me too much and I shut down or freeze up. I love reading stories of intrepid travelers and adventurers, but when it comes to being intrepid or taking risks in circumstances that involve other human beings, my capabilities are low. Not debilitatingly low, but lower than what I perceive to be as average.
Many of my friends are capable of jumping balls-first into social circumstances. I envy them. When I try to visualize copying them, the back of my spine feels like it's trying to pucker. It's a stark fear response. This dynamic is also what I think makes me feel... frustrated? when people tell me to just let go and stop thinking so hard. They (obviously) don't feel the clutching fear I feel, and they have no idea how much work it's taken to get this far in the world. It appears to be fun for them, so it's like they think I don't like fun. Fuck them. I love fun. But mortal fucking terror isn't fun, and it's even less fun when it happens as a result of situations that I know shouldn't trigger terror but do anyways, so on top of being terrified I feel ridiculous.
I do think that the older I get, the easier it is for me to have serendipitous encounters, but that's mostly because the older I get, the larger my library of mental models becomes, so there are fewer and fewer situations I find myself in that are terrifyingly unknown. The larger my library becomes, the less time I have to spend spinning up models are referring to them - it becomes largely intuitive and feels 'natural'. It feels like I have to work very hard to get to a point of intuitive operation in the world that I perceive average/typical (?) people are capable of from the beginning.
This is one of my motivations for traveling: to rapidly add diverse mental models to my library in order to increase the number of situations that I'll be able to experience intuitive low-stress engagement with and, now that you mention it, serendipity.
....
Or, maybe, this was all a bunch of bullshit I thought of while stuck deep in a rabbit hole of my own mind. For what it's worth, I thought up all this stuff while simultaneously Doing Actual Things with My meatBody in the Physical World.