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Hide and cover clocks to stop procrastinating. There's no five minutes or five years "from now" that's not just "now" – but quantified time creates the illusion you perceive the future. This creates an emotional relationship to approaching deadlines. If you can't see time in your environment (at least when you want to work), the pain of experiencing "the future" immediately subsides but so does the idea you can put things off.
Useful links: Overcoming Bias, Dr. K, J Krishnamurti, Jeffery Kaplan
When I first learned about social status as a concept, I somehow got the mistaken impression that any kind of status seeking is amoral. This caused me harm because I didn't want to violate any social boundaries, and trying to avoid violating status seeking behavior hobbles your ability to find and follow up on opportunities.
I think status seeking can be zero sum, and in such cases it should be avoided (like playing school with the intention of becoming valedictorian).
Status seeking can be positive sum while consisting of iterated zero sum games (like playing in a tennis club).
Status seeking behavior in positive sum environments generally consists of good things, like working harder at the gym.
The concept is extremely useful to keep in mind when designing environments. What constitutes status seeking should be legible, enable and encourage prosocial behavior, and allow social norms to be learned in a healthy way. Losing in iterated zero-sum games is often a common factor in environments with this attribute, since losing is then an expected outcome of playing, and the game can altered so that an individual loss is seen as providing a gain in knowledge, and continuing to play becomes the source of reward.
This can be actively implemented into zero-sum social situations by setting up a situation to expose oneself to frequent but non-comprimising losses. Like starting debates to entertain others with the intention of being roasted.
Sometimes the thing that seems like zero-sum between two players actually has a third player, let's call them "audience" or "environment", and the payout is different when you include those. Two people trying to win a tennis match provide entertainment for the audience. Also, in short term, one of the players wins and the other one loses, but in long term, both have practiced their skills and had some healthy exercise.
Status seeking is immoral when it comes to conflict with doing the right thing. Sometimes that means cheating to appear better than you actually are. Sometimes it means generating negative externalities.
But in a healthy environment, social status can be a way to recognize and reward doing the right thing.
Emotional or cognitive pain is something we don't treat usually as a learning signal as we treat other sources of pain. This is troublesome since it underpins many self-destructive behaviors and all of our neurotic thinking. Sometimes, gut-wrenching dysphoria is a signal you've touched a hot stove (realizing you said something hurtful), and other times it's a major reaction to what's substantively a small insult.
After having been debilitated for a few days many times following the latter kind of pain, I think the right approach is to run head on into desensitization based on their different causes. Eventually, the logical assessment of "this isn't a threat" will correspond to the perceived reality.
As an example, I used to get offended by a lot of minor politically-charged statements before I read Paul Graham's essay on heresy, then realized the pain of getting offended makes you stronger – it's even fun to seek – and felt it much less intensely after that. The hinge of that phenomenon was the realization that offense comes from things we fear might be true – but what's actually the case can't hurt you since it's always been that way, knowing can only help you make better decisions. In a similar vein, overblown neuroticism comes from the possibility that an insult might be true. Accepting things we don't want to believe about ourselves as data can only help us improve.
Taken at surface-value, I don't like the idea that "desensitization" is good, since it seems to argue that pain is inherently bad rather than a useful signal, but this is wrong, like you're saying. I encounter it quite often when reading about psychology, and it's mostly used to argue that sensitivity is bad in itself.
Of course, things which do not damage the body should not cause pain signals. But if reality causes pain to somebody, it's likely because their internal model of the world is wrong, and because they identify with wrong beliefs. The ego will protect itself against modification, it really thinks we're in danger in these situations. It's likely an old defense mechanism from when ostracization was actually lethal.
Now, it's as you say. All discomfort is a sign that one should work on themselves, and that this process can be highly rewarding and solve internal conflicts and contradictions. We are already living reality, so the truth can't possibly kill us. But these false beliefs may die in our place, and that's often a painful process. But it's less painful in the long run than living those false beliefs and getting scared every time they're threatened, so I think the superior choice is facing reality.
It's a bit sad that "suffering" has been misunderstood like this, and treated like a problem in itself, rather than the symptom of a problem that it actually is. Especially since the truth is so nice and positive compared to this gloomy understanding.
More Dakka On Your Expectations
After hearing my friend talk about his roommate’s brash decision-making from the despair at getting rejected by girls he liked several times, my friend mentioned that his roommate had asked out a total of three people since high school. Only three!
While there are more factors in the story involved, I’ve heard similar enough troubles that it seems worth saying: Three people is not a lot. Certainly not enough rejections to merit the magnitude of self-worth issues people can walk away with that few from.
If you had the expectation that if the first person you ask out didn’t like you then you’re doomed to loneliness, then a (probable enough) failure would be such a damaging experience you might not try again for a long time. If you instead believed that number was two, the first rejection would hurt considerably less. The higher you go, the less it hurts.
Maybe the expectation we implicitly have from culture is low enough to make three rejections somewhat sting. Why should it? Why shouldn’t that threshold be something like sixty? Or a hundred?
If you can only alter your chances by acquiring skills, improving yourself, and looking harder, then each rejection is valuable new data on what to do better next time. None should be felt as a failure towards your goal by any means. Rejections are an indicator of progress.
I made the same mistake when I was young. And it is difficult in retrospect to find out exactly why. I don't remember hearing or reading this explicitly, but somehow I got the idea that first you need to figure out who is your "true love" and then you need to ask them out and... hope that the feeling is reciprocated?
Which is why I have wasted lots of time worrying about how I truly feel about some person, and when I finally felt sure this was the right choice, I got rejected and was emotionally devastated.
And when I put it like this, of course it sounds completely stupid. If you want to figure out whether someone is a good fit for you, you need to interact with them, preferably in many different situations. And you should also interact with people who maybe don't seem like a good fit but also don't have any obvious red flags, because maybe you will change your opinion after you learn more about them.
The very concept of "true love" probably needs to be thrown away, because liking/wanting another person is not necessarily a symmetric thing, so there is a high chance of getting rejected; a better concept would be something like having a pool of "potential loves", people you feel you could be happy with, and if a few of them reject you it's perfectly okay because you only need one of them anyway. (Unless you are poly.) Plus, as you meet new people, he pool of "potential loves" can grow.
Another thing I wish I had understood better is that experimenting with romantic relations is not only ethically acceptable (as long as you do not hurt other people unnecessarily) but probably also necessary. You may sincerely think that someone is a good match for you based on the data you have at the moment... but as you start dating, you find out more about the person, and maybe you learn that they are actually not a good match. It may feel like tricking them, and you may actually get accused of having tricked them, but it's just learning things that you probably could not have learned different way, e.g. because people are different in public and in private.
Rejections are an indicator of progress.
You can make the same mistake hundred times and get rejected hundred times, that is no progress.
Also, you can use an approach that works in 10% of situations, you try it 10 times, get rejected 9 times and succeed once. Here, persistence led to success, but calling it "progress" feels kinda incorrect.
each rejection is valuable new data on what to do better next time.
People are different; sometimes two people want different (or even opposite) things.
I guess it makes sense to distinguish between improving in general, and adapting to a subculture. Some things seem to be always good, except some people care about them more, and some care less. (For example, I spent a lot of time and effort improving my dancing skills -- some women were highly impressed, some didn't care at all, but I haven't met anyone who would consider dancing skills a bad thing.) Other things can be admired by some people, and hated by other people, so if you do more of that, you increase your changes with the former, and decrease your chances with the latter. Here you need to figure out which type of people you want to impress. It probably helps to be flexible, to be able to do something, but also to stop doing that, but you still risk accidentally making a wrong first impression. This is further complicated by the fact that some people are in denial about what attracts them.
Avoidant behavior is more interesting to think of in reverse: why do people do anything in the first place?
Procrastination (in a serial way, i.e. burnout) is due to a failure to respond to the normal incentives people act on in your situation. It can be solved by finding another motivation for the activity.
Given recent discussion of short timelines & take off on LessWrong, AlignmentForm, and broadly, I've been quite worried. I want to be as skeptical as I can, but it’s hard to judge anything: I don’t know what information I’m missing from the timeline estimates I hear, and increasingly strange or concerning things are put out in public regularly. I can’t really say how likely short timelines are, but given what’s happening, it’s absurd to dismiss this as all collective delusion, and it seems something serious is happening.
Because of my information deficit, I don’t have any idea what work will lead to positive outcomes in these conditions, which of those problems I could likely contribute the most to, and how I could start on that work.
So I feel my current task is to gather a theory of positive impact in this situation and work out from there. I think it would be extremely useful to talk with as many people who think about this as I can 1:1 to understand what they think are the relevant factors.
I used to get depressed about genetic determinism. It's a two-sentence thought that eliminates your perceived capacity for change.
However, while some predictive models can be built, and many things do revert to the mean – those are tendencies. You only get a pattern from a behavior that repeats. Some things don't. If you're looking for an overarching cause of life-outcomes, you necessarily cancel out individual variation.
No study on demographics that includes a section called "the one-off thing that happened to one guy once in defiance of what usually happens".
Those models don't know what you want. They can't account for your decision to find it.
Most importantly, they can't account for a systematic effort to find it.
Unwanted thoughts are continuous and amorphous processes, and you can lessen their severity by focusing on when the focal point of your attention fluctuates, leaving a sort of "negative space" of the thought's form in your mind's periphery.