leogao's Shortform

leogao

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an idea that i associate with bay area strains of buddhism is something like "life is just a series of distractions, you are distracted from distraction only by even more distractions, and it's all because you are experiencing suffering that is too uncomfortable to focus on, so if you somehow dispel all of it you are confronted with the existential dread of the impermanence of life, and dispelling that is the final boss." i might be completely misunderstanding something, I'm not a Buddhism expert by any means, please correct me if I'm wrong.

I've updated a lot towards something like this being at least kind of true. it seems like at least for a certain neurotype of person, much of one's behavior (ambition, addiction, hedonism, status, socialization, etc) serves as a way to distract from some kind of emotional pain. it looks different in different people; sometimes it looks like working a zillion hours so you have no time to reflect; or making status/money go up for its own sake; or drinking heavily; or playing video games; or spending lots of time at social events. the commonality is escaping the experience of the present in some way. in much the same way that you will flinch when on the threshold of a cold shower, because the anticipation of the discomfort tries to push you away from it, you flinch away from emotional discomfort. generally, confronting the pain is better than letting it fester.

of course, one very big source of emotional pain for many people is the impermanence of life and the associated existential dread. the idea of the inevitability of death is very spooky. contrary to the standard story though, i'd guess there are also many other sources of emotional pain, which vary by person. maybe if i introspect deeper i will discover that everything is secretly about impermanence deep down, but idk.

it also seems clear that some people are a lot more avoidant/distraction-prone than other people. at the most extreme is people with the ADHD neurotype. in some way, we can think of ADHD as emotional dysregulation that causes constant pain, which can be escaped primarily by distraction through entering flow state (which allows you to stop experiencing the self) or constantly fixating on different things to stay busy and avoid having to confront the emotional pain. this also explains stimming (self-soothing), procrastination (some takes have negative emotions associated, so they are avoided). I'm not sure if forgetfulness can be explained by this theory, though. on the other end, some (most?) people are naturally very good at living in the moment, are emotionally in tune, and generally do not exhibit any of the ADHD traits. i have no idea if any of this applies to normal people. my guess is it's still applicable overall but less so, but also that there are a small number of exceptions, forms of emotional pain that normal people are actually more susceptible to than ADHD/autistic people. as weak evidence, even non Buddhist literature sometimes likes to make fun of normal characters for things like this.

also, i still think some parts of this are utterly crazy. the part i most disagree with is the part where you're supposed to dissolve the pain of impermanence and fear of death. maybe many other fears should be dissolved, but it is good that impermanence is uncomfortable! you should be afraid of death and fill the void of existential dread with an ambition to end death forever.

the part where there is no such thing as pleasure, just distractions and the absence of suffering, also seems kind of crazy to me.

my overall stance on how to relate to things like Buddhism epistemically is I'd guess they contain many nuggets of wisdom but also i should remain deeply skeptical of the specific ways they've put the ideas together

2Kaj_Sotala6mo

It's often not the worst thing in the world, but the clinging introduces a low-level resistance to the pleasure that actually makes the pleasure less pleasant. It also brings in various kinds of discomfort - e.g. someone who sees a tasty food they can't eat, or an attractive person who isn't into them, may experience a flash of pleasure from the sight of those and then make themselves uncomfortable by clinging to that experience and repeatedly thinking about what they can't get. If you are, say, at work and clinging to the thought of how nice it would feel to go home, your focus being on that future pleasure may prevent you from noticing things that you could enjoy in the current moment (it actively blocks them, as the clinging crowds out the pleasant sensory moments out of your mind). Someone may find themselves repeatedly waiting for the end of the day when at work, repeatedly waiting for the weekend when the day ends, and repeatedly waiting for the next vacation during weekends. Joe Carlsmith writes: [...] I feel the "seems to hijack attention and agency" thing is particularly prominent when in the company of people I'm attracted to or whose favor I might otherwise want to get. It's hard to think clearly when the mind keeps clinging to "what would get them to like me". Addictive behaviors also have clinging to pleasure as a major component - you think of how it would feel if you got to gamble/drink/whatever again, and then you can't get the thought of that out of your head.

2leogao6mo

hmm, it's not a priori obvious to me that these are all the same thing. the following feel distinct: * emotional avoidance. i know i should think about something, but the emotional pain of thinking about it pushes me away, and i find other things to distract myself from having to feel it, or procrastinate it, or make myself too busy to feel it, etc. i relate to the thing where indecision can arise from feeling emotionally avoidant of two different things i need to trade off between. addiction is often a way to distract myself from an unpleasant emotion. * longing. i want something i can't have. i find myself compulsively thinking really hard about ways i can get it (often not super productively, my thinking is often very distorted in this mode). i don't feel particularly avoidant of the feeling; if anything, it draws me in and distracts me from everything else. but it also feels inaccurate to say that everything else is causing me pain that i am trying to distract from (like with addiction), if anything, the longing is more painful, but i can't look away. other emotions mentioned feel like they're maybe doing something else but it's unclear. jealousy feels like longing plus some kind of tribal status thingy. anxiety is maybe longing for a kind of reassurance. the feeling that makes positive experiences worse because you're scared that they will end is emotional avoidance. i wonder if it even matters whether these are the same thing or different things. is there any difference in prediction if they are the same vs different things.

I think the underlying mechanisms for several of these is distinct, but there's a neural mechanism that acts as a kind of shared bottleneck. Analogy: a word processor and a video player will get started up for different reasons, but they both make OS calls to read files from disk, and disrupting the file read operation will disrupt both.

In the case of clinging, I think the shared bottleneck is largely what Romeo described:

Tanha is more literally translated as 'fused to' or 'welded to'. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the atte... (read more)

leogao's Shortform

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leogao's Shortform

8

Ω 4