JuliaHP's Shortform

JuliaHP

This is a special post for quick takes by JuliaHP. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Over time during my life Ive started to see the world as a more and more horrible place, in various ways. Ive noticed that this seems to make it harder to be excited about things in general, although I'm not confident that these are related. This seems kind of bad as being excited about things is among other things important for learning things and doing things.

Imagine a robot which serves coffee and does a back-flip. Wouldn't that be awesome cool? A healthy kid would probably be excited about making such a thing. This kind of feels like a values thing in some sense. The world containing an awesome robot sure seems nice.

But now the world happens to suck. The awesomeness of the existence of the robot feels diminished. The world with billions of tortured sentient beings, vs the world with billions of tortured sentient beings but it has a back-flipping coffee robot.

Perhaps the world feels smaller as a kid and the robot feels more meaningful. Maybe if the world is less sucky its easier to ignore the larger world and live in a more local smaller world where the existence of the robot matters more in a relative sense?

I don't feel like I have a great understanding of whats going on here though, or if my hunch is even in the right direction. I'm curious if others have similar experiences or clarifying thoughts.

I think the basic mechanism here is that people actually judge most things by their pleasantness to a much larger degree than they tend to admit, and general bad mood decreases pleasantness.

Directionally I agree with lc saying it sounds like you're depressed, but I don't think it actually has to be anywhere near clinical depression. I think "I'm generally sadder so things seem less exciting" is a very commonly true description. You reporting it could have more to do with you being more introspective than with how extreme the condition is.

The general remedy... (read more)

3[anonymous]1y

I have a similar experience. I'm not sure what to write, but here are some thoughts. * The healthy kid probably wouldn't be excited by a back-flip robot arbitrarily instantiated in a hell. Its awesomeness is context-dependent. * What kinds of motivation do you have access to? * In fiction, the protagonists have motivation even when the world seems really bad. They want to change it. Most real humans instead keep the torture out of mind, but not you. * Separately, a theorist may devote so much energy to their object of study that it becomes intrinsically important to their mind. This is myopic in a way (it's about the thing itself). But maybe it can be non-myopic if thinking about it is instrumental, so contextualizing doesn't diminish it. Maybe passion and heroic motivation can then fuse together.

1Myron Hedderson1y

It makes sense that getting negative information about the world would reduce motivation for a while. But I'm not sure that "a healthy kid would be excited about making a robot that could serve coffee and do a backflip" is necessarily true. The judgment about what is "healthy" vs not is doing a lot of work there, and deserves to be questioned. Suppose you were a kid in a war zone - a "healthy" response in that situation is different from a "healthy" response in a safe suburban first-world neighborhood, which is different from a "healthy" response in a future utopia where many problems that exist today have been solved. Maybe in future we'll get to a world that is so good, the most exciting thing isn't something like "maybe we can end world hunger" or "we could reengineer the food system to mean it doesn't cause any suffering to animals" or "we could turn the natural world into a garden where many of the wild animal suffering issues that currently exist don't any more" or "maybe we can cure cancer permanently and make dying of 'old age' a thing that just doesn't happen any more" but "someone invented an exciting new flavour of cheese that nobody has ever tasted before". We might shrug and go "why does that matter very much?" while the people of that future world could consider not being excited about the new cheese a sign of a problem with motivation. Similarly, someone in a war zone may consider most things people who are not in war zones occupy themselves with fairly trivial and unmotivating, and have a startle response and level of vigilance to threat that would be very dysfunctional in a quiet suburb, and all that makes good sense to me. With that as background, what you're saying is, you're finding the actual world is a worse place than you expected. EDIT TO ADD: And that is shifting what feels important and motivating to you, such that things that might once have seemed important, and might seem important to the people around you, might seem relatively less im