Orwell is one of my personal heroes, 1984 was a transformative book to me, and I strongly recommend Homage to Catalonia as well.

That said, I'm not sure making theories of art is worth it. Even when great artists do it (Tolkien had a theory of art, and Oscar Wilde, and Flannery O'Connor, and almost every artist if you look close enough), it always seems to be the kind of theory which suits that artist and nobody else. Would advice like "good prose is like a windowpane" or "efface your own personality" improve the writing of, say, Hunter S. Thompson? Heck no, his writing is the opposite of that and charming for it! Maybe the only possible advice to an artist is to follow their talent, and advising anything more specific is as likely to hinder as help.

I think for good emotions the feel-it-completely thing happens naturally anyway.

To me it's less about thoughts and more about emotions. And not about doing it all the time, but only when I'm having some intense emotion and need to do something about it.

For example, let's say I'm angry about something. I imagine there's a knob in my mind: make the emotion stronger or weaker. (Or between feeling it less, and feeling it more.) What I usually do is turn the knob up. Try to feel the emotion more completely and in more detail, without trying to push any of it away. What usually happens next is the emotion kinda decides that it's been heard and goes away: a few minutes later I realize that whatever I was feeling is no longer as intense or urgent. Or I might even forget it entirely and find my mind thinking of something else.

It's counterintuitive but it's really how it works for me; been doing it for over a decade now. It's the closest thing to a mental cheat code that I know.

There's an amazing HN comment that I mention everytime someone links to this essay. It says don't do what the essay says, you'll make yourself depressed. Instead do something a bit different, and maybe even opposite.

Let's say for example you feel annoyed by the fat checkout lady. DFW advises you to step over your annoyance, imagine the checkout lady is caring for her sick husband, and so on. But that kind of approach to your own feelings will hurt you in the long run, and maybe even seriously hurt you. Instead, the right thing is to simply feel annoyed at the checkout lady. Let the feeling come and be heard. After it's heard, it'll be gone by itself soon enough.

Here's the whole comment, to save people the click:

DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis ("This is water") is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.

To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It's the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; "Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops."

In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.

Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.

The "trick" to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the "master" DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I'm disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples' lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.

Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can't be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it's an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.

There's something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.

[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]

And another comment from a different person making the same point:

Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace's.

In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.

Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.

He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.

Wow, it's worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is "government-complete" and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.

What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?

Or that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can't?

I think any theory of school that doesn't mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?

You're saying governments can't address existential risk, because they only care about what happens within their borders and term limits. And therefore we should entrust existential risk to firms, which only care about their own profit in the next quarter?!

Yeah, the trapped priors thing is pretty worrying to me too. But I'm confused about the opposing interventions thing. Do charter cities, or labor unions, rely on donations that much? Is it really so common for donations to cancel each other out? I guess advocacy donations (for example, pro-life vs pro-choice) do cancel each other out, so maybe we could all agree that advocacy isn't charity.