Krieger

Does anyone feel "signaling guilt"? When I have to write something like a CV/Resume/essay for the purpose of admission into a high-status institution (e.g., academia, high-paying job), I feel an insane amount of ugh-field and find myself unable to properly motivate myself into actually focusing on it. All of it just feels ... dishonest. It gets worse with more competitive positions; just good ol' Moloch doing what it's good at: race-to-the-bottom, throwing away everything of value for the sake of slightly increasing competitiveness at the margin, etc. Every time when I have to (fake intentions and emotions / intentionally distort my value system / signal fake compliance / pander to the reviewers by adopting their political stance and lingo / do something solely for the sake of signaling), it feels like I'm corrupting my "soul" via some irreversible process. Perhaps the concept of "signaling" is infohazardous—I wasn't like this a couple years ago, back when I unconsciously optimized everything for the sole purpose of "appearing good in my resume," completely guilt-free. Not any more. And no one around me seems to get it. These days I find myself ... just baffled, as to how my colleagues can even do what they're doing while staying sane. Entire lives, lived without a single shred of real substance, just pure, pure signaling. I read the Moral mazes and understand how institutions select for lizards not actual living-breathing-humans— And I tried so many things—artificially pumping my short-term motivation with stimulants, outsourcing my writings to GPT-3, trying to compartmentalize my life—none of them work consistently, at least for me. The only thing that's keeping me going at this point is the tiny, tiny positive-reinforcment from the (false) belief that "I am a rare instance of an actual living-breathing-human who is heroically resisting the selection pressures and fighting against the Evil and Immoral Lizards." Not for so long. (did I mention that I'm ac