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In my opinion, this is a failing of schools. Keep trying while figuring out how to do it better is a culture of learning. Shuffling everybody through without

In my opinion, this is a failing of schools. Keep trying while figuring out how to do it better is a culture of learning. Shuffling everybody through without meaningful challenges and eliminating all indicators of relative (or even absolute) performance, means kids aren't developed with a sense of self-development, even if they do pick up some academic knowledge along the way. This can easily cause people to become reliant on an unearned default acceptance, confirmation, and praise from others. Home life certainly has a lot to do with it, encouraging kids to get through their homework (and homework itself is of arguable benefit), but the standards and expectations of schools really set the underlying tone. We need to be trained in overcoming challenges ourselves, with assistance and guidance where appropriate, and with real consequences if we don't. The fact that so many people hit adulthood without this basic self-determining ability is apocalyptic.

ashleypt 10y ago
Yeah the fixed mindset has really crippled me in my life. I was one of those "gifted" kids (to be fair, I do have a pretty high IQ, but fixed mindset is bad for high-IQ individuals too) and I couldn't even stick with video games after awhile, always playing on the easiest difficulties. It's really taking a long time to re-build my attention span and work ethic (ie. from just fiddling around with a million little linux distros and languages, to really investing in learning Android/Java like I am right now - one thing at a time) For anyone who hasn't read it yet, or isn't familiar with these ideas of praising effort and relative improvement over ability and talent, checkout Mindset - it's a great book which I'm about half-way through right now: https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322 https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0...
- hosh 10y ago
  I had something similar. Martial arts and video games didn't quite switch it on for me. There were wishful thinking on my part when I practiced those. At some point, I learned to eat the suffering that comes with doing something difficult. It came down to that. There is no avoiding the suffering. What makes hard work "hard" is literally the suffering. Being able to be present -- being mindful -- to it is what makes it look like endurance, perseverance, grit, "ren", "nin" on the outside. It looks stoic, like being indifferent to pain, but it isn't. Being indifferent is a subtle way of avoiding the suffering, while I'm speaking of being present to pain and suffering. I learned that through a shamanic thing and cultivated it with meditation. My ability to practice the things I wanted and take on challenges really accelerated. (I got a taste for climbing up mountains, heh). I also went to the other extreme where work became just an endless death march of anxiety and stress. (If you can eat suffering, then you can just keep on going, right?) That took reading a book on classical, non-dual Shaiva Tantra and it's philosophy (it's View) before things clicked for me there. Up until then, I had difficulty reconciling some things. I didn't want to lose being able to work hard, but sustaining that was deteriorating things for my health and my family.
  - ashleypt 10y ago
    for me, yeah, meditation and exercise has helped quite a lot because they both directly reward and reinforce accepting struggle or challenge very shortly after doing it and the effect builds through persistence. I don't like to call it "pain" or "suffering" - I think "strain" or "tension" is a much much better to put it because you can strain to do something pleasant like when we squint to try to see something better, or when we stretch to loosen up our muscles. Describing it as pain or suffering isn't going to help anyone standing on the outside of learned-helplessness - for a long time I associated "hard work" with doing things just because you felt like you had to because of that mindset and because of public schooling/being told what to do as a kid and so I carried on that refusal into my adult life. It's taken a couple years to learn that effort is fun /in the moment/ too if you /care/ about it - look up flow states. we tend to make things like exercise and so on into these grueling things that we do as if out of this sense of duty. we don't really have to do anything - we can never get out of bed and starve to death. nobody's going to judge us for that, and if the only thing that makes you choose different is feeling guilty then you need to find your motivation. for me, the less I judge myself for not doing, often the quicker I get started. it's been tough to remember that - I can still agonize with patterns like "analysis paralysis" and I have to just stop, and go do something totally unproductive until my motivation returns. It's kind of like diffused/focused thinking as applies to learning, or anabolic/catabolic processes for weight lifting.
    - hosh 10y ago
      I'm specifically using pain and suffering because I am not talking in metaphors and I am not trying to dress it up or down. I am not trying to comfort myself or others, and I am not trying to ennoble this. I am not trying to put lipstick on a pig. Pain is literally, physical pain sensations, no more, no less. By suffering, I am speaking about dukkha, or existential anguish. When you try to make something into something else in order to make it more pleasant, that is a form of a story in the head. It will work for awhile until it doesn't. The whole point of mindulfness meditation is awakening to what is, not what you wish things are. It doesn't matter whether you are doing something you think is pleasant or not, dukkha is present there. Strain and tension contains pain. Dukkha is only there when someone is not mindful. Ironically, by being present to the actual amount of pain, the dukkha lessens: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-coolest-psychological-trick/answer/Barnard-Law-Collier https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-coolest-psychological-tric... (Quora answer, not mine's, that explains this very well). Learned helplessness is a story in the head. There are methods to dissolve and deconstruct that which I will not mention here. When you replace that story with a different story, you are creating the conditions for your next disappointment. Real power and freedom comes from releasing the stories that prop up your identity. Now having said all of that, I had written about "supports" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091341 ... So long as those support help you in your practice, it's great. At some point, those supports become obstacles themselves. They are, after all, stories in the head. > we tend to make things like exercise and so on into these grueling things that we do as if out of this sense of duty. we don't really have to do anything If we don't have to do anything, then what is the point of living and struggling? If you lose your motivation for living and struggling, then what happens when you really need to make it through? This was the paradox that was resolved for me with non-dual Shaiva Tantra.
stcredzero 10y ago
This can easily cause people to become reliant on an unearned default acceptance, confirmation, and praise from others. This makes so much sense of so many of the interactions I've had with younger people! Look at games nowadays. 80's arcade games used to pretty much throw you into the pool, and leave it up to you to swim. (Granted, they threw you into the shallow end.) Now, it seems like games hold your hand and praise you for every action you take.
hosh 10y ago
> The fact that so many people hit adulthood without this basic self-determining ability is apocalyptic. We lost a lot of our traditional rites of passages. Some of the traditional ones goes against contemporary notions of childhood and would be considered child abuse. In some cultures, for example, failing the rite of passage is fatal. Those cultures may consider that the spirit inhabiting the child was not serious or ready about being an adult. Try against next time. I'm not suggesting we lost our way and we should go back to traditional practices. Rather, there are wisdom we learned with our modernity and there is wisdom we lost when we left behind traditional wisdom. There is some sort of way where we can have those teachings of self-reliance that's expressed natively, and emergently from our modern sensibilities. I don't know what that is, though it's something in the back of my mind for a while.

ashleypt 10y ago

Yeah the fixed mindset has really crippled me in my life. I was one of those "gifted" kids (to be fair, I do have a pretty high IQ, but fixed mindset is bad for high-IQ individuals too) and I couldn't even stick with video games after awhile, always playing on the easiest difficulties. It's really taking a long time to re-build my attention span and work ethic (ie. from just fiddling around with a million little linux distros and languages, to really investing in learning Android/Java like I am right now - one thing at a time) For anyone who hasn't read it yet, or isn't familiar with these ideas of praising effort and relative improvement over ability and talent, checkout Mindset - it's a great book which I'm about half-way through right now: https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322 https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0...

hosh 10y ago
I had something similar. Martial arts and video games didn't quite switch it on for me. There were wishful thinking on my part when I practiced those. At some point, I learned to eat the suffering that comes with doing something difficult. It came down to that. There is no avoiding the suffering. What makes hard work "hard" is literally the suffering. Being able to be present -- being mindful -- to it is what makes it look like endurance, perseverance, grit, "ren", "nin" on the outside. It looks stoic, like being indifferent to pain, but it isn't. Being indifferent is a subtle way of avoiding the suffering, while I'm speaking of being present to pain and suffering. I learned that through a shamanic thing and cultivated it with meditation. My ability to practice the things I wanted and take on challenges really accelerated. (I got a taste for climbing up mountains, heh). I also went to the other extreme where work became just an endless death march of anxiety and stress. (If you can eat suffering, then you can just keep on going, right?) That took reading a book on classical, non-dual Shaiva Tantra and it's philosophy (it's View) before things clicked for me there. Up until then, I had difficulty reconciling some things. I didn't want to lose being able to work hard, but sustaining that was deteriorating things for my health and my family.
- ashleypt 10y ago
  for me, yeah, meditation and exercise has helped quite a lot because they both directly reward and reinforce accepting struggle or challenge very shortly after doing it and the effect builds through persistence. I don't like to call it "pain" or "suffering" - I think "strain" or "tension" is a much much better to put it because you can strain to do something pleasant like when we squint to try to see something better, or when we stretch to loosen up our muscles. Describing it as pain or suffering isn't going to help anyone standing on the outside of learned-helplessness - for a long time I associated "hard work" with doing things just because you felt like you had to because of that mindset and because of public schooling/being told what to do as a kid and so I carried on that refusal into my adult life. It's taken a couple years to learn that effort is fun /in the moment/ too if you /care/ about it - look up flow states. we tend to make things like exercise and so on into these grueling things that we do as if out of this sense of duty. we don't really have to do anything - we can never get out of bed and starve to death. nobody's going to judge us for that, and if the only thing that makes you choose different is feeling guilty then you need to find your motivation. for me, the less I judge myself for not doing, often the quicker I get started. it's been tough to remember that - I can still agonize with patterns like "analysis paralysis" and I have to just stop, and go do something totally unproductive until my motivation returns. It's kind of like diffused/focused thinking as applies to learning, or anabolic/catabolic processes for weight lifting.
  - hosh 10y ago
    I'm specifically using pain and suffering because I am not talking in metaphors and I am not trying to dress it up or down. I am not trying to comfort myself or others, and I am not trying to ennoble this. I am not trying to put lipstick on a pig. Pain is literally, physical pain sensations, no more, no less. By suffering, I am speaking about dukkha, or existential anguish. When you try to make something into something else in order to make it more pleasant, that is a form of a story in the head. It will work for awhile until it doesn't. The whole point of mindulfness meditation is awakening to what is, not what you wish things are. It doesn't matter whether you are doing something you think is pleasant or not, dukkha is present there. Strain and tension contains pain. Dukkha is only there when someone is not mindful. Ironically, by being present to the actual amount of pain, the dukkha lessens: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-coolest-psychological-trick/answer/Barnard-Law-Collier https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-coolest-psychological-tric... (Quora answer, not mine's, that explains this very well). Learned helplessness is a story in the head. There are methods to dissolve and deconstruct that which I will not mention here. When you replace that story with a different story, you are creating the conditions for your next disappointment. Real power and freedom comes from releasing the stories that prop up your identity. Now having said all of that, I had written about "supports" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091341 ... So long as those support help you in your practice, it's great. At some point, those supports become obstacles themselves. They are, after all, stories in the head. > we tend to make things like exercise and so on into these grueling things that we do as if out of this sense of duty. we don't really have to do anything If we don't have to do anything, then what is the point of living and struggling? If you lose your motivation for living and struggling, then what happens when you really need to make it through? This was the paradox that was resolved for me with non-dual Shaiva Tantra.

stcredzero 10y ago

This can easily cause people to become reliant on an unearned default acceptance, confirmation, and praise from others. This makes so much sense of so many of the interactions I've had with younger people! Look at games nowadays. 80's arcade games used to pretty much throw you into the pool, and leave it up to you to swim. (Granted, they threw you into the shallow end.) Now, it seems like games hold your hand and praise you for every action you take.

hosh 10y ago

> The fact that so many people hit adulthood without this basic self-determining ability is apocalyptic. We lost a lot of our traditional rites of passages. Some of the traditional ones goes against contemporary notions of childhood and would be considered child abuse. In some cultures, for example, failing the rite of passage is fatal. Those cultures may consider that the spirit inhabiting the child was not serious or ready about being an adult. Try against next time. I'm not suggesting we lost our way and we should go back to traditional practices. Rather, there are wisdom we learned with our modernity and there is wisdom we lost when we left behind traditional wisdom. There is some sort of way where we can have those teachings of self-reliance that's expressed natively, and emergently from our modern sensibilities. I don't know what that is, though it's something in the back of my mind for a while.