5 ms·

Wow. This is something I’ll probably remember for quite some time. It’s intuitive and immediately applicable, and also a dose of awareness I’ve needed recently

by lame88 7y ago

Wow. This is something I’ll probably remember for quite some time. It’s intuitive and immediately applicable, and also a dose of awareness I’ve needed recently. However, there’s a catch to this. By distancing yourself like this, it seems like you may act quite rationally - but perhaps too locally rational. You may be a long time Java programmer and just feel incredibly unfulfilled about your day to day work, and you might be eyeing stuff like Scala and Clojure with dreams of a more fulfilling line of work. Perhaps the distanced rational self would say no, you are well invested in this Java skillset, and these new things could die out, or any new venture like this might not work out, so stick with what you know. But perhaps you take the more emotional route and say no, even if things pan out badly for me, i want a more fulfilling day to day rather than writing so much repetitive code or whatever (no offense to anyone happy with Java). And perhaps you land in a spot where you’re much happier. Or hell, perhaps you really wanted to pursue music, art, etc. It’s my conjecture, but perhaps it’s most concisely put as: the more you distance yoursef, the less risk you tolerate, and you will take the safe path, precluding the wild possibilities that are the spice of life.

B-Con 7y ago
This is me. I have a track record of making good, rational decisions that I end up regretting because it wasn't what I actually wanted. recently I've been trying to do a better job of checking in on my feelings to ensure present me don't make logical decisions future me will be aggrevated to follow up on.
- Fricken 7y ago
  Reason is slave to the passions.
logicchains 7y ago
Also applies to relationships: self-distancing/meditation can allow you to tolerate a lot of things that maybe you'd be better off not having to tolerate in the first place, and keep you from leaving a bad situation.
- afarrell 7y ago
  As the sibling comment by isacikgoz points out, it can also give you time to notice emotions which you might have otherwise suppressed. The challenge is to find a technique which lets you do that without becoming overwhelmed by the multitude of possible interpretations of your situation. Some people find that journalling helps. I find that one technique which works well for me is when I can talk with a friend who is very good at a particular type of listening, where they ask calm questions to draw out your thoughts and more concisely restate your thoughts back to you.
dancek 7y ago
I know it's just an example, but someone who understands programming work would probably not be against learning another language or two and trying to get more interesting work. They may question whether the language will make you happy. Similarly they'd ask someone switching to art whether that would really be the path to happiness, are jobs available, what kind of salary to expect etc. I wouldn't tell a friend not to pursue their dreams. But I would look for good arguments that they actually understand what they want.
perfmode 7y ago
It’s neither/nor. It’s not about acting rationally versus emotionally. Reason isn’t necessarily good. And emotion isn’t necessarily bad. It’s a matter of acting unintentionally versus intentionally. (For some definition of intentionally). A crude counterexample { Some people might act rationally out of habit. And for them, self-distancing might result in listening more closely to emotions which, for them, tend to be crowded out by deeply-ingrained intellectual ideologies. } And in fact, it’s not about ideology versus non-ideology. There are people throughout history who have articulated this much clearer than I have. I hope someone will follow up with links to passages in this vein.
isacikgoz 7y ago
I think the main motivation of asking yourself those questions with self-distancing is to expose your feelings to yourself. It helps you to state them. You are trying to understand yourself. I guess this is the main reason of this technique. Unfortunately it is not emphasized in the article.
swombat 7y ago
I think you speak here to an important potential misunderstanding about self-distancing. It shouldn’t be about eliminating emotions, it should be about seeing them clearly. Even the first example quote about LeBron makes the point... he says he doesn’t want to make an emotional decision... he wants to make a decision that will make him happy. Happy is an emotion too, and a totally valid goal. “Emotional” is really being used as a shortcut to “unconscious”. Even (perhaps especially) as inputs to the decision, emotions are valuable. If you feel joy at the thought of learning Scala and Clojure, that’s an important piece of information! If you feel depressed and apathetic when writing Java code, that too is very important. Make conscious emotional decisions, should be the take away here. And self-distancing, to see your own emotions clearly, will help with that.
- afarrell 7y ago
  > I think speak here about an important potential misunderstanding about... Meta feedback: This strikes me as a great way to open a comment like this. You’re clarifying that you think someone’s wrong on a point of fact/interpretation but that they’ve thoughtfully contributed to the conversation.
- lame88 7y ago
  I had considered this but I felt my comment was getting too long, and I still feel pretty opaque about it. And I might need to read the study itself to get a clearer picture - the article didn't quite answer all my questions. Basically I feel some friction between distance and self-awareness. It seemed that this study was about choices and action, and that this technique is effective when you have a clear picture of what you want. But to me, that's the catch: knowing the subjective part of finding out what I really want (beyond the immediate sense) is the hardest, and I feel that the critical self-reflection that requires is something you don't want to be distanced for (how can you understand yourself if you're thinking of yourself as someone else? You can understand your patterns of behavior this way, but that's a small piece of the puzzle). Hopefully this gets you to the point where you come out with exactly that set of emotional criteria, and then you can make well-reasoned decisions based on that, possibly using techniques like distancing. So there's definitely potential for harmony between the two steps. Trouble is, it seems all too easy to skip or cut short that self-awareness part and go right to the decisions, which is usually what is prompting us to go about these efforts in the first place. So certainly, I can see how a technique like this can help people make objectively better decisions, by some objective criteria. But without that clear picture, applying distancing on its own seems like it would make someone even more prone to neglecting their desires, since they are separating themselves from the decision. But this is all conjecture of someone having only read the article with little background in psychology and being prone to making emotional short-term decisions all the time. Sorry for the post length; since I feel so conflicted about it it was hard to really distill my thoughts.
HappyDreamer 7y ago
> the more you distance yourself, the less risk you tolerate The opposite, for me. My logical distanced reasoning tells me to go far away to a country where I know no one, see how it is like to live there, find new friends and colleagues and maybe live there. Whilst my feelings / intuition? about this makes me anxious and I'd rather stay at home, in "safety". Turns out in this case, the logic distanced reasoning was right, for me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Kirth 7y ago
Self-distancing is a tool and in this case you are using it wrong. Often, the problem when making such choices, is that fear short-circuits the thinking process. "I may switch to Clojure and not find a job; NO JOB? POVERTY! POVERTY? DEATH!" whereas a more correct thought process would be: "I may switch to Clojure, enjoy it but not find a job. How long can I do without a job?" This will allow you to explore and discover the safety nets you have around you. From experience as a former doom-thinker: such safety nets are more prevalent than you'd think.

by lame88 7y ago

B-Con 7y ago

This is me. I have a track record of making good, rational decisions that I end up regretting because it wasn't what I actually wanted. recently I've been trying to do a better job of checking in on my feelings to ensure present me don't make logical decisions future me will be aggrevated to follow up on.

Fricken 7y ago
Reason is slave to the passions.

logicchains 7y ago

Also applies to relationships: self-distancing/meditation can allow you to tolerate a lot of things that maybe you'd be better off not having to tolerate in the first place, and keep you from leaving a bad situation.

afarrell 7y ago
As the sibling comment by isacikgoz points out, it can also give you time to notice emotions which you might have otherwise suppressed. The challenge is to find a technique which lets you do that without becoming overwhelmed by the multitude of possible interpretations of your situation. Some people find that journalling helps. I find that one technique which works well for me is when I can talk with a friend who is very good at a particular type of listening, where they ask calm questions to draw out your thoughts and more concisely restate your thoughts back to you.

dancek 7y ago

I know it's just an example, but someone who understands programming work would probably not be against learning another language or two and trying to get more interesting work. They may question whether the language will make you happy. Similarly they'd ask someone switching to art whether that would really be the path to happiness, are jobs available, what kind of salary to expect etc. I wouldn't tell a friend not to pursue their dreams. But I would look for good arguments that they actually understand what they want.

perfmode 7y ago

It’s neither/nor. It’s not about acting rationally versus emotionally. Reason isn’t necessarily good. And emotion isn’t necessarily bad. It’s a matter of acting unintentionally versus intentionally. (For some definition of intentionally). A crude counterexample { Some people might act rationally out of habit. And for them, self-distancing might result in listening more closely to emotions which, for them, tend to be crowded out by deeply-ingrained intellectual ideologies. } And in fact, it’s not about ideology versus non-ideology. There are people throughout history who have articulated this much clearer than I have. I hope someone will follow up with links to passages in this vein.

isacikgoz 7y ago

I think the main motivation of asking yourself those questions with self-distancing is to expose your feelings to yourself. It helps you to state them. You are trying to understand yourself. I guess this is the main reason of this technique. Unfortunately it is not emphasized in the article.

swombat 7y ago

I think you speak here to an important potential misunderstanding about self-distancing. It shouldn’t be about eliminating emotions, it should be about seeing them clearly. Even the first example quote about LeBron makes the point... he says he doesn’t want to make an emotional decision... he wants to make a decision that will make him happy. Happy is an emotion too, and a totally valid goal. “Emotional” is really being used as a shortcut to “unconscious”. Even (perhaps especially) as inputs to the decision, emotions are valuable. If you feel joy at the thought of learning Scala and Clojure, that’s an important piece of information! If you feel depressed and apathetic when writing Java code, that too is very important. Make conscious emotional decisions, should be the take away here. And self-distancing, to see your own emotions clearly, will help with that.

afarrell 7y ago
> I think speak here about an important potential misunderstanding about... Meta feedback: This strikes me as a great way to open a comment like this. You’re clarifying that you think someone’s wrong on a point of fact/interpretation but that they’ve thoughtfully contributed to the conversation.
lame88 7y ago
I had considered this but I felt my comment was getting too long, and I still feel pretty opaque about it. And I might need to read the study itself to get a clearer picture - the article didn't quite answer all my questions. Basically I feel some friction between distance and self-awareness. It seemed that this study was about choices and action, and that this technique is effective when you have a clear picture of what you want. But to me, that's the catch: knowing the subjective part of finding out what I really want (beyond the immediate sense) is the hardest, and I feel that the critical self-reflection that requires is something you don't want to be distanced for (how can you understand yourself if you're thinking of yourself as someone else? You can understand your patterns of behavior this way, but that's a small piece of the puzzle). Hopefully this gets you to the point where you come out with exactly that set of emotional criteria, and then you can make well-reasoned decisions based on that, possibly using techniques like distancing. So there's definitely potential for harmony between the two steps. Trouble is, it seems all too easy to skip or cut short that self-awareness part and go right to the decisions, which is usually what is prompting us to go about these efforts in the first place. So certainly, I can see how a technique like this can help people make objectively better decisions, by some objective criteria. But without that clear picture, applying distancing on its own seems like it would make someone even more prone to neglecting their desires, since they are separating themselves from the decision. But this is all conjecture of someone having only read the article with little background in psychology and being prone to making emotional short-term decisions all the time. Sorry for the post length; since I feel so conflicted about it it was hard to really distill my thoughts.

HappyDreamer 7y ago

> the more you distance yourself, the less risk you tolerate The opposite, for me. My logical distanced reasoning tells me to go far away to a country where I know no one, see how it is like to live there, find new friends and colleagues and maybe live there. Whilst my feelings / intuition? about this makes me anxious and I'd rather stay at home, in "safety". Turns out in this case, the logic distanced reasoning was right, for me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Kirth 7y ago

Self-distancing is a tool and in this case you are using it wrong. Often, the problem when making such choices, is that fear short-circuits the thinking process. "I may switch to Clojure and not find a job; NO JOB? POVERTY! POVERTY? DEATH!" whereas a more correct thought process would be: "I may switch to Clojure, enjoy it but not find a job. How long can I do without a job?" This will allow you to explore and discover the safety nets you have around you. From experience as a former doom-thinker: such safety nets are more prevalent than you'd think.