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I'm personally pretty riveted by this article -- it seems to translate the beneficial mental health activity of tracking your emotional progression over time (w

I'm personally pretty riveted by this article -- it seems to translate the beneficial mental health activity of tracking your emotional progression over time (which lots of cool, useful mental health apps and startups allow users to do now, and this genre of hack is one of the most common at mental health hackathons) to an entirely different perspective on how to view human existence. I wonder what the trade-offs of adopting this perspective are. On the one hand, we'd become more attuned to our emotional states, and mental health would presumably be positively affected; but on the other hand, in creating a society that relates every single venture and activity and thought process back to the end goal of how the individual feels about it, aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Maybe this perspective in combination with a healthy sense of altruism, ethics, vision / dreams / ambitions, etc., might be a neat way to view the world. Or maybe a lot of us already view the world a lot like this, subconsciously.

CyanBird 7y ago
>aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Not necessarily, we all are to a degree or another, hard wired to care for each other and to want to belong to something. I care for my neighbor because I have met him several times and I just feel within me that when he's happy I can feel better and more relaxed. It is like that Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech; >"We all want to live by eachother's happiness, not by eachother's misery" For the last year or so, I had been thinking on this topic, specially from the direction of de-radicalizing people when talking about politics, specially in today's age. I realized that the amount of time I spend talking with people and engaging them on conversation on said subjects is just a sliver of the amount of time they actually spend consuming polarizing content and altering their own neuron network to be unfriendly to new ideas, meaning that wherever I discuss things, I'm fighting asymmetrically against their set past experiences, therefore I should instead of go in long diatribes, I need to get past said wall of pre-conceved notions, arguments and dialogue trees right into shared interests and outlook, after all, we all want a better world, so we can set that as the goal and build on each other's views. Thank you for the link btw, I very much liked that last drawing, it is super cute
lcuff 7y ago
> aren't we making people a lot more selfish? It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10 years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for using drugs.

CyanBird 7y ago

>aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Not necessarily, we all are to a degree or another, hard wired to care for each other and to want to belong to something. I care for my neighbor because I have met him several times and I just feel within me that when he's happy I can feel better and more relaxed. It is like that Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech; >"We all want to live by eachother's happiness, not by eachother's misery" For the last year or so, I had been thinking on this topic, specially from the direction of de-radicalizing people when talking about politics, specially in today's age. I realized that the amount of time I spend talking with people and engaging them on conversation on said subjects is just a sliver of the amount of time they actually spend consuming polarizing content and altering their own neuron network to be unfriendly to new ideas, meaning that wherever I discuss things, I'm fighting asymmetrically against their set past experiences, therefore I should instead of go in long diatribes, I need to get past said wall of pre-conceved notions, arguments and dialogue trees right into shared interests and outlook, after all, we all want a better world, so we can set that as the goal and build on each other's views. Thank you for the link btw, I very much liked that last drawing, it is super cute

lcuff 7y ago

> aren't we making people a lot more selfish? It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10 years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for using drugs.