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You will love others how you love yourself and conversely, how you love others is how you love yourself. I would strongly encourage you to give freely to someo

You will love others how you love yourself and conversely, how you love others is how you love yourself. I would strongly encourage you to give freely to someone what you wish to receive. Intellectual loneliness is the equivalent of I skipped leg day at the gym, not the badge of honor some make it to be. If you don't know why someone isn't intellectually on your level, unearth why. You will discover every human on this planet has the deepest depths of any other with varying degrees of access. If all that sounds too unstructured, I would highly recommend reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And specifically, if you're looking for companionship, Love Does by Bob Goff. From someone who has already reached heights in Silicon Valley, found a wonderful spouse, and now has a kid after turning 30 these are some things that helped me through what you're sharing here. I wish you the best on your journey

anthony_d 4y ago
I was completely with you until you got to Victor Frankl. I just can’t stand what he writes. Respect what he dealt with but he sounds like a fortune cookie.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I also agree. I read Man's Search for Meaning at a point where I felt no meaning in my life. I found it completely worthless as a guide to finding meaning. There is one sentence in the last half of the book that is something like "meaning comes from living every moment as if it has meaning" and that seemed like his central idea of "logotherapy". Meaning is to find meaning. My response is that "meaning is figuring out how to make your brain cells fire off in ways that result in feeling contentment or wanting." If we are ruled by our transmitters like serotonin (contentment) and dopamine (motivation/action/wanting), this all breaks down when it comes to real depression. In real depression the reward systems we experience have stopped working to the point where sunsets are hard to appreciate. The mechanics through which we might experience meaning are corrupted to the point where conventional philosophy doesn't make a lot of sense. How do you find meaning when the "meaning" circuits in your brain don't fire? On the topic of the book I found this quote on American (or was it western) culture insightful: “The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.”
  - stevenfoster 4y ago
    If your meaning circuits aren't firing you're probably too comfortable would be my guess. Not to be demeaning in any way. The condition you are describing is real, horrible, and worth taking seriously. My experience growing up mixed race, on the USA and Mexico border, with different family members on each side, some how my "poorer" family on the Mexico side are happier. Their lives are challenging but simple, rewarding, if of little consequence. When the pandemic hit, I left Silicon Valley and had to leave California because I couldn't afford it there anymore, and while I've visited Mexico multiple times since, I moved to the forest near the Canadian border where some of my closest friends now live in log cabins and heat their homes with wood burning stoves. They hunt for and grow their own food. They get together for harvest festivals and apple picking and are far poorer than most people I ever knew in the SF Bay Area but they seem to me to have so much joy, purpose, challenge, and hope. I am the least educated of them all as a hispanic American. Some have bachelors degrees while others have full on medical degrees, yet they've removed themselves from city comforts to live an intentionally different kind of life. Within the first month of meeting these people they had me on the roof of a barn after 8 inches of snow hard fallen repairing a roof for a single mother. That's the kind of stuff these people do on their weekends. It feels like another world, far closer to my experiences in Mexico than in the city centers of America. So I say all this to share an experience because I do not believe our meaning circuits only fire in a vacuum. Perhaps like a car others can "jump" our transmitters. This is what I found and worked for me. I don't know if it work for all or even many but I do believe something to the effect of changing your current place for somewhere else and finding a way to serve others with others ideally can be of benefit. I very much appreciated you sharing your note with me here and hope for reprieve and resolve for you in your journey. And I welcome any recommendations you have for a book as well on this topic. I too am on my own journey and choose to continue learning. Thank you.
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      > they've removed themselves from city comforts to live an intentionally different kind of life. Like "savages" who reject their soma. (brave new world) American culture has rotted. The communities that our parents grew up with (churches) have failed as an institution. Seeking community is a function that most of my peers (and myself) seem to have failed at, particularly in San Francisco. Being a very white guy born into a very white culture I always envied other people who seemed to have communities built around theirs. Probably a case of grass is greener. I spent around a year vagabonding and I can say for certain that "wherever you go there you are" is completely 100% true and that while location change can help spur action and change, it's a spark that might be capable of starting a fire, but the fuel has to be there. I definitely get that a sense of community and service could "jump" transmitters, but it still requires seeking behavior rather than escaping behavior so the bootstrapping problem remains. I agree comfort is the opposite of growth. You can't grow without discomfort. One of the most important decisions in life is to choose the right pain. In many ways it is the pain a person chooses to suffer that separates and elevates them above others. There is clearly a difference between productive pain (going for a run) and unproductive pain (feeling lonely and depressed). The larger problem is one of debt. As people live a life of escapism they accumulate debts. The opportunity cost of constantly escaping is high, and it builds up. Adventures not had, stories not made, relationships not had, languages not learned, weights not lifted, hiking trails not explored, work projects not done, resume not built/resume gap, communication skills left unpracticed, money left unearned, houses left unbought, money left uninvested. As you watch your personal value diminish or stagnate, your options similarly look more unpleasant. The idea of finding love dies, and the idea of finding a tolerable co-habitor starts to creep in. When faced with the work required to "pay off debt" and the perception of meager rewards for doing so, darkness settles in. In some ways it becomes preferable to be crushed by the debt than face paying it off. The pressure to pay off debt creates equal pressure to escape those obligations and a person is faced with a very simple and dangerous choice. Do I want to live today or do I want to press the skip day button (drugs, reddit, games, tv, over-consumption of any sort). Every day skipped is another day deeper in debt and an investment in remaining depressed. It's a simple problem to solve (Choose discomfort, fake it til you make it), but a very hard path to walk, especially without a guiding light. When you're in long relationships and things go badly, in a very literal sense, your body starts to learn that relationships are not a source of joy and pleasure, but an impending injury. Expectations become self fulfilling prophecies that reinforce the expectation of injury. When you have deep crashes at moments you feel high, it teaches your feeling brain (as opposed to thinking brain) to fear and dread the high. The positive feelings of anticipation you might have had when young become negative feelings of anticipation after negative experiences. Dopamine dries up. Once you no longer anticipate reward, how do you motivate paying off the debt? IMHO that is the puzzle of depression. Fighting depression requires work, but doing work requires belief of reward. The thinking brain understands this and knows the right path, but the feeling brain is in control. Wrestling the feeling brain into unlearning trauma isn't something I think most of us are able to do without professional help. They say gratitude is a good practice and quite literally boosts your serotonin. ^^ This Stanford professor's podcast is super interesting: https://hubermanlab.com/ https://hubermanlab.com/ While this book is a bit dated, I found it an incredibly interesting perspective: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/378339.The_New_Toughness_Training_for_Sports https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/378339.The_New_Toughn... While the book was written for the purpose of becoming a better competitor/athlete, the content is much more broad in scope. One key idea from the book is that negative self talk is a manifestation of stress. Another key idea is that just like you can sprain an ankle and have a physical injury, it is entirely possible to over stress yourself and experience a mental injury that shares many of the same properties as a physical injury. The last chapter or two is a little woo woo, but the rest seems pretty solid.
- stevenfoster 4y ago
  Fair. It was something that resonated with me but can see where you're coming from with your perspective. Curious if you have an author or book you'd recommend instead?

anthony_d 4y ago

I was completely with you until you got to Victor Frankl. I just can’t stand what he writes. Respect what he dealt with but he sounds like a fortune cookie.

hayst4ck 4y ago
I also agree. I read Man's Search for Meaning at a point where I felt no meaning in my life. I found it completely worthless as a guide to finding meaning. There is one sentence in the last half of the book that is something like "meaning comes from living every moment as if it has meaning" and that seemed like his central idea of "logotherapy". Meaning is to find meaning. My response is that "meaning is figuring out how to make your brain cells fire off in ways that result in feeling contentment or wanting." If we are ruled by our transmitters like serotonin (contentment) and dopamine (motivation/action/wanting), this all breaks down when it comes to real depression. In real depression the reward systems we experience have stopped working to the point where sunsets are hard to appreciate. The mechanics through which we might experience meaning are corrupted to the point where conventional philosophy doesn't make a lot of sense. How do you find meaning when the "meaning" circuits in your brain don't fire? On the topic of the book I found this quote on American (or was it western) culture insightful: “The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.”
- stevenfoster 4y ago
  If your meaning circuits aren't firing you're probably too comfortable would be my guess. Not to be demeaning in any way. The condition you are describing is real, horrible, and worth taking seriously. My experience growing up mixed race, on the USA and Mexico border, with different family members on each side, some how my "poorer" family on the Mexico side are happier. Their lives are challenging but simple, rewarding, if of little consequence. When the pandemic hit, I left Silicon Valley and had to leave California because I couldn't afford it there anymore, and while I've visited Mexico multiple times since, I moved to the forest near the Canadian border where some of my closest friends now live in log cabins and heat their homes with wood burning stoves. They hunt for and grow their own food. They get together for harvest festivals and apple picking and are far poorer than most people I ever knew in the SF Bay Area but they seem to me to have so much joy, purpose, challenge, and hope. I am the least educated of them all as a hispanic American. Some have bachelors degrees while others have full on medical degrees, yet they've removed themselves from city comforts to live an intentionally different kind of life. Within the first month of meeting these people they had me on the roof of a barn after 8 inches of snow hard fallen repairing a roof for a single mother. That's the kind of stuff these people do on their weekends. It feels like another world, far closer to my experiences in Mexico than in the city centers of America. So I say all this to share an experience because I do not believe our meaning circuits only fire in a vacuum. Perhaps like a car others can "jump" our transmitters. This is what I found and worked for me. I don't know if it work for all or even many but I do believe something to the effect of changing your current place for somewhere else and finding a way to serve others with others ideally can be of benefit. I very much appreciated you sharing your note with me here and hope for reprieve and resolve for you in your journey. And I welcome any recommendations you have for a book as well on this topic. I too am on my own journey and choose to continue learning. Thank you.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    > they've removed themselves from city comforts to live an intentionally different kind of life. Like "savages" who reject their soma. (brave new world) American culture has rotted. The communities that our parents grew up with (churches) have failed as an institution. Seeking community is a function that most of my peers (and myself) seem to have failed at, particularly in San Francisco. Being a very white guy born into a very white culture I always envied other people who seemed to have communities built around theirs. Probably a case of grass is greener. I spent around a year vagabonding and I can say for certain that "wherever you go there you are" is completely 100% true and that while location change can help spur action and change, it's a spark that might be capable of starting a fire, but the fuel has to be there. I definitely get that a sense of community and service could "jump" transmitters, but it still requires seeking behavior rather than escaping behavior so the bootstrapping problem remains. I agree comfort is the opposite of growth. You can't grow without discomfort. One of the most important decisions in life is to choose the right pain. In many ways it is the pain a person chooses to suffer that separates and elevates them above others. There is clearly a difference between productive pain (going for a run) and unproductive pain (feeling lonely and depressed). The larger problem is one of debt. As people live a life of escapism they accumulate debts. The opportunity cost of constantly escaping is high, and it builds up. Adventures not had, stories not made, relationships not had, languages not learned, weights not lifted, hiking trails not explored, work projects not done, resume not built/resume gap, communication skills left unpracticed, money left unearned, houses left unbought, money left uninvested. As you watch your personal value diminish or stagnate, your options similarly look more unpleasant. The idea of finding love dies, and the idea of finding a tolerable co-habitor starts to creep in. When faced with the work required to "pay off debt" and the perception of meager rewards for doing so, darkness settles in. In some ways it becomes preferable to be crushed by the debt than face paying it off. The pressure to pay off debt creates equal pressure to escape those obligations and a person is faced with a very simple and dangerous choice. Do I want to live today or do I want to press the skip day button (drugs, reddit, games, tv, over-consumption of any sort). Every day skipped is another day deeper in debt and an investment in remaining depressed. It's a simple problem to solve (Choose discomfort, fake it til you make it), but a very hard path to walk, especially without a guiding light. When you're in long relationships and things go badly, in a very literal sense, your body starts to learn that relationships are not a source of joy and pleasure, but an impending injury. Expectations become self fulfilling prophecies that reinforce the expectation of injury. When you have deep crashes at moments you feel high, it teaches your feeling brain (as opposed to thinking brain) to fear and dread the high. The positive feelings of anticipation you might have had when young become negative feelings of anticipation after negative experiences. Dopamine dries up. Once you no longer anticipate reward, how do you motivate paying off the debt? IMHO that is the puzzle of depression. Fighting depression requires work, but doing work requires belief of reward. The thinking brain understands this and knows the right path, but the feeling brain is in control. Wrestling the feeling brain into unlearning trauma isn't something I think most of us are able to do without professional help. They say gratitude is a good practice and quite literally boosts your serotonin. ^^ This Stanford professor's podcast is super interesting: https://hubermanlab.com/ https://hubermanlab.com/ While this book is a bit dated, I found it an incredibly interesting perspective: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/378339.The_New_Toughness_Training_for_Sports https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/378339.The_New_Toughn... While the book was written for the purpose of becoming a better competitor/athlete, the content is much more broad in scope. One key idea from the book is that negative self talk is a manifestation of stress. Another key idea is that just like you can sprain an ankle and have a physical injury, it is entirely possible to over stress yourself and experience a mental injury that shares many of the same properties as a physical injury. The last chapter or two is a little woo woo, but the rest seems pretty solid.
stevenfoster 4y ago
Fair. It was something that resonated with me but can see where you're coming from with your perspective. Curious if you have an author or book you'd recommend instead?