11 ms·

All of your unquestioned cultural norms and biases. Everything your parents, your family; your community and your society taught you. The heuristics that keep

by ukj 4y ago

All of your unquestioned cultural norms and biases. Everything your parents, your family; your community and your society taught you. The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
> The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles. Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.
- ukj 4y ago
  It is an unrealistic and unwise expectation to live one’s life that way. Decision fatigue will catch up with anyone who lives like that soon enough. Time is a finite resource. Don’t waste it on perfectionism.
  - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
    This has not been my experience in the past 7 years of addiction recovery. It's been imperative in order to root out as many ways my personality evolved to support addiction and has led to realizing many unconventional ways I've been avoiding my emotions than what's identified by most recovery or 12-step groups. Also, I've made arguments like what you're making before i entered into recovery to explain why i wasn't trying to make comprehensive changes to my life and explain away learned helplessness around changing myself. My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism." These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making. I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop. As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.
    - ukj 4y ago
      None of what I am about to say is meant to discourage you; or dismiss you - keep fighting the good fight. It sure sounds like you've been through hell. You should read my comments through an objective lens. I try to be as neutral/scientific/objective as possible with my words and I say this from my perspective as scientist/engineer. The world is far too complex for any human to be able to model it at high fidelity; never mind compute the 1st, 2nd and n-th order consequences of any given choice on a long-enough time scale. It's one of the many reasons why we conceptually distinguish malice from ignorance - we are only human, not omnipotent/omniscient gods. In practical terms when modeling dynamic systems there's the concept of Lyapunov time [1] - the timescale at which your "predictions" (first principles reasoning) falls apart. None of this is meant to undermine individual attempts at being better; more thoughtful humans, but it's absolutely meant to discourage all pursuits of human perfection/exceptionalism. Holding oneself to impossibly high standards is equally psychologically harmful. Pragmatism before idealism. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
      - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
        It sounds like we're on the same page when it comes to perfectionism. My hell has been living with ADHD and undiagnosed autism and CPTSD/PTSD and addiction in an addiction-oriented ableist society. I lucked out on addiction, cause i got addicted to gathering/hoarding/consuming/analyzing/problem identifying/ problem solving/synthesizing information early on in life. Every addiction builds superpowers and most of mine are around metacognition. Recovery for me meant a very broad view of addiction and recovery were needed, since we ARE information. My recovery is an un-compiled/-published case study in addiction with unique and meaningful contributions to the field. Looking forward to doing that work once i get my family stabilized in a supportive community (anarchistically nurturing a new person means throwing out a lot of parenting guidance and can be very brutal without a like-minded community in close proximity, and takes my whole day practically every day). And I thoroughly enjoy my life as it is. We're working to start a carnival dedicated to learning to confront and heal through trauma and it means building a community of people normalizing loving intimate relationships through openly practicing vulnerability.

by ukj 4y ago

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago

> The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles. Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.

ukj 4y ago
It is an unrealistic and unwise expectation to live one’s life that way. Decision fatigue will catch up with anyone who lives like that soon enough. Time is a finite resource. Don’t waste it on perfectionism.
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  This has not been my experience in the past 7 years of addiction recovery. It's been imperative in order to root out as many ways my personality evolved to support addiction and has led to realizing many unconventional ways I've been avoiding my emotions than what's identified by most recovery or 12-step groups. Also, I've made arguments like what you're making before i entered into recovery to explain why i wasn't trying to make comprehensive changes to my life and explain away learned helplessness around changing myself. My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism." These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making. I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop. As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.
  - ukj 4y ago
    None of what I am about to say is meant to discourage you; or dismiss you - keep fighting the good fight. It sure sounds like you've been through hell. You should read my comments through an objective lens. I try to be as neutral/scientific/objective as possible with my words and I say this from my perspective as scientist/engineer. The world is far too complex for any human to be able to model it at high fidelity; never mind compute the 1st, 2nd and n-th order consequences of any given choice on a long-enough time scale. It's one of the many reasons why we conceptually distinguish malice from ignorance - we are only human, not omnipotent/omniscient gods. In practical terms when modeling dynamic systems there's the concept of Lyapunov time [1] - the timescale at which your "predictions" (first principles reasoning) falls apart. None of this is meant to undermine individual attempts at being better; more thoughtful humans, but it's absolutely meant to discourage all pursuits of human perfection/exceptionalism. Holding oneself to impossibly high standards is equally psychologically harmful. Pragmatism before idealism. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
    - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
      It sounds like we're on the same page when it comes to perfectionism. My hell has been living with ADHD and undiagnosed autism and CPTSD/PTSD and addiction in an addiction-oriented ableist society. I lucked out on addiction, cause i got addicted to gathering/hoarding/consuming/analyzing/problem identifying/ problem solving/synthesizing information early on in life. Every addiction builds superpowers and most of mine are around metacognition. Recovery for me meant a very broad view of addiction and recovery were needed, since we ARE information. My recovery is an un-compiled/-published case study in addiction with unique and meaningful contributions to the field. Looking forward to doing that work once i get my family stabilized in a supportive community (anarchistically nurturing a new person means throwing out a lot of parenting guidance and can be very brutal without a like-minded community in close proximity, and takes my whole day practically every day). And I thoroughly enjoy my life as it is. We're working to start a carnival dedicated to learning to confront and heal through trauma and it means building a community of people normalizing loving intimate relationships through openly practicing vulnerability.