7 ms·

I suffered from this. The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. W

I suffered from this. The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created. I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty. OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.

nefrix 2y ago
Why did you delete the links? Your comment regarding the ego stayed with me, and today I wanted to access again the links you shared, and saw that were deleted.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  Do you mean mean this one ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115 I also recommend Waking up with Sam Harris. That's what got me started.
calstad 2y ago
I know it’s a bit of a personal question, but can you elaborate on your ego diluting experience?
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  I think it would be really hard to understand without experiencing it. But I will write down anyway. So before dilution I had this strong idea of who I was. I had this back story. There were certain things I do. And certain things I don't do. I used to judge everyone. I had a very high opinion about myself and used to constantly do or find things to validate that. Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Each and every moment is intense. Sunsets are absolutely beautiful that you cannot describe through words. Spending time in nature is surreal. You do the right thing instead of doing things to validate your narrative. The dopamine hit I used to get when I used to do certain things is gone( i use to confuse these dopamine hits as me doing something right). This unlocks doing things more from Intuition and less from memory. There is less fear. There is more flow. More creativity. No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe. That said it's not all great stuff. You also have to work through some existential questions which you were previously isolated by the ego. Like mortality. Impermanence of everything. Aging body. What happens after death. Nature of awareness. Why I am aware. Is awareness eternal and it's implications etc etc.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    Happy to hear that worked out for you, that sounds like a great place to be. What facilitated the change though, or how did that happen? Was there a catalyst?
    - hshshshshsh 2y ago
      Sorry. I can't write it down because I think what I did was reckless and stupid and I don't want to give any ideas in a high visible thread like this. For a lot of people this is triggered by something unexpected happening in life which breaks the narrative one has been building their entire life. You can search for Spiritual Awakening and find a lot of examples. Buddha at the Gas Pump is a great podcast to listen to for such experiences. As I sad it's not all great all the times. There were a lot of times in which I wished I could go back to the old mode. Though I think the overall change was for the better.
      - vasco 2y ago
        Isn't this just another meta level of ego? Now you're elevated above everyone in the rat race because you "dilluted" your ego. But that's still the voice in your head controlling you, it just convinced you it doesn't anymore. Buddhist philosophy always failed to click for me because of this.
        hshshshshsh 2y ago
        Hmm. There is no voice which says the ego is diluted. The volume of the talk is lowered. Previously it was at 100. It lowered down to 4 or 5. Previously I used to listen to the voice and memories to make decisions. Since both got lowered in intensity , I now have to rely on Intuition to make decisions. And not recollection of what I did previously. Which makes things new. And sometimes give an almost child like curiosity. Even doing something as simple as going for a walk is amazing. Since the mind is not constantly trying to predict what is next and characterising things as I have seen this or not. You notice things you have never noticed before. The awareness is heightened.
      - 2y ago
mangomountain 2y ago
This is spot on for the audiobook I’m listening to “Mindset: The Psychology of Success” , it’s resistance to effort that preserves belief in effortless ability and prevents any real progress
Jerrrrrrry 2y ago
I am suffering from this. Every word you wrote stabbed me in my past, which means dissonance, somewhere. Subconscious self-sabotage to rip the proverbial band-aid off, induced manic/delirium from a small infection, rumination/paranoia, catatonia. Took less consciousness away from my delaying of problems. My ego didn't handle it, the manic iD, did. I had successfully ran away from all my problems, failing upwards just enough to irk out a cowardly existence. If Moses had an antibiotic, or had flossed more, the 4(0?) days of desert-delirium may not had been so fearlessly familiar. after day 4-5 of catatonic rumination and paralyzing anxiety: I cried aloud, "just give me an ounce of strength"; that let me ruminate as to why: I was asking for help: I am not allowed to. why not? skip that token, backprop later. Why an ounce? and why of strength? and why am I asking aloud? and who am I asking? ... Why an ounce? Why not a ratio of my body mass? Why not an arbitrary....because I have 0. Zero what? Strength? Why am I asking for strength? Because I am a coward. and Occam's Razor clicked, all my problems stemmed from cowardice. I awoke to find myself identifying with "depersonalization" for once, which was embarrassing. But embarrassing/cringe is dissonance, so my ego deconstruction began. Morality is cowardice in disguise. <-- Stuck here, unable to proceed. Too axiomatic. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for. Not out of the woods yet, but at least I know I am in a familiar forest.
3abiton 2y ago
This mirros my experience during my studies. The first few years were excruciating.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  Yes. I am just at my first year. It has been really bad in beginning. Now I am getting used to it slowly.
slibhb 2y ago
It's hard to get more ironic than farming upvotes on the internet talking about how you transcended ego or whatever.
- masspro 2y ago
  Or maybe they just wanted to share something connected to the article
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    It’s a signalling problem, a 31 day old pseudonymous account is pretty always going to enjoy vastly less credibility than say a 10 year old account with hundreds of thousand of karma. If the latter wrote the above comment, nobody would question if the real intention was farming for this or that, since it would make practically no difference for the account holder or the passing reader.
    - Gud 2y ago
      Wouldn’t it make more sense to suspect the account with hundreds of thousands of karma points to be the karma farmer?
      - hshshshshsh 2y ago
        You should always be suspicious of anything that you have not experienced yourself. I used to care about HN karma a lot before spiritual awakening. Had 2 accounts with 2000+ karma before. It was one of those things that helped in building a grand ego for myself. Now I just prefer to post from randomly created HN accounts. You can probably come back a few months later and see this account to be no longer active.
        hshshshshsh 2y ago
        Ahh. I think I misread what you wrote. Ignore the above comment.
tjpnz 2y ago
That hurt. Is there a name for this?
shrubble 2y ago
It’s an interesting concept; I am in the process of learning Scheme and I am not very good at it at the moment. I can see that my ego is getting in the way of doing more practice; the reading of Scheme books is much easier than writing some simple programs such as the practice ones at RosettaCode…
jwrallie 2y ago
By “accidentally went through” do you mean without a specific trigger or cause? Or do you mean there was one (or more) but you had no control over it?
- sfn42 2y ago
  Kind of sounds like they accidentally had a big dose of shrooms or something like that.
Arisaka1 2y ago
This speaks volumes for me. I always wondered how as a kid I would bust my face until I can be good at the hardest video games because those happened to be purchased as a present or from myself. And also I have font memories of my first IT job building software for work and would make something working in a few hours. And my conclusion so far is: standards. I didn't had standards of what constitutes "fair difficulty", "good code", and more. So I would just give myself reps in both activities to become better without care. Now that I'm older I second guess myself and worry about the things I attempt to build or play, all the time: "is this best practice?", "am I building it right?", "this game is too hard, it must be because it's unfair or poorly game designed". And so I've decided to give myself room to enjoy myself without a single care in the world: I completed a game called "Metaphor Refantazio" on Hard, without looking at guides, without worrying about "best team comp", "where to get best gear" etc. and when I got stuck instead of looking things up I took a step back, looked what classes and gear I had to work with and figured things out on my own. Don't get me wrong: the ideas and approaches I came up with were far from optimal (I can find videos of people killing the hardest bosses in one turn). But what matters is that they were my ideas. This game had been therapeutic for me in many ways, and this was only one. But my point is, just like doing this makes you a better gamer, doing this in moderation can make you a better programmer. I'm not talking about "pretend the standard library, books and docs don't exist" but I mean "pretend tutorials on YouTube don't exist". I feel like tutorial hell can stem from exactly the same insecurities and desire for higher standards.
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]
- DoingSomeThings 2y ago
  The video game example resonates. I realized recently that I load up walkthroughs by default. Before I’ve even turned the game on, I’m already following someone else’s ideas of best practice. I think it comes from a misplaced belief about saving time and optimizing for “best” solutions. Taking a less optimal path is scary, even in a game with 0 real world consequences. I’ll consider that next time.
blueyes 2y ago
"Reading and writing more" are just aspirations. Those don't translate well to new behaviors. BJ Fogg (Stanford prof, behavioral scientist) lays out how to build new behaviors in Tiny Habits. You need to make them easy and attach the easy thing to something you already do regularly. (When I sit down to lunch, I read one page...) https://tinyhabits.com/ https://tinyhabits.com/ Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwey talks about this in the Inner Game of Tennis (which is not really about tennis! ;). Your critic is not allowing you to "run hot" and put down some words that are less than perfect. It would be helpful to find something to focus your mind on, a simple count, like key strokes or word count. Alternatively, there's the practice of Morning Pages from the Artist's Way. Just let yourself write anything for a while. It's not for publication. You need to open the gates and you can do that by lowering the stakes involved with putting a word on the page. Inner Game https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314 https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance... Artists Way https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/0143129252/ https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431... I wrote about some other stuff here that helps. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-better https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...
1jss 2y ago
Thanks for sharing your story here! I think your comments and answers are thoughtful and well stated. I don't share the Buddhist worldview but can relate anyways in terms of art. When learning to model in 3D I started looking at things around me differently. Instead of looking at a chair and in my head thinking "chair", I looked at it as a shape and a surface with a texture (not thinking those words, just looking). This opened up a world of beauty, not only in natural objects, but also in man made things, especially in metals. The key change was to not categorize or label the things but instead become vulnerable to their features and let them move me. It had unexpected but pleasant everyday effects, such as stopping at a door I always used and in awe contemplating the door handle.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  That is quite interesting. What you stumbled upon yourself is a technique used by many meditation teachers to help in awakening. I think the the idea is the moment you categorize something you stop knowing what the thing is and replace it with belief. Glad you are having fun with it :)

nefrix 2y ago

Why did you delete the links? Your comment regarding the ego stayed with me, and today I wanted to access again the links you shared, and saw that were deleted.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
Do you mean mean this one ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115 I also recommend Waking up with Sam Harris. That's what got me started.

calstad 2y ago

I know it’s a bit of a personal question, but can you elaborate on your ego diluting experience?

hshshshshsh 2y ago
I think it would be really hard to understand without experiencing it. But I will write down anyway. So before dilution I had this strong idea of who I was. I had this back story. There were certain things I do. And certain things I don't do. I used to judge everyone. I had a very high opinion about myself and used to constantly do or find things to validate that. Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Each and every moment is intense. Sunsets are absolutely beautiful that you cannot describe through words. Spending time in nature is surreal. You do the right thing instead of doing things to validate your narrative. The dopamine hit I used to get when I used to do certain things is gone( i use to confuse these dopamine hits as me doing something right). This unlocks doing things more from Intuition and less from memory. There is less fear. There is more flow. More creativity. No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe. That said it's not all great stuff. You also have to work through some existential questions which you were previously isolated by the ego. Like mortality. Impermanence of everything. Aging body. What happens after death. Nature of awareness. Why I am aware. Is awareness eternal and it's implications etc etc.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  Happy to hear that worked out for you, that sounds like a great place to be. What facilitated the change though, or how did that happen? Was there a catalyst?
  - hshshshshsh 2y ago
    Sorry. I can't write it down because I think what I did was reckless and stupid and I don't want to give any ideas in a high visible thread like this. For a lot of people this is triggered by something unexpected happening in life which breaks the narrative one has been building their entire life. You can search for Spiritual Awakening and find a lot of examples. Buddha at the Gas Pump is a great podcast to listen to for such experiences. As I sad it's not all great all the times. There were a lot of times in which I wished I could go back to the old mode. Though I think the overall change was for the better.
    - vasco 2y ago
      Isn't this just another meta level of ego? Now you're elevated above everyone in the rat race because you "dilluted" your ego. But that's still the voice in your head controlling you, it just convinced you it doesn't anymore. Buddhist philosophy always failed to click for me because of this.
      - hshshshshsh 2y ago
        Hmm. There is no voice which says the ego is diluted. The volume of the talk is lowered. Previously it was at 100. It lowered down to 4 or 5. Previously I used to listen to the voice and memories to make decisions. Since both got lowered in intensity , I now have to rely on Intuition to make decisions. And not recollection of what I did previously. Which makes things new. And sometimes give an almost child like curiosity. Even doing something as simple as going for a walk is amazing. Since the mind is not constantly trying to predict what is next and characterising things as I have seen this or not. You notice things you have never noticed before. The awareness is heightened.
    - 2y ago

mangomountain 2y ago

This is spot on for the audiobook I’m listening to “Mindset: The Psychology of Success” , it’s resistance to effort that preserves belief in effortless ability and prevents any real progress

Jerrrrrrry 2y ago

I am suffering from this. Every word you wrote stabbed me in my past, which means dissonance, somewhere. Subconscious self-sabotage to rip the proverbial band-aid off, induced manic/delirium from a small infection, rumination/paranoia, catatonia. Took less consciousness away from my delaying of problems. My ego didn't handle it, the manic iD, did. I had successfully ran away from all my problems, failing upwards just enough to irk out a cowardly existence. If Moses had an antibiotic, or had flossed more, the 4(0?) days of desert-delirium may not had been so fearlessly familiar. after day 4-5 of catatonic rumination and paralyzing anxiety: I cried aloud, "just give me an ounce of strength"; that let me ruminate as to why: I was asking for help: I am not allowed to. why not? skip that token, backprop later. Why an ounce? and why of strength? and why am I asking aloud? and who am I asking? ... Why an ounce? Why not a ratio of my body mass? Why not an arbitrary....because I have 0. Zero what? Strength? Why am I asking for strength? Because I am a coward. and Occam's Razor clicked, all my problems stemmed from cowardice. I awoke to find myself identifying with "depersonalization" for once, which was embarrassing. But embarrassing/cringe is dissonance, so my ego deconstruction began. Morality is cowardice in disguise. <-- Stuck here, unable to proceed. Too axiomatic. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for. Not out of the woods yet, but at least I know I am in a familiar forest.

3abiton 2y ago

This mirros my experience during my studies. The first few years were excruciating.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
Yes. I am just at my first year. It has been really bad in beginning. Now I am getting used to it slowly.

slibhb 2y ago

It's hard to get more ironic than farming upvotes on the internet talking about how you transcended ego or whatever.

masspro 2y ago
Or maybe they just wanted to share something connected to the article
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  It’s a signalling problem, a 31 day old pseudonymous account is pretty always going to enjoy vastly less credibility than say a 10 year old account with hundreds of thousand of karma. If the latter wrote the above comment, nobody would question if the real intention was farming for this or that, since it would make practically no difference for the account holder or the passing reader.
  - Gud 2y ago
    Wouldn’t it make more sense to suspect the account with hundreds of thousands of karma points to be the karma farmer?
    - hshshshshsh 2y ago
      You should always be suspicious of anything that you have not experienced yourself. I used to care about HN karma a lot before spiritual awakening. Had 2 accounts with 2000+ karma before. It was one of those things that helped in building a grand ego for myself. Now I just prefer to post from randomly created HN accounts. You can probably come back a few months later and see this account to be no longer active.
      - hshshshshsh 2y ago
        Ahh. I think I misread what you wrote. Ignore the above comment.

tjpnz 2y ago

That hurt. Is there a name for this?

shrubble 2y ago

It’s an interesting concept; I am in the process of learning Scheme and I am not very good at it at the moment. I can see that my ego is getting in the way of doing more practice; the reading of Scheme books is much easier than writing some simple programs such as the practice ones at RosettaCode…

jwrallie 2y ago

By “accidentally went through” do you mean without a specific trigger or cause? Or do you mean there was one (or more) but you had no control over it?

sfn42 2y ago
Kind of sounds like they accidentally had a big dose of shrooms or something like that.

Arisaka1 2y ago

This speaks volumes for me. I always wondered how as a kid I would bust my face until I can be good at the hardest video games because those happened to be purchased as a present or from myself. And also I have font memories of my first IT job building software for work and would make something working in a few hours. And my conclusion so far is: standards. I didn't had standards of what constitutes "fair difficulty", "good code", and more. So I would just give myself reps in both activities to become better without care. Now that I'm older I second guess myself and worry about the things I attempt to build or play, all the time: "is this best practice?", "am I building it right?", "this game is too hard, it must be because it's unfair or poorly game designed". And so I've decided to give myself room to enjoy myself without a single care in the world: I completed a game called "Metaphor Refantazio" on Hard, without looking at guides, without worrying about "best team comp", "where to get best gear" etc. and when I got stuck instead of looking things up I took a step back, looked what classes and gear I had to work with and figured things out on my own. Don't get me wrong: the ideas and approaches I came up with were far from optimal (I can find videos of people killing the hardest bosses in one turn). But what matters is that they were my ideas. This game had been therapeutic for me in many ways, and this was only one. But my point is, just like doing this makes you a better gamer, doing this in moderation can make you a better programmer. I'm not talking about "pretend the standard library, books and docs don't exist" but I mean "pretend tutorials on YouTube don't exist". I feel like tutorial hell can stem from exactly the same insecurities and desire for higher standards.

canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]
DoingSomeThings 2y ago
The video game example resonates. I realized recently that I load up walkthroughs by default. Before I’ve even turned the game on, I’m already following someone else’s ideas of best practice. I think it comes from a misplaced belief about saving time and optimizing for “best” solutions. Taking a less optimal path is scary, even in a game with 0 real world consequences. I’ll consider that next time.

blueyes 2y ago

"Reading and writing more" are just aspirations. Those don't translate well to new behaviors. BJ Fogg (Stanford prof, behavioral scientist) lays out how to build new behaviors in Tiny Habits. You need to make them easy and attach the easy thing to something you already do regularly. (When I sit down to lunch, I read one page...) https://tinyhabits.com/ https://tinyhabits.com/ Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwey talks about this in the Inner Game of Tennis (which is not really about tennis! ;). Your critic is not allowing you to "run hot" and put down some words that are less than perfect. It would be helpful to find something to focus your mind on, a simple count, like key strokes or word count. Alternatively, there's the practice of Morning Pages from the Artist's Way. Just let yourself write anything for a while. It's not for publication. You need to open the gates and you can do that by lowering the stakes involved with putting a word on the page. Inner Game https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314 https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance... Artists Way https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/0143129252/ https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431... I wrote about some other stuff here that helps. https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-better https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...

1jss 2y ago

Thanks for sharing your story here! I think your comments and answers are thoughtful and well stated. I don't share the Buddhist worldview but can relate anyways in terms of art. When learning to model in 3D I started looking at things around me differently. Instead of looking at a chair and in my head thinking "chair", I looked at it as a shape and a surface with a texture (not thinking those words, just looking). This opened up a world of beauty, not only in natural objects, but also in man made things, especially in metals. The key change was to not categorize or label the things but instead become vulnerable to their features and let them move me. It had unexpected but pleasant everyday effects, such as stopping at a door I always used and in awe contemplating the door handle.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
That is quite interesting. What you stumbled upon yourself is a technique used by many meditation teachers to help in awakening. I think the the idea is the moment you categorize something you stop knowing what the thing is and replace it with belief. Glad you are having fun with it :)