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> Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is b

> Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one character. You say you've lost your 'story' and your 'character', that you don't 'act' anymore. But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do. And by acting like that person in your head would, you start to feel the same way too. I think it's a lot more complicated than how I'm thinking. But I really do have a strong intuition that people feel the way they think the person they're acting like should feel, when physical feelings are non-factors. Really, I don't actually know. Like, what we actually do and what we say we do; what we actually think and what we say we think. What we say we do and think feel like things we're saying to trick ourselves into doing and thinking those things. That's I guess the core of my intuition.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
Did you experience this or are you guessing? Because I think you are thinking this again through ego. I don't have a thought that I appreciate sunset when I see one. The sunset looks magical. There is a shift in experience. Before watching sunset was like watching in 420p. Now it's 4k. The consciousness is heightened. You only see the sunset. You don't think of old memories of sunset. Or random events from past or thing you have to do. You just see the sunset. It's not the commentary that changed from hey yet another sunset to I appreciate sunset. The commentary is gone or minimised and the resolution is increased. And there are no memories from past to distract you from experiencing the sunset. And this applies to most things. It's just nature has a lot of stuff that work well with heightened awareness. You don't want to spend your time with a heightened awareness and live next to a highway. That works against you.
- rsktaker 2y ago
  I'm guessing but it's not without some experience. I feel like I trick myself all the time - to guide myself towards becoming what I want to be. There was a time when I felt unintelligent and incapable of great, technical things. So I kind of just did things that it seemed capable people did. I felt like people who are smart, capable, and rich now, hacked things when they were young and were rebellious and broke the rules and did whatever they wanted and put lots of effort into random interesting things because they were interesting. So, because the end goal was attractive to me in a way, I tried to do those things too - maybe consciously, maybe not. I feel like that process made me different though. I have genuinely changed into someone far more capable technically, way more interested in super 'nerdy' things. Anyway, I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I don't really get it. But sunsets are nice - I like seeing them too. Yeah I suppose what I mean was that the commentary changed. Interesting that for you there's no commentary, I think I've felt like that before. Sometimes I feel like I just exist in a nice feeling - no words, nothing. Just experiencing. But that doesn't last very long, or it turns into something negative like boredom or something. Then I get up with a bad feeling lol
  - tmnvix 2y ago
    > I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I think most people are familiar with the feeling of being in a 'flow state'. Contrasting this with times when we indulge in a stream of 'self referential thought' is, in my opinion, a good way to grasp how ego influences our state of mind. Try to imagine being in a flow state without actually doing anything other than observing. It's something I experience at times when I'm in a beautiful natural environment. I try to bring this feeling into my everyday life.
    - svara 2y ago
      > Try to imagine being in a flow state without actually doing anything other than observing. It's something I experience at times when I'm in a beautiful natural environment. I try to bring this feeling into my everyday life. I think you explained this very clearly and beautifully. I think I know exactly what you mean. I used to find a lot of comfort in being able to get myself into this state of mind easily, usually, like you, by just calmly observing natural surroundings in environments that are special to me. That was in my late teens and early twenties. I'm now about 15 years older and find it so much harder. I think it has something to do with living a hectic adult life, and I really hope I'll be able to find back to that some time. Part of me really believes that to experience life in this way is what we're here for and modern life's way of distancing us from this experience is something we need to be very wary of.
jcul 2y ago
In my humble opinion, the experience is more one of realizing you've been acting and not having to identify so much with the character you are playing. It's hard to describe, because you're still doing the act, just some part of you realizes the unimportance of it. And some of that realization shines through in the act itself, in your character.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  Yes. That is well put!
Nition 2y ago
Something related to this that I've been thinking about. We all have kind of a story of ourselves and our life through various memories that make a picture of who we are. But if you ever meet up with someone you haven't seen for 20 years, or find some old documents, or whatever, stuff can easily come up that you've completely forgotten, or reframe things in a whole different light. We know this kind of thing happens with history - certain people become famous while others drift into obscurity, things get remembered incorrectly etc - but it also happens with your own memory of your own life. The only real way around it is keeping a journal.
uoaei 2y ago
I share your theory. I understand it best in the converse, i.e., we can delude ourselves into thinking we will never be able to understand X or do Y. Not that many can personally identify with the experience, but a huge part of why people think they are "bad at math" is because they tell themselves so. They expect it based on stories they hear from others and then they reinforce it by getting nervous in critical situations and getting flustered. It is the same with positive change -- after a certain point you have to come to terms with what you have been telling yourself about your downsides and how arbitrary and mean that is, and then you can find some distance from that characterization of yourself and begin to work on a new one (which should be expected to be ultimately supplanted by the next, etc.).
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
This guy is right. The OP might be completely truthful and not lying to himself, but the probability that he isn't is quite high. Same as reading someone calling himself a genius, might be true, but it rarely is. Further posts clearly portray what one might call "McBuddhism", complete with meditation and the new age "don't judge others!". Judgement is an animal mechanism, it's your subconscious quickly putting people in boxes to ascertain their intentions and reliability then your conscious refining that rough estimate. You can't "turn off" judgement, only keep it inside. Once again, people being misled around by emotions and tone. Judgement is a tool, it's not good or bad by itself, what matters is its accuracy, i.e. truth.
- tailspin2019 2y ago
  Judgement is an animal instinct as you say, but I think it can also be a cognitive habit. Our self awareness - in theory - allows us to change our habits, or at least temper them. So my experience of this is that my default animal instinct is to automatically judge people in a negatively biased way (which I think may come from our evolutionary instinct to try to predict danger - or if not, perhaps something encoded in me specifically at an early age) but I have tried to adopt the conscious habit of overriding this initial instinct with “mediating thoughts” like “what do I really know about this person?” and “how would I behave if I were in their position”. I also try to simply remember my discovered self-knowledge that my instinctive emotional response - pre-thought - is to be distrustful or overly negative. Just keeping that in mind helps automatically attack the judgemental thoughts as they come up. I guess it helps me recognise the pattern and not trust those thoughts. I’m quite convinced that I’ve done this for long enough now that my “habit” of automatically judging people has lessened over time. The instinct is still there, but better cognitive habits have been overlaid on top. That said, I still feel I’m about 5-10% along in terms of progress compared to where I’d want to be! (And in reality there is no “end” to this work). My outward behaviour towards others is generally “good” - I think - but I find myself often frustrated at the instinctive negativity in my head which I have to proactively counter - each and every time. And because I’m human, I sometimes (ok… often) forget to.
1659447091 2y ago
> But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do. I think this is a case of words are hard. OP was asked to elaborate, and tried to put into words a state of being. It wasn't as another story of self, the previous state of having stories of the self was in the original post. This was an attempt to describe something, I am not sure language is nuanced enough to grasp it, or encompass it. I personally experience it as "inner peace" or "acceptance", very close to the core essence of philosophical Daoism or Epictetus' Stocism; I've never been able to put it into words but as another comment says: >> The problem is that state cannot be expressed in words or cognition, because it isn't part of your mind. Which I find to be a great way to express it. It doesn't mean being a transcended guru or anything; for me, the more I work on myself the more I find things that are leftover relics given to me, and I work on figuring out if that idea or values are actually mine or someone else's, and if mine, are they outdated (why did something trigger it) what needs to be reworked, does it need to be reworked. If it is someone else's, do I want to keep it or discard it. Thats one of the more actionable ways I try and explain the years of inner work to get here (by here it sometimes feels like the starting line, not the finish). One day while hiking I stopped in my tracks as it hit me that I could not think of the last time I berated myself (this use to consume a lot of my time, but no one ever knew it), or was triggered into aggressivly defending my ego or tried to be something other than myself for others. I think we are told to build the outer self (protect and hide the vulenable inner), for me that was backwards, build the inner, "know thyself", and you don't need to build an outer protective shell. It's a much more "authentic" self experience, one I don't have to think about. Of course there are bad days and negative thoughts, but compared to what it was..., its rainbows and butterflies with a couple passing rain clouds now.
escapedmoose 2y ago
This sounds a lot like Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of living/acting “in bad faith.” You might be interested to read more about it: https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith-and-the-harms-of-inauthenticity/ https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith...

hshshshshsh 2y ago

Did you experience this or are you guessing? Because I think you are thinking this again through ego. I don't have a thought that I appreciate sunset when I see one. The sunset looks magical. There is a shift in experience. Before watching sunset was like watching in 420p. Now it's 4k. The consciousness is heightened. You only see the sunset. You don't think of old memories of sunset. Or random events from past or thing you have to do. You just see the sunset. It's not the commentary that changed from hey yet another sunset to I appreciate sunset. The commentary is gone or minimised and the resolution is increased. And there are no memories from past to distract you from experiencing the sunset. And this applies to most things. It's just nature has a lot of stuff that work well with heightened awareness. You don't want to spend your time with a heightened awareness and live next to a highway. That works against you.

rsktaker 2y ago
I'm guessing but it's not without some experience. I feel like I trick myself all the time - to guide myself towards becoming what I want to be. There was a time when I felt unintelligent and incapable of great, technical things. So I kind of just did things that it seemed capable people did. I felt like people who are smart, capable, and rich now, hacked things when they were young and were rebellious and broke the rules and did whatever they wanted and put lots of effort into random interesting things because they were interesting. So, because the end goal was attractive to me in a way, I tried to do those things too - maybe consciously, maybe not. I feel like that process made me different though. I have genuinely changed into someone far more capable technically, way more interested in super 'nerdy' things. Anyway, I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I don't really get it. But sunsets are nice - I like seeing them too. Yeah I suppose what I mean was that the commentary changed. Interesting that for you there's no commentary, I think I've felt like that before. Sometimes I feel like I just exist in a nice feeling - no words, nothing. Just experiencing. But that doesn't last very long, or it turns into something negative like boredom or something. Then I get up with a bad feeling lol
- tmnvix 2y ago
  > I don't know what it means to think this through ego. I think most people are familiar with the feeling of being in a 'flow state'. Contrasting this with times when we indulge in a stream of 'self referential thought' is, in my opinion, a good way to grasp how ego influences our state of mind. Try to imagine being in a flow state without actually doing anything other than observing. It's something I experience at times when I'm in a beautiful natural environment. I try to bring this feeling into my everyday life.
  - svara 2y ago
    > Try to imagine being in a flow state without actually doing anything other than observing. It's something I experience at times when I'm in a beautiful natural environment. I try to bring this feeling into my everyday life. I think you explained this very clearly and beautifully. I think I know exactly what you mean. I used to find a lot of comfort in being able to get myself into this state of mind easily, usually, like you, by just calmly observing natural surroundings in environments that are special to me. That was in my late teens and early twenties. I'm now about 15 years older and find it so much harder. I think it has something to do with living a hectic adult life, and I really hope I'll be able to find back to that some time. Part of me really believes that to experience life in this way is what we're here for and modern life's way of distancing us from this experience is something we need to be very wary of.

jcul 2y ago

In my humble opinion, the experience is more one of realizing you've been acting and not having to identify so much with the character you are playing. It's hard to describe, because you're still doing the act, just some part of you realizes the unimportance of it. And some of that realization shines through in the act itself, in your character.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
Yes. That is well put!

Nition 2y ago

Something related to this that I've been thinking about. We all have kind of a story of ourselves and our life through various memories that make a picture of who we are. But if you ever meet up with someone you haven't seen for 20 years, or find some old documents, or whatever, stuff can easily come up that you've completely forgotten, or reframe things in a whole different light. We know this kind of thing happens with history - certain people become famous while others drift into obscurity, things get remembered incorrectly etc - but it also happens with your own memory of your own life. The only real way around it is keeping a journal.

uoaei 2y ago

I share your theory. I understand it best in the converse, i.e., we can delude ourselves into thinking we will never be able to understand X or do Y. Not that many can personally identify with the experience, but a huge part of why people think they are "bad at math" is because they tell themselves so. They expect it based on stories they hear from others and then they reinforce it by getting nervous in critical situations and getting flustered. It is the same with positive change -- after a certain point you have to come to terms with what you have been telling yourself about your downsides and how arbitrary and mean that is, and then you can find some distance from that characterization of yourself and begin to work on a new one (which should be expected to be ultimately supplanted by the next, etc.).

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

This guy is right. The OP might be completely truthful and not lying to himself, but the probability that he isn't is quite high. Same as reading someone calling himself a genius, might be true, but it rarely is. Further posts clearly portray what one might call "McBuddhism", complete with meditation and the new age "don't judge others!". Judgement is an animal mechanism, it's your subconscious quickly putting people in boxes to ascertain their intentions and reliability then your conscious refining that rough estimate. You can't "turn off" judgement, only keep it inside. Once again, people being misled around by emotions and tone. Judgement is a tool, it's not good or bad by itself, what matters is its accuracy, i.e. truth.

tailspin2019 2y ago
Judgement is an animal instinct as you say, but I think it can also be a cognitive habit. Our self awareness - in theory - allows us to change our habits, or at least temper them. So my experience of this is that my default animal instinct is to automatically judge people in a negatively biased way (which I think may come from our evolutionary instinct to try to predict danger - or if not, perhaps something encoded in me specifically at an early age) but I have tried to adopt the conscious habit of overriding this initial instinct with “mediating thoughts” like “what do I really know about this person?” and “how would I behave if I were in their position”. I also try to simply remember my discovered self-knowledge that my instinctive emotional response - pre-thought - is to be distrustful or overly negative. Just keeping that in mind helps automatically attack the judgemental thoughts as they come up. I guess it helps me recognise the pattern and not trust those thoughts. I’m quite convinced that I’ve done this for long enough now that my “habit” of automatically judging people has lessened over time. The instinct is still there, but better cognitive habits have been overlaid on top. That said, I still feel I’m about 5-10% along in terms of progress compared to where I’d want to be! (And in reality there is no “end” to this work). My outward behaviour towards others is generally “good” - I think - but I find myself often frustrated at the instinctive negativity in my head which I have to proactively counter - each and every time. And because I’m human, I sometimes (ok… often) forget to.

1659447091 2y ago

> But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do. I think this is a case of words are hard. OP was asked to elaborate, and tried to put into words a state of being. It wasn't as another story of self, the previous state of having stories of the self was in the original post. This was an attempt to describe something, I am not sure language is nuanced enough to grasp it, or encompass it. I personally experience it as "inner peace" or "acceptance", very close to the core essence of philosophical Daoism or Epictetus' Stocism; I've never been able to put it into words but as another comment says: >> The problem is that state cannot be expressed in words or cognition, because it isn't part of your mind. Which I find to be a great way to express it. It doesn't mean being a transcended guru or anything; for me, the more I work on myself the more I find things that are leftover relics given to me, and I work on figuring out if that idea or values are actually mine or someone else's, and if mine, are they outdated (why did something trigger it) what needs to be reworked, does it need to be reworked. If it is someone else's, do I want to keep it or discard it. Thats one of the more actionable ways I try and explain the years of inner work to get here (by here it sometimes feels like the starting line, not the finish). One day while hiking I stopped in my tracks as it hit me that I could not think of the last time I berated myself (this use to consume a lot of my time, but no one ever knew it), or was triggered into aggressivly defending my ego or tried to be something other than myself for others. I think we are told to build the outer self (protect and hide the vulenable inner), for me that was backwards, build the inner, "know thyself", and you don't need to build an outer protective shell. It's a much more "authentic" self experience, one I don't have to think about. Of course there are bad days and negative thoughts, but compared to what it was..., its rainbows and butterflies with a couple passing rain clouds now.

escapedmoose 2y ago

This sounds a lot like Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of living/acting “in bad faith.” You might be interested to read more about it: https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith-and-the-harms-of-inauthenticity/ https://philosophybreak.com/articles/sartre-waiter-bad-faith...