(og thread) vague intuition that a critical factor of why behavior change/redesign is so unsuccessful so often is: insufficient support for the turbulent emotional quality of the transition. There’s a glossing over of how much sadness, despair, despondence there often is in the process

every cope is an emotional support cope, and on the inside at some level we become screaming crying babies when you take our pacifiers from us. behavior change necessitates that we both be this new kind generous supportive adult and the old screaming baby simultaneously

several good corollaries/implications here, one is that obviously behavior change becomes MUCH easier if you do it in concert with supportive peers, environments… (sometimes people think their bottleneck is time but it’s actually the absence of a supportive context)

another is that, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that someone who has managed such a transition is probably more capable than most re: managing “turbulence” in general. A lot of my favorite people are like this. It’s no guarantee that they will be dysfunction-free though

(When I say “dysfunction” here I mean less “they have issues”- everyone has issues- and more, “they have issues with the way they manage their issues”. This too, technically everyone has, but that’s like saying “everyone’s a little crazy”. There are consequential thresholds.)

The tricky thing about kinship is- everything that’s better with good friends is worse with bad friends, and it can be very hard to know the difference from the inside especially when you’re still working through your own worst dysfunctions

also interesting to think about how context dependent dysfunction can be, and how a person with some horrendous dysfunctions can still live an approximate good life by steering clear of what they know they cannot manage. But the more of life you avoid this way, the hollower it is

re: therapy, a good therapist should be like a full-stack “suffering engineer” but bad therapists are more like script-following “suffering technicians”– and as with friends, the more down bad you are, the harder it is to know in the short/medium term if you’ve got it good or bad

in both cases, once you get sufficiently good at knowing how to ask for the help you need, you can actually get far more out of an “average” or “decent” actor than most people tend to assume is possible. but again, the ppl who most need help, don’t know how to ask for it

this is an extreme caricature example using a literal chatbot, but it’s illustrative of how a script-following therapist can leave you worse off. one would hope that no human therapist is this bad. Knowing humans, it’s imo near-certain that some are actually worse 😅💀

apparent in the exchange is that the person is suffering from being in an unsustainable, unjust environment, and obviously no chatbot or even an excellent therapist can fix injustice for you. But imo at least properly acknowledging the truth of the matter would be of some relief

then once you acknowledge that you’re stuck in a losing game and you’ve grieved etc the tragedy of that, it becomes a question of how you’re going to play the shit hand you’ve been dealt. “Do more breathing exercises for anxiety” is not an intrinsically bad suggestion but… until you come to terms with the full truth of everything about your life – from your mortality to the nature of the context you’re in to the range of options you have to trade-offs you’re making – there’ll just be more fresh new anxiety. And tbf this is a massive project…

and “become enlightened” is probably not a sustainable or accessible solution for most people just trying to live their life with less suffering. But yeah there has to be a whole spectrum of options between “breathing exercises” (good!) and “Buddha mode” (also good? lol)

If I were talking with a depressed teacher friend I’d probably ask them a bunch of questions, mainly, from a place of genuine human curiosity and affection. What got you into teaching? What if you just quit? (followup q’s) What if you semi-quit by just not doing some stuff?

usually then what comes up is a bunch of guilt, a sense of obligation, etc (which if you zoom out you can see how the wider education apparatus exploits this) and we gotta talk about realistic/reasonable expectations for a human being in unfair circumstances

and maybe in the grand scheme of things that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? to bring it all back bc it’s all connected, that’s why we use our copes and pacifiers, to deal with the Sisyphean task of trying to live reasonably in an absurd universe

there’s another POV on all of this that’s less dire, it involves humor and silliness, but I’m currently too sleep-deprived to bring it up gracefully in plaintext in a way that wouldn’t come across as insulting to someone who’s struggling. It does involve “to hell with everyone!”, but in a cheeky-cheerful way the way Alan Watts might say it

I slept maybe 4-5 hours and woke up with the thought “hmm I should write about behavior change”. deranged behavior. which I will not change

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(jun2022 thread) For two decades now I’ve been pondering varying versions of the question “why do we not do more of that which we know to be good for us”, and I think the dominant answer I return to is “there is a part of us which does not want it”

this thought recurred to me this morning when I woke up with a groggy head and it suddenly occurred to me that I used to solve my grogginess with box breathing- it works fantastically and there’s no downside – and/but at some point I just stopped doing it and went groggy instead

it does also seem to me to be true that there are people who look and seem conventionally successful who get there by basically suppressing the Do Not Want part of them, gagging and tying them up in a cellar of the subconscious, mocking and insulting them…

I’ve always sensed that this is not a healthy or happy way to live, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of cautionary tales, Midas tragedies. And I’ve heard from remarkable people doing remarkable things about how anxious, despondent, lonely, depressed and despairing they are

the interesting Q to me then is to really get to know and really understand my void self. at the end of the spectrum some will say that shadows cannot be perceived, known, understood, only feared. there’s some truth in that but it’s not the whole truth. language is tricky

LOL it’s almost like gender stuff

men and women both talking about each other like the other = incomprehensible aliens

some of incomprehensibility is “you’re not even trying”

a lot of it is “you’re starting with a set of assumptions and you don’t even realize what they are”

(Obi Wan: Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.)

a lot of the first version of @introspectvv is about preparing the reader – and myself, really – for all the hard, self-annihilating questions. I talk abt the latter too, but a lot of that stuff is vague and sketchy and under construction bc I’m not yet confident in my knowledge