= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
AdeleneDawner comments on Too busy to think about life - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (62)
I have this problem, too (and it doesn't feel like an excuse to me, though I don't as much class it as a problem as a fact about me, at this point), and this sounds like an interesting approach.
My answer would start with 'For the most part I honestly don't care, but...'.
Good start. Next time, keep going for ten minutes. (It's OK if you decide to keep the result to yourself instead of posting it as a comment.)
You might have a "convince yourself that life is pointless" bias...
Something else that might help is to rephrase the question and ask what you would do.
If there was a button to safely stop a happy, healthy, responsible mother from getting hit by a car, would you push it? Or maybe, would you have pushed it in the past? Not do you care but would you push it?
If there were two buttons, one to make the tasty food in your house disappear, and one to make the garbage disappear, and you could only push one, which one would it be? Not do you care, but which one?
You could take your choices as evidence that some part of your brain might care. If you're going to do these things anyway, and they don't seem common-sensically-morally wrong, then why not try to care more about doing them?
You can do that by making a decision that your choices will follow a system. Being aware of the system, over time, the effect of cognitive dissonance resolution might just be that your emotions get more involved and you actually start caring more.
It happened to me, for reals :)
I'd expect to be having trouble with general apathy and/or depression if that were the case, and I'm not. (I do experience a fair bit of apathy, but it's the comfortable 'hey, not my problem' kind of apathy: not troublesome, actually very close to contentment.)
If it were convenient, sure. I wouldn't go especially far out of my way to, though, in practice.
This comes under 'basic maintenance', in my book. I'd be willing to devote as much energy to pushing the 'remove garbage' button as I'd be willing to put into cleaning my house the normal way (which is, um, not actually very much), and perhaps a little more for the novelty value.
Why should I value 'caring more'? I'm quite satisfied with my life as it is now.
(It might be useful to note for context that I appear to be a satisficing consequentialist by nature. 'Good enough' makes lots of sense to me, and most of the bits of the world that I seem most likely to be able to change are already good enough. The bits that aren't good enough, I do put effort into fixing, including long-term effort. But the idea of having some sort of intentional long-term effect on things mostly just makes me go o.O)
Ah, I got the impression when you said
that you viewed this as a problem, but I guess now that you were just continuing the already-established word choice.
ETA: Something to note... you seem to be distinguishing yourself by your aversion to effort:
That doesn't mean you care or feel strongly about avoiding effort moreso than the people your description aims to distinguish you from, but simply that you assign more negative utility to it.