My life was so much simpler when I hated you.
I swear it isn't personal. You're just so completely a person. I kind of have a thing about people, you see.
Altruism is about how you act, not how you feel. 'Keep your identity small' has been my mantra for years, and years, and years. So it shouldn't be that shocking if my goals and personality fail to hang together in cute little narratively satisfying ways. I'm a cold and aloof misanthrope who just happens to want to save the world. I can totally like My Little Pony and not particularly care for friendship. And have it say nothing deeper about me than that I'm capable of distinguishing fiction from reality.
Sorry. Compartmentalization is magic.
I've felt this way for as long as I can remember. And the older I got, the more evidence I accumulated: People are dumb. They're loud. They're cruel. They're boring. Beneath me. Not worth my time. I loathe them. In high school, as in grade school, my best friends were books. My only friends were books — just as I wanted it.
By age 20, I was routinely having panic attacks at social outings.
Unfortunately, being an ambitious hermit is way harder than it looks. I knew my goals required I be able to deal with people, so when I started college I decided to learn to socialize. I didn't have to like it, but I had to be good at it.
My understanding of how to learn things wasn't very sophisticated back then, so I just threw myself into the thick of it. I — I who hated people, I who was terrified of them — joined clubs. Volunteered for clubs. Made friends. Went dancing on the weekends. I set out to improve every group I ran into; and, by and large, I succeeded. By junior year, I was running two student groups officially, one surreptitiously, tutoring five philosophy students while studying pedagogy, and working as a resident assistant (meaning I was caretaker of a floor of 50 freshman girls). I learned how to avoid chaotic gatherings, and how to steer unavoidable socialization into the fixed scripts I felt most comfortable with.
People looked up to me. They saw me as bold, as charismatic, as authoritative. I spent much of my free time huddled in my room exhausted and crying. But I gained many skills very quickly.
On my first visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, I attended a workshop with the Center for Applied Rationality. One of the workshop activities was called "Comfort Zone Expansion", or CoZE for short, and it was basically exposure therapy. They took everyone to a crowded mall and told them to get a little outside their comfort zone. Some of the men had their makeup done, for example, and others were pushing their boundaries just by shaking hands with a few strangers.
The night before CoZE, I couldn't sleep. I was already way outside my comfort zone, spending nearly every moment of every day surrounded by strangers I had to interact with in relatively unstructured ways. During dinner and other break times, I would hide in my room instead of getting to know the extraordinarily intelligent and fascinating participants and instructors. I felt like I was on the edge of a panic attack the entire day leading up to the CoZE exercise. When the time came, I simply couldn't do it. I couldn't even go and sit silently in a crowded area reading a book. The thought of being trapped with other people in a car on the way there made it hard to breathe. I stayed behind.
During the following week, I thought about all the networking opportunities I'd missed. CFAR selects their participants carefully in order to create a certain culture, to build a community that can have the largest impact on the rest of the world. Thus, the people at their workshops are invariably extraordinary. And I'd more or less failed to make friends with a single one of them. Without the familiar structure of academic settings, my hard-earned coping mechanisms hadn't been enough.
It was not because of my failure that this was a tipping point. I'd failed before to accomplish social goals I'd set for myself. But I'd only wanted to want to do those things, on the meta level. They'd seemed like a good idea, but I'd felt no visceral motivation to do them, so I wasn't surprised, or really even disappointed, when they didn't work out. The difference this time was that I really wanted to interact with these people, on the object level. I wanted it, and I couldn't do it.
It was then I noticed I was confused.
If the source of my social difficulties was a deep desire to not interact with other humans, then why, with that desire absent, did the problems remain?
The answer was incredibly obvious when I finally asked myself the question.
My main symptoms: Intense fear of interacting with strangers, especially in unstructured ways. Fear of situations in which I may be judged. Worrying about embarrassing or humiliating myself (mostly by looking stupid). Fear that others will notice that I’m anxious. Having to fight to make eye contact. Intense fear of tests and being tested. Massively inconveniencing myself to avoid socialization. Panic attacks in which I experience trouble breathing, tachycardia, shaking, derealization, and belief that I am dying.
Misanthropy does not cause things like this. Phobias do.
My 'I'm good at manipulating my self-narrative' self-narrative was suddenly falling apart. Without a hell of a lot of introspection and self-honesty, you don't really see your identity as your identity. You see it as the way life is. An invisible backdrop. And all the time I'd been self-modifying, I'd just been lying to myself that I knew which bits of me were 'my identity', and which weren't.
I was even lying to myself about which things I wanted to change about myself — convincing myself that people weren't worth being around, that I liked it this way, that I wouldn't change a thing if I miraculously gained the power to interact with them without feeling my pulse quicken and my throat tighten. That the problem wasn't inside of me.
My identity wasn't small. It was just hiding out of view. And that had given it an awful power over me.
So it turns out I wasn't this awesome distant gleaming badass shunning the humans out of haughty contempt. I wasn't in control. I was scared, and disoriented, and amazingly unhappy. Maybe I was still a sassy curmudgeon of some sort, deep down. But mainly I was just ill.
My story is still a work in progress. I'll have more to tell soon. For now I just want to say: If you're struggling with your own identity, or with a disease of the mind, I'll be rooting for you from where I'm at now. Misanthope or not, I really do want you to make it through this, and see you find peace with your self, see you start to see yourself more clearly. You can stand what is true.
Because you are already enduring it.
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As Robin Hanson has pointed out, beliefs are also a way of showing something about oneself. Tribal membership, moral superiority, etc. A good Cimmerian believes in Crom, the grim gloomy unforgiving god.
My impression is that most people never admit that their beliefs are contradictory, instead they either lash out at whoever is bringing the contradictions to the forefront of their mind or start ignoring him.
Can you give three examples of improvements in your life since your epiphany?
Sure!
1) My conversations with friends are more efficient illuminating. 2) I learn more quickly from mistakes. 3) I prevent more mistakes before they get the chance to happen.
If I hadn't given those examples, could you have predicted positive changes resulting from having generally more accurate beliefs? It really doesn't seem that surprising to me that someone's life would improve in a zillion different ways if they weren't wrong so much.