Several years ago, Alicorn wrote an article about how she hacked herself to be polyamorous.  I'm interested in methods for hacking myself to be aromantic.  I've had some success with this, so I'll share what's worked for me, but I'm really hoping you all will chime in with your ideas in the comments.

Motivation

Why would someone want to be aromantic?  There's the obvious time commitment involved in romance, which can be considerable.  This is an especially large drain if you're in a situation where finding suitable partners is difficult, which means most of this time is spent enduring disappointment (e.g. if you're heterosexual and the balance of singles in your community is unfavorable).

But I think an even better way to motivate aromanticism is by referring you to this Paul Graham essay, The Top Idea in Your Mind.  To be effective at accomplishing your goals, you'd like to have your goals be the most interesting thing you have to think about.  I find it's far too easy for my love life to become the most interesting thing I have to think about, for obvious reasons.

Subproblems

After thinking some, I came up with a list of 4 goals people try to achieve through engaging in romance:

1. Companionship.
2. Sexual pleasure.
3. Infatuation (also known as new relationship energy).
4. Validation.  This one is trickier than the previous three, but I think it's arguably the most important.  Many unhappy singles have friends they are close to, and know how to masturbate, but they still feel lousy in a way people in post-infatuation relationships do not.  What's going on?  I think it's best described as a sort of romantic insecurity.  To test this out, imagine a time when someone you were interested in was smiling at you, and contrast that with the feeling of someone you were interested in turning you down.  You don't have to experience companionship or sexual pleasure from these interactions for them to have a major impact on your "romantic self-esteem".  And in a culture where singlehood is considered a failure, it's natural for your "romantic self-esteem" to take a hit if you're single.

To remove the need for romance, it makes sense to find quicker and less distracting ways to achieve each of these 4 goals.  So I'll treat each goal as a subproblem and brainstorm ideas for solving it.  Subproblems 1 through 3 all seem pretty easy to solve:

Subproblem 4 seems trickiest.

Hacking Romantic Self-Esteem

I'll note that what I'm describing as "validation" or "romantic self-esteem" seems closely related to abundance mindset.  But I think it's useful to keep them conceptually distinct.  Although alieving that there are many people you could date is one way to boost your romantic self-esteem, it's not necessarily the only strategy.

The most important thing to keep in mind about your romantic self-esteem is that it's heavily affected by the availability heuristic.  If I was encouraged by someone in 2015, that won't do much to assuage the sting of discouragement in 2016, except maybe if it happens to come to mind.

Another clue is the idea of a sexual "dry spell".  Dry spells are supposed to get worse the longer they go on... which simply means that if your mind doesn't have a recent (available!) incident of success to latch on, you're more likely to feel down.

So to increase your romantic self-esteem, keep a cherished list of thoughts suggesting your desirability is high, and don't worry too much about thoughts suggesting your desirability is low.  Here's a freebie: If you're reading this post, it's likely that you are (or will be) quite rich by global standards.  I hear rich people are considered attractive.  Put it on your list!

Other ideas for raising your romantic self-esteem:

• Take steps to maintain your physical appearance, so you will appear marginally more desirable to yourself when you see yourself in the mirror.
• Remind yourself that you're not a victim if you're making a conscious choice to prioritize other aspects of your life.  Point out to yourself things you could be doing to find partners that you're choosing not to do.

I think this is a situation where prevention works better than cure--it's best to work pre-emptively to keep your romantic self-esteem high.  In my experience, low romantic self-esteem leads to unproductive coping mechanisms like distracting myself from dark thoughts by wasting time on the Internet.

The other side of the coin is avoiding hits to your romantic self-esteem.  Here's an interesting snippet from a Quora answer I found:

In general specialized contemplative monastic organisations that tend to separate from the society tend to be celibate while ritual specialists within the society (priests) even if expected to follow a higher standard of ethical and ritual purity tend not to be.

So, it seems like it's easier for heterosexual male monks to stay celibate if they are isolated on a monastery away from women.  Without any possible partners around, there's no one to reject (or distract) them.  Participating in a monastic culture in which long-term singlehood is considered normal & desirable also removes a romantic self-esteem hit.

Retreating to a monastery probably isn't practical, but there may be simpler things you can do.  I recently switched from lifting weights to running in order to get exercise, and I found that running is better for my concentration because I'm not distracted by attractive people at the gym.

It's not supposed to be easy

I shared a bunch of ideas in this post.  But my overall impression is that instilling aromanticism is a very hard problem.  Based on my research, even monks and priests have a difficult time of things.  That's why I'm curious to hear what the Less Wrong community can come up with.  Side note: when possible, please try to make your suggestions gender-neutral so we can avoid gender-related flame wars.  Thanks!

Many of you have already seen Gwern's page on the topic of nicotine use. Nicotine is interesting because it's a stimulant, it may increase intelligence (I believe Daniel Kahneman said he was smarter back when he used to smoke), and it may be useful for habit formation.

However, the Cleveland Clinic thinks they put your heart at risk. This site covers some of the same research, and counterpoint is offered:

Elaine Keller, president of the CASAA, pointed to other recently published research that she said shows outcomes in the “real world” as opposed to a laboratory. One study showed that smokers put on nicotine replacement therapy after suffering an acute coronary event like a heart attack or stroke had no greater risk of a second incident within one year than those who were not.

I managed to get ahold of the study in question, and it seems to me that it damns e-cigarettes by faint praise. Based on a quick skim, researchers studied smokers who recently suffered an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). The treatment group was given e-cigarettes for nicotine replacement therapy, while the control group was left alone. Given that baseline success rates in quitting smoking are on the order of 10-20%, it seems safe to say that the control group mostly continued smoking as they had previously. (The study authors say "tobacco use during follow-up could not be accurately assessed because of the variability in documentation and, therefore, was not included in the present analysis", so we are left guessing.)

29% of the nicotine replacement group suffered an adverse event in the year following the intervention, and 31% of the control group did--similar numbers. So one interpretation of this study is that if you are a smoker in your fifties and you have already experienced an acute coronary syndrome, switching from cigarettes to e-cigs will do little to help you avoid further health issues in the next year. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Another more recent article states that older smokers should see health gains from quitting cigarettes, which hammers the nail in further for e-cigarettes. It also states:

More conclusive answers about how e-cigarettes affect the body long-term are forthcoming, Rose said. Millions in research dollars are being funneled toward this topic.

“There is some poor science,” Rose said. “Everybody is trying to get something out quick in order to get funding.”

So based on this very cursory analysis I'm inclined to hold off until more research comes in. But these are just a few data points--I haven't read this government review which claims "e-cigarettes are about 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes", for example.

The broad issue I see is that most e-cigarette literature is focused on whether switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is a good idea, not whether using e-cigarettes as a nonsmoker is a good idea. I'm inclined to believe the first is true, but I'd hesitate to use research that proves the first to prove the second (as exemplified by the study I took a look at).

Anyway, if you're in the US and you want to buy e-cigarette products it may be best to do it soon before they're regulated out of existence.

Many LessWrong users are depressed. On the most recent survey, 18.2% of respondents had been formally diagnosed with depression, and a further 25.5% self-diagnosed with depression. That adds up to nearly half of the LessWrong userbase.

One common treatment for depression is talk therapy. Jonah Sinick writes:

Talk therapy has been shown to reduce depression on average. However:

• Professional therapists are expensive, often charging on order of $120/week if one's insurance doesn't cover them.
• Anecdotally, highly intelligent people find therapy less useful than the average person does, perhaps because there's a gap in intelligence between them and most therapists that makes it difficult for the therapist to understand them.

House of Cards by Robyn Dawes argues that there's no evidence that licensed therapists are better at performing therapy than minimally trained laypeople. The evidence therein raises the possibility that one can derive the benefits of seeing a therapist from talking to a friend.

This requires that one has a friend who:

• is willing to talk with you about your emotions on a regular basis
• you trust to the point of feeling comfortable sharing your emotions

Some reasons to think that talking with a friend may not carry the full benefits of talking with a therapist are

• Conflict of interest — Your friend may be biased for reasons having to do with your pre-existing relationship – for example, he or she might be unwilling to ask certain questions or offer certain feedback out of concern of offending you and damaging your friendship.
• Risk of damaged relationship dynamics — There's a possibility of your friend feeling burdened by a sense of obligation to help you, creating feelings of resentment, and/or of you feeling guilty.
• Risk of breach of confidentiality — Since you and your friend know people in common, there's a possibility that your friend will reveal things that you say to others who you know, that you might not want to be known. In contrast, a therapist generally won't know people in common with you, and is professionally obliged to keep what you say confidential.

Depending on the friend and on the nature of help that you need, these factors may be non-issues, but they're worth considering when deciding between seeing a therapist and talking with a friend.

One idea for solving the problems with talking to a friend is to find someone intellectually similar to you who you don't know--say, someone else who reads LessWrong.

This is a thread for doing that. Please post if you're either interested in using someone as a sounding board or interested in making money being a sounding board using Skype or Google Hangouts. If you want to make money talking to people, I suggest writing out a little resume describing why you might be a nice person to talk to, the time zone you're in, your age (age-matching recommended by Kate), and the hourly rate you wish to charge. You could include your location for improved internet call quality. You might also include contact info to decrease trivial inconveniences for readers who haven't registered a LW account. (I have a feeling that trivial inconveniences are a bigger issue for depressed people.) To help prevent email address harvesting, the convention for this thread is if you write "Contact me at [somename]", that's assumed to mean "my email is [somename]@gmail.com".

Please don't be shy about posting if this sounds like a good fit for you. Let's give people as many options as possible.

I guess another option for folks on a budget is making reciprocal conversation arrangements with another depressed person. So feel free to try & arrange that in this thread as well. I think paying someone is ideal though; listening to depressed people can sometimes be depressing.

BlahTherapy is an interesting site that sets you up with strangers on the internet to talk about your problems with. However, these strangers likely won't have the advantages of high intelligence or shared conceptual vocabulary LessWrong users have. Fortunately we can roll our own version of BlahTherapy by designating "lesswrong-talk-to-someone" as the Schelling interest on Omegle.com. (You can also just use lesswrong as an interest, there are sometimes people on. Or enter random intellectual interests to find smart people to talk to.)

I haven't had very good results using sites like BlahTherapy. I think it's because I only sometimes find someone good, and when they don't work, I end up more depressed than I started. Reaching out in hopes of finding a friend and failing is a depressing experience. So I recommend trying to create a stable relationship with regularly scheduled conversations. I included BlahTherapy and Omegle because they might work well for some people and I didn't want to extrapolate strongly from n=1.

LessWrong user ShannonFriedman seems to work as a life coach judging by the link in her profile. I recommend her posts How to Deal with Depression - The Meta Layers and The Anti-Placebo Effect.

There's also the How to Get Therapy series from LW-sphere blog Gruntled & Hinged. It's primarily directed at people looking for licensed therapists, but may also have useful tips if you're just looking for someone to talk to. The biggest tip I noticed was to schedule a relaxing activity & time to decompress after your conversation.

The book Focusing is supposed to explain the techniques that successful therapy patients use that separate them from unsuccessful therapy patients.  Anna Salamon recommends the audiobook version.

There's also: Methods for Treating Depression, Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression.

I apologize for including so many ideas, but I figured it was better to suggest a variety of approaches so the community can collectively identify the most effective solutions for the rationalist depression epidemic. In general, when I'm depressed, I notice myself starting and stopping activities in a very haphazard way, repeatedly telling myself that the activity I'm doing isn't the one I "should" be doing. I've found it pretty useful to choose one activity arbitrarily and persist in it for a while. This is often sufficient to bootstrap myself out of a depressed state. I'd recommend doing the same here: choose an option and put a nontrivial amount of effort into exploring it before discarding it. Create a todo list and bulldoze your way down it.

Good luck. I'm rooting for you!

Legal note: Talking to unlicensed people over the internet is not a substitute for professional help. If you are depressed you should visit a licensed therapist.