I'd read Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Lindy effect for the strongest defense of this proposition. Basically all ideas and culture are constantly fighting in a market of culture. For every Jhana there are 1000 different spiritual concepts, which try to occupy the same niche. There has to be something to Jhana's that leads to it still being done today, while the rest became history. That something does not have to necessarily mean that the idea is true, for example meditation in general is known to be very good for you, so if Jhana's work as the carrot on the stick to get people to meditate, then the idea would also stick around, as people start praising Jhana's due to the benefits they got from meditation. But every idea that is old needs to have some sort of payload, something that helped it survive on the market of ideas and culture for millenia.
Started taking Metformin for weight loss. Insane results so far, losing 2lbs/week. Obviously medicine works differently for everyone, and ozempic is probably more effective overall, but if you are priced out of ozempic like me as a student, it is worth to give this a try, since it is incredibly cheap and has lesser side effects.
Thanks! Both your own article and the link were pretty good.
Interestingly my situation resolved, I just kept my attention on the emotion, and one day something happened that made it crystal clear to me what the right course was. A long time friend and formely one of my closest friends treated me like shit, and suddenly I knew that the emotion was that she had to go, and I cut contact. Since then my feelings have returned to an unexciting baseline, with no current big blindspots.
I think the right play is just to keep attention on it, keep it in your periphery, until the gears click and the reason the emotion lies dormant comes into focus.
Somewhat related, but recently I have been trying to get more in touch with my emotions, only to ... not understand what they are telling me? I can often feel a vague sense of unease, or something hinting me at something, but I can't for the life of me make out what my emotions want from me, until I accidentally clear whatever reason there was for me to be uneasy, and the feeling passes, until next time.
There is just not enough feedback, or my emotional vocabulary is missing, it truly feels like your anecdote of trying to wiggle the ears for the first time.
While this is probably not so bad overall, as it means I am past the "Peak of Mount Stupid" and in the "Valley of Despair" of listening to my emotions, it feels irritating. I visualise my mind as a cockpit for my consciousness a lot recently, a bit like an X-Wing cockpit, and now I see a bunch of flickering lights and extra buttons to the sides, but I have no idea what they mean and none of them are labeled properly.
Is there anyone who has had this problem before, or is there any actually good taxonomies of emotions out there? I found most scientific work in this field to be sorely lacking, identifying only 5-7 emotions each, and there are more like 50 visibly distinct ones for all sorts of needs and lacks.
Oh sure! It is fairly abstract, and that could make it more concrete.
I will stick with the video gaming example. I am currently on a schedule that allows me to game 3 days a week, because I tend to get addicted to online card games if unregulated.
However that is a rule that reads (If it is not Monday/Thursday/Sunday, you can't ever game).
That functions, per se, you gain slack by not being compelled to game on these days, but lose it by not being able to game, even if it would be a good idea.
I was super stressed recently, to the point of some latent genetic mental health problems butting up, and I realised the easiest way to hammer down my stress beneath symptom onset would be just another run of Dream Quest. Also I had really really valuable Podcasts to listen to, which were highly relevant to my current interests with great signal/noise ratio, but I can't listen to Podcasts without doing anything else on the side like gaming.
So, a round of Dream Quest with the Podcast in the back ground was the perfect action for the situation, despite defying my rule which was generally good and beneficial. Because my rule lacked exceptions. It now has exceptions for mental health crisises.
The next point is exploit protection. I can also make an ammend to the rule that allows me to game when I have a valuable podcast to listen to, but given how long podcasts tend to be, that is a very easy rule to create exploits with, which would render the whole framework impossible. As such the rule also needs an exploit inhibitor for an exploitable exception.
The rule now looks something like
"You can game on Monday/Thursday/Sunday, you can also game if you need the stress relief for emergency reasons. You can also game when you are listening to a really valuable podcast, you are not allowed to exploit the hunt for podcasts to game all day."
I had an example for the last point in my head, it had something to do with how emergency and valuable are subjective words and thus have a need for a definiton, and if you have multiple rules which have emergency or value clauses it is nice to have a set definition for emergency and value.
But I forgot the exact specifics, I suppose I should have written down the examples immediatly!
The important part is however how that rule formed. It started as a fairly straight up inhibition, and ended up as a reasonably complex cluster which functions well, and it is open for further evolution, because it is the subject of an ongoing negotiation in myself - between the part that really loves Card games and the part that tries to get shit done.
There are incredibly usefull shorthands. What is the probability for 2n attempts?