Oxford: mental moves of the day

Here are some mental moves that I plan to write about more seriously in future, but that are on my mind today. I am tired and wanted to post this before sleeping, so sorry for sloppiness and any lack of coherence (some people stop typing as they fall asleep, but I sometimes write nonsense at various levels. One time my sentence just came to be about wolf men or something like that, which it was very much not at the beginning.)

Reality hop

Often a person’s picture of the world is confused or wrong, and they also sort of know this. For instance, maybe you don’t know what to do with your life, and feel like nothing would be good. But if you thought about it you would have to admit that something probably was good, and that you just hadn’t found it. Or perhaps you feel worthless, but also know that you gave up coffee yesterday and that caffeine withdrawal always makes you feel like this. I think a natural thing to do is to just live in that world—where there is nothing good to do, or where you are worthless—and have the fact that it is in error somewhere off in a pile of boring and vaguely guilt-inducing facts, like the fact that you have 274 unread emails in your inbox. (And given the situation of nothing being good to do or you being worthless, diving into some random repertoire of boring and guilt inducing facts probably isn’t that exciting a prospect.)

 A different thing is to remember that there is a real world, which is where your actions in fact take place, and where everything that matters to you lives (even if you are also currently confused about what matters to you). As in, vividly appreciate that there is this real place you can’t see. What is really going on right now is that you are stumbling around confusedly in the real place, past value you would really care to pick up if you could see where you were, like a sleepwalker treading on his own cat. Or a child knocking delicious food that his father has made him onto the floor, because he doesn’t know what it is or that the motion of those arms relate to him. 

There is a specific kind of mental move that I take to mean all of this, but I’m not sure how to point to it.

Then even if you still can’t see that world at the moment, even if you can’t feel it, you can remember that it is out there (the only thing out there) and perhaps expand your felt model of the situation e.g. from ‘dark and terrible place’ to ‘perception of dark and terrible place, possibly in less dark and terrible place, or not’. And you can take your best shot at the actions that would be good in the real world. And try to put your heart into them, knowing that they drive toward what you do believe in, whether or not you currently feel like you believe in things. Perhaps you can remember what it is like to believe in a thing and drive toward it, and know that that is what you are doing. Like shooting blindfolded, and your spatial intuitions feeling like the bullet could be going anywhere, but you know that you did the calculations right to hit the target.

(For instance, if it seems like your problems are so overwhelming that talking to a friend couldn’t help and will be unpleasant, but you know that you are prone to catastrophizing similar matters, and that talking to friends has helped other times when you also would have avoided it, then you might do it even while it feels doomed.)  

Importance dissolution

Today I had a somewhat worrying health problem, and I had to contact someone about it and then someone else and deal with various annoyances because I’m not in my usual country, and because my usual phone number is considered unacceptable by half of services here. This all seemed aversive and unsettling, and it also seemed like my day would be eaten up by this whole business. Then at some point when I was thinking about making a phone call, and putting it off, and mentally preparing what I would say, it occurred to me that my life shouldn’t be about this whole issue in this way. No matter how badly making this phone call may go, it should be a background blip in a day that is about something else. Similar to if you were going to tread on a marble and it would hurt your foot, and you oriented your whole day around that happening at 5:17pm, counting down the hours, then celebrating and giving yourself an easy evening, and your story of the day being about that. That all seems bad. Which is pretty obvious, stated that way, but I think it is a kind of mistake a human can make.

For me there is a particular mental move here also, beyond explicitly appreciating that it is bad to find unimportant things important. I did that move, and focused on writing instead. And it was good. (I was probably more effective even at the things that were no longer my focus, but that hopefully isn’t the usual result of me reducing my attention on a thing.)