I’m in a pretty low mood today. Which is to say: it seems like I—a fairly neutral and normal and attuned creature—am living in a world that is small and surreal and leaves a bad taste in your mouth and your soul.
I’m in a good position to intellectually track the fact that this is a me thing, not a ‘the world’ thing, because the situation was entirely different two days ago, and if there’s one thing we know about the world, it takes more than two days to radically change it.
But this kind of intellectual fact is sometimes hard to properly believe in. Especially for longer periods. It’s easier to be viscerally confident that things were good two days ago than that they were good two months ago. And either way, perceptions of the world kind of feel like they are about the world, not the perceiver.
A consequence of only believing things intellectually is that you don’t fluidly act on their consequences. For instance in this kind of case, if it was a me thing—and in particular, a me-here-now thing—then there are probably lots of other places in mind space that are different and potentially good. Some of them are probably accessible to me: me-in-a-week, me-if-I-went-to-a-zoo-right-now, me-if-I-hung-out-with-different-people, me-if-I-took-different-drugs, etc. If I properly felt this was true, it might be pretty motivating to move around in the world and mind-space and try to find some. Whereas if I implicitly believe that the world is the problem, aka everything, then what’s the point in going anywhere else in it?
What to do here? I think it’s good to notice this, where it’s happening. And to manually notice the implications that don’t come naturally, and perhaps try to make them visceral: I think it can be helpful to actively try to imagine all the different little pockets of consciousness out there and how each one has its own image of the world it feels like it is looking out on, with different flavors and colors and brightnesses.
Hi, I think I'm getting your idea here. To me, if you would permit me a bad taste wordplay, it feels like: All the world's a cage, and all the people, merely stayers. They have their exits and their entrances, and one person in their time plays many parts - jailer, prisoner, judge, executioner, administrator or beaureaucrat, gatekeeper, or dictator.
The whole world feels like a prison sometimes because it is. We live in literally Foucault's panopticon, the design for a prison, and it is self-inflicted.
I too dream of a world where we leave aside the devices, whether physical or memetic, "strategic communication" and simply be free. That is the only world I can see a home in.
Check out my post : https://substack.com/@silentswift/note/p-201892225?utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web on the value of information for another perspective.
Low moods of despair make me think of that SSC review, the biography Chronicles of Wasted Times. The author is seeing maggots and decay everywhere — but ends up in WWII bombed-out London.
Like, despair can be both a personal inclination and legitimate.