Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Sunset at Noon, published by Raemon on the LessWrong.
A meandering series of vignettes.
I have a sense that I've halfway finished a journey. I expect this essay to be most useful to people similarly-shaped-to-me, who are also undergoing that journey and could use some reassurance that there's an actual destination worth striving for.
Gratitude
Tortoise Skills
Bayesian Wizardry
Noticing Confusion
The World is Literally on Fire...
...also Metaphorically on Fire
Burning Out
Sunset at Noon
Epistemic Status starts out "true story", and gets more (but not excessively) speculative with each section.
i. Gratitude
"Rationalists obviously don't actually take ideas seriously. Like, take the Gratitude Journal. This is the one peer-reviewed intervention that actually increases your subjective well being, and costs barely anything. And no one I know has even seriously tried it. Do literally none of these people care about their own happiness?"
"Huh. Do you keep a gratitude journal?"
"Lol. No, obviously."
- Some Guy at the Effective Altruism Summit of 2012
Upon hearing the above, I decided to try gratitude journaling. It took me a couple years and a few approaches to get it working.
First, I tried keeping a straightforward journal, but it felt effortful and dumb.
I tried a thing where I wrote a poem about the things I was grateful for, but my mind kept going into "constructing a poem" mode instead of "experience nice things mindfully" mode.
I tried just being mindful without writing anything down. But I'd just forget.
I tried writing gratitude letters to people, but it only occasionally felt right to do so. (This came after someone actually wrote me a handwritten gratitude letter, which felt amazing, but it felt a bit forced when I tried it myself)
I tried doing gratitude before I ate meals, but I ate "real" meals sort of inconsistently so it didn't take. (Upon reflection, maybe I should have fixed the "not eat real meals" thing?)
But then I stumbled upon something that worked. It's a social habit, which I worry is a bit fragile. I do it together with my girlfriend each night, and on nights when one of us is traveling, I often forget.
But this is the thing that worked. Each night, we share our Grumps and Grates. (We're in a relationship and have cutesey-poo ways of talking to each other).
Grumps and Grates goes like this:
We share anything we're annoyed or upset about. (We call this The Grump. Our rule is to not go searching for the Grump, simply to let it out if it's festering so that when we get to the Gratefuls we actually appreciate them instead of feeling forced)
Share three things that we're grateful for that day. On some bad days this is hard, but we should at least be able to return to old-standbys ("I'm breathing", "I have you with me"), and you should always perform the action of at least attempting an effortful search.
Afterwards, pause to actually feel the Grates. Viscerally remember the thing and why it was nice. If you're straining to feel grateful and had to sort of reach into the bottom of the barrel to find something, at least try to cultivate a mindset where you fully appreciate that thing.
Maybe the sun just glinted off your coffee cup nicely, and maybe that didn't stop the insurance company from screwing you over and your best friend from getting angry at you and your boss from firing you today.
But... in all seriousness... in a world whose laws of physics had no reason to make life even possible, a universe mostly full of empty darkness and no clear evidence of alien life out there, where the only intelligent life we know of sometimes likes to play chicken with nuclear arsenals...
...somehow some tiny proteins locked together ever so long ago and life evolved and consciousness evolved and somehow beauty evolved and... and here you are, a meatsack cobbled togeth...
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