> But what are you sacrificing in return for your “perseverance”?
Nothing that matters to you. If it mattered to you it would be a life goal.
> The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek.
You've added a ton of words which literally don't even mean anything in context. Let me whittle this down:
> The reason why modern humans have increased risk of these symptoms is they know that even when they achieve their life goals, that they wouldn't achieve satisfaction.
Okay, we found an actual claim.
In his essay, Yes, We Have Noticed the Skulls, Scott Alexander notes that any intellectual movement that has been around for a while has made some mistakes, and is probably aware of them, so if there's some obvious failure of a movement, the people who still believe in the movement probably have learned from that failure. Communists are aware of Stalin murdering people and are wary of totalitarianism. Christians are aware of Torquemada torturing people and are wary of religious persecution. There are of course crazy communists and Christians who think Stalin and Torquemada were great, but they're not by any means the majority. If you talk to a communist and your big argument is "but, Stalin!" you're just showing exactly how outdated your knowledge is.
This is no exception. If your big criticism of psychology is that achieving your goals can leave you feeling empty, well, let me assure you, psychologists are well aware of this, and have studied it at length. This is not the gotcha you think it is.
There are two kinds of goals, process goals and outcome goals. Yes, outcome goals are likely to leave people feeling empty once the desired outcome achieved, which is why some psychologists think it's a good idea to focus on process goals instead. When you talk about "achieving" things and not feeling satisfaction, you're only talking about outcome goals, when there's a whole other type of goal that the article you're criticizing is probably talking about.
The discussion at hand is about the effects of “Perseverance towards life goals” when somebody has depression, anxiety, or what have you. The article mentions it is useful, and I can no doubt agree with that. It can be meditative, having a mission and all (perhaps one that you do not 100% agree with). It is satisfying, and can keep life afloat.
But this “fake mission” trick should be just that — a trick. A placeholder in life for when things get real tough. A patch on your wound that helps the wound heal. The patch isn’t healing the wound, your body is.
But people (e.g. self-help aficionados) become thoroughly entranced with this idea (among other bad ideas like growth
mindset) that they lose sight of the fact that a patch is a patch, a bandage a bandage. It has outlived its usefulness, but people keep treating it as a real solution.
Most often when people observe their mind they can dig up a lot of content. Depression, anxiety, and what have you are real things that you can explore and navigate. How to navigate and what to do with them is extremely difficult because we have never been taught how. We sort of induct what our parents and teachers do without explicitly categorizing/identifying what is going on in out minds. Most times we are running the same damn loop for the, what, millionth time in a row. The same situation, the same psychological response, the same result.
Without even going into replication crisis, there are a lot of psychological theories and therapies that are sold, to others and even to the theorizer him/herself. The mind is a value-seeking machine that will not deter itself from using fiction to understand the world and get what it wants.
Interestingly, the fiction of the mind acts as a patch itself, but it is never recognized by the self because the mind (most of the time) does it under the rug. So the patch sticks around and causes problems.
The solution is to recognize that the mind can employ fiction and slowly but surely the mind will start doing these things overtly visibly to you (simply because it doesn’t have to hide it anymore).
Stay on track with what the mind provides to you and be free about it (sometimes ignore it, hate it, listen to it, coddle it, be depressed, be anxious — to the mind emotions are generated and should be accepted without scores attached to them). Then the implicit goals will become explicit. But this hijacking of explicit goals without respecting implicit goals is pure whack.
Jesus dude, I'm really not sure whose post you're responding to, because you didn't address anything I said in my post.
> The discussion at hand is about the effects of “Perseverance towards life goals” when somebody has depression, anxiety, or what have you. The article mentions it is useful, and I can no doubt agree with that. It can be meditative, having a mission and all (perhaps one that you do not 100% agree with). It is satisfying, and can keep life afloat.
> But this “fake mission” trick should be just that — a trick. A placeholder in life for when things get real tough. A patch on your wound that helps the wound heal. The patch isn’t healing the wound, your body is.
There's nothing "fake" about life goals, and it's not a trick. When I say I want to have close, honest relationships, or when I say I want a contributing role in my community, I really want those things. These aren't placeholders, patches, or bandages for anything. They're actually what I want, and it's arrogant of you to think you know what I want better than I know what I want.
> Stay on track with what the mind provides to you and be free about it (sometimes ignore it, hate it, listen to it, coddle it, be depressed, be anxious — to the mind emotions are generated and should be accepted without scores attached to them). Then the implicit goals will become explicit. But this hijacking of explicit goals without respecting implicit goals is pure whack.
This implicit versus explicit goals dichotomy is something you made up, and then started accusing people of choosing one over the other. Nobody is suggesting choosing explicit goals over implicit goals. In fact, nobody even was talking about these things before you invented them. This is just a straw man argument.
The entirety of your post could have been reduced to around five sentences--this would be a great increase in clarity with no loss in meaning. Throwing in random parentheticals and clauses might fool dumb people into thinking what you're saying is smart, but smart people are going to suspect that you're hiding a bogus argument under layers of words.
You are taking this way more personally than you should be. You should probably check yourself and see if you aren’t being an asshole to other people with your supposed “intelligence”.
Ad hominem aside, is it so hard to understand the words “implicit” and “explicit”? They are English words, and implicit vs. explicit goals really isn’t all that hard to understand. Maybe people around you don’t use this language, but implicit vs. explicit models is a dichotomy I hear all the time among pretty smart people. And very useful distinction.
I don’t think you are capable of ingesting in new information or original thought. Your response to what I said about “fake mission” clearly demonstrates this. I also never said you don’t know your desires. I don’t even know you. Do you have so much time that you feel personally attacked by some (you would call) random assortment of words on the internet? Jeez.
I am seeing your other comments and you are just not that positive overall. Being skeptical and negative and doubtful isn’t a hallmark of intelligence, mind you.
> They are English words, and implicit vs. explicit goals really isn’t all that hard to understand.
The problem isn't that they are hard to understand, the problem is that they have nothing to do with what anyone was talking about. When someone says, "Persevering in goals can alleviate negative feelings", saying "Explicit goals can distract from implicit goals" isn't a response, it's a non-sequitur.
> Being skeptical and negative and doubtful isn’t a hallmark of intelligence, mind you.
Being skeptical and doubtful are definitely hallmarks of intelligence. The alternative to skepticism is blind faith. The alternative to doubt is unjustified confidence.
In the rest of your post you've decided to attack me personally, to which my only response is going to be: you're accusing me of ad hominem attacks?
They don't have to be, but in the absence of evidence, they are. That's just true by the definitions of the words.
Put another way: not all faith is blind, but faith without skepticism is blind faith; not all confidence is unjustified, but in the confidence without justification (evidence) is unjustified.
> In his essay, Yes, We Have Noticed the Skulls, Scott Alexander notes that any intellectual movement that has been around for a while has made some mistakes, and is probably aware of them, so if there's some obvious failure of a movement, the people who still believe in the movement probably have learned from that failure. Communists are aware of Stalin murdering people and are wary of totalitarianism.
I'm not so sure about that. So far, we've had dozens of implementations of communism all over the world and 100% of them ended up being authoritarian (i.e. if you disagree with the ruling party, you go to jail) or straight up murderous. This uncanny correlation suggests that it may not be impossible to actually implement anything like communism without it being evil. Jordan Peterson explores reasons for why that might be so.
> So far, we've had dozens of implementations of communism all over the world and 100% of them ended up being authoritarian (i.e. if you disagree with the ruling party, you go to jail) or straight up murderous.
sigh You read a post saying that "but look at these skulls!"-type arguments are naive and arrogant, and your response is a "but look at these skulls!"-type argument? Really?
Which of these[1] pacifist[2] communes[3] do you think fit into your 100% number that you made up without researching?
I'm not defending communism or Christianity here, I'm saying find out what people actually believe and why they believe it before you criticize, instead of criticizing high-profile failures of their movement which they probably recognize and disagree with.
> Jordan Peterson explores reasons for why that might be so.
The fact that Jordan Peterson is exploring reasons for why something might be so which isn't so, tells me all I need to know about Jordan Peterson's opinions on the subject: they're uninformed opinions.
All of these examples are not societies implementing communism, but just merely small groups of people who do so, in a safe bubble provided by a non-communist society (US or Israel) which surrounds them. They benefit immensely from the wealth and protection coming from the surrounding non-communist society. These conditions do not translate in any way to larger scale implementation and it's not what majority of people mean when they discuss communism. I'd like to see one example of communist society of let's say even just 1 million people that is not a colossal failure.
> All of these examples are not societies implementing communism
How so?
> but just merely small groups of people who do so, in a safe bubble provided by a non-communist society (US or Israel) which surrounds them. They benefit immensely from the wealth and protection coming from the surrounding non-communist society.
If you talk to communists, I think you'll find a lot of communists agree with this.
EDIT: That said, I think you may be underestimating the degree of independence these communes have. Keep in mind, Maoz Haim was founded in 1937, before Israel existed, which makes it a bit hard to argue that it's dependent on Israel. All three of these communes have a high degree of food and energy independence.
> These conditions do not translate in any way to larger scale implementation
So what? I think if you talk to communists, you'll find a lot of communists agree with this as well.
Sometimes solutions don't have to scale. A famous communist once said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the idea of a cancer cell." (Okay, maybe it's a bit of a stretch to call Edward Abbey a communist).
> it's not what majority of people mean when they discuss communism.
So what? The majority of people don't get to tell communists what communists believe. A straw man argument doesn't become valid because the majority of people believe the straw man is real.
Your argument stating that communism is evil everywhere its implemented is ridiculous - communism exists at varied scales, so of course, there have been huge authoritarian states, but also many communes, worker cooperatives and cities which didnt turn out like the nightmare you make it to be.
Nothing that matters to you. If it mattered to you it would be a life goal.
> The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek.
You've added a ton of words which literally don't even mean anything in context. Let me whittle this down:
> The reason why modern humans have increased risk of these symptoms is they know that even when they achieve their life goals, that they wouldn't achieve satisfaction.
Okay, we found an actual claim.
In his essay, Yes, We Have Noticed the Skulls, Scott Alexander notes that any intellectual movement that has been around for a while has made some mistakes, and is probably aware of them, so if there's some obvious failure of a movement, the people who still believe in the movement probably have learned from that failure. Communists are aware of Stalin murdering people and are wary of totalitarianism. Christians are aware of Torquemada torturing people and are wary of religious persecution. There are of course crazy communists and Christians who think Stalin and Torquemada were great, but they're not by any means the majority. If you talk to a communist and your big argument is "but, Stalin!" you're just showing exactly how outdated your knowledge is.
This is no exception. If your big criticism of psychology is that achieving your goals can leave you feeling empty, well, let me assure you, psychologists are well aware of this, and have studied it at length. This is not the gotcha you think it is.
There are two kinds of goals, process goals and outcome goals. Yes, outcome goals are likely to leave people feeling empty once the desired outcome achieved, which is why some psychologists think it's a good idea to focus on process goals instead. When you talk about "achieving" things and not feeling satisfaction, you're only talking about outcome goals, when there's a whole other type of goal that the article you're criticizing is probably talking about.