91–100 of 288 posts
My experience is informed by past experience. Just like my emotional reaction is informed by past emotional experiences.
My entirely unscientific theory is that like other cells, we're born with a limited number of fucks in our body. When we're young, we (instinctively, subconsciously) feel like our fucks reserves are plentiful, so we give a fuck about a lot of stuff. As we get older, our reservoir of fucks gets progressively depleted. The fucks are rarer, so we give a fuck less and less often. I've recently turned 40 and I can definit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I settled on the triune brain model as a good-enough approximation for my needs in relation to this (whether it's factually accurate is another issue). I would then categorize my thoughts and subsequent actions based on that model (mainly limbic vs. neocortex). It's pretty easy to tell them apart with some high-level introspection. Then, I'd short-circuit any emotional thinking once I spotted myself engaging in it, a…
This seems weird and bad. Emotion and "reason" aren't two ends of a spectrum. You likely aren't any more logical or less emotional now than you were before. I believe you about better control over how you engage with your emotional responses but damn dude. If you were just getting too mad at stuff they got therapy for that you don't hafta roll your own psychic amputations these days.
CBT being the most popular kind. In CBT you detect negative emotional reasoning, categorise it, and refute it by coming up with a more rational response.
See the pattern?
It's just from feeling more right? When I was 9 the best pizza I'd ever had came from a Walmart food court. Now that I'm closer to 30 I'm had a lot more pizza that was far better and far worse than that pizza. If I were to eat that same pizza again it probably wouldnt taste better than any pizza I've ever had. My experience is informed by past experience. Just like my emotional reaction is informed by past emotional…
If the Wal-Mart pizza were the main factor, it seems to me we'd expect to see the reverse: the young would be more content with the simple, but as they got bored over time, they'd seek greater and greater thrills as they aged.
That said, I do think you're right when it comes to a sense of sadness. A middle-schooler is devastated when another student says his shoes are out of style. Someone in their 50s is generally devastated by more substantive things like the death of a child.
> When older people say, “This is the best time of your life, enjoy it while you can,” that’s a form of abuse. I guess that these days anything can be called "abuse".
Nowadays, any simple comment can be interpreted on any extreme and everything in between. Anecdotally, in my experience, this shift is really visible for 3-4 years now. I don't know what changed in these recent years or what caused that shift to become so drastic (again, in my experience). Internet gave a stage to these interpretation even though they were there previously in low volume. But even on the internet, thi…
a) systems like Twitter giving people dopamine bumps and internet points for strong emotional responses to the most extreme interpretation of anything anyone says and
b) peoples training their brains to have strong emotional responses to the most extreme interpretation of anything anyone says
1.Experience : Every situation is new when you are young therefore much more stressful/emotional.
2.Hormones : obvious but an 80yo is not getting the same surge of adrenaline for things as a 20yo.
3.Control : Old people general have money, options, connections, safety nets. Much easier to stay unemotional when something cant affect you.
There didn't need a PHD for that....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's preposterous! I'm sticking to my "fucks are finite and biologically limited" theory. I'll use the TED talk to promote my upcoming self-help book around this mind-blowing new theory.
Be careful, Malcolm Gladwell may steal your comment for a book and then blame you when science debunks it.
At age 20 or so, I read a quote in a book (on day trading, IIRC) that went something like: "Master your emotions, or they will master you." After thinking about it, I realized that despite identifying as a logical-thinking individual, I was nevertheless at the mercy of the more primitive parts of my brain. Sometimes totally, but pretty much all executive functions were influenced by it to a large degree. That might b…
If I ever got something beneficial out of meditation, it was that feelings and thoughts come and go and do not have to necessarily be listened to. I didn't realise this until I was in my early 20s, and looking back, there were so many regretful moments as a result of just doing whatever feelings and thoughts dictated I should do in any given moment. Being able to view your thoughts and feelings in an abstract, manage…