Earlier quoted context omitted.
Er, I hope it’s not at room temp otherwise you might get food poisoning.
You may have to reduce the amount of Fs you give.
While I usually keep my rice warm instead, I take it you’ll be here all week.
Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
241–250 of 288 posts
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#242My personal observation is that emotional control and resilience comes from experience. It comes from being exposed to lots of different emotional triggers.
The times when I’ve been the most emotionally strong have been after my most socially diverse periods
Perhaps the effect is somewhat cumulative
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#243I'm 63 and for me the answer is simple: more self-awareness. I am aware of what thoughts my emotion is in response to. I am aware of how my emotions are cascading other emotions and triggering feelings based on memories of similar circumstances. I am aware of how my emotions are affecting the people around me and how their response is feeding back into my thoughts and feelings. Finally, with self-awareness comes the…
Agree, but you can only do that if you do the introspection work, like you did. I know some people in your age range who still react like a 20yo.
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#244Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Friends say bands are "awesome", long meetings are "excruciating", guys in mock turtlenecks say products are "magical" or "revolutionary". Boys cry "wolf". What does it all mean? Do these exaggerations, or use of flowery language, carry any real world consequences? The words "abuse" and "violence" (and other vernacular that people are using around problems they face) carry consequences under the law, reputational d…
Actually I often wonder if people think about the extremity of their words. Absurd exaggeration is the norm. That's fine in the form of metaphor (though I still dislike "murder" and "rape" to describe the vagaries of competitive sports and business!) but it's something else when the words can have legal/moral/professional ramifications. Power gained by the previously-disempowered is rarely handled responsibly. But th…
That's a fair point and one I'm willing to accept, but this has been going on for at least half a decade if not longer. I guess at some point, the sort of meta-conversation you and I are having will have to be had.
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#246I'm 63 and for me the answer is simple: more self-awareness. I am aware of what thoughts my emotion is in response to. I am aware of how my emotions are cascading other emotions and triggering feelings based on memories of similar circumstances. I am aware of how my emotions are affecting the people around me and how their response is feeding back into my thoughts and feelings. Finally, with self-awareness comes the…
I'm about half your age and I don't know much about anything but, I think I'd agree based on my experience so far. I realized a while back that I'm some sort of chemical soup and I don't know where my thoughts or emotions even originate from. I don't seem to produce them voluntarily – they just bubble up out of the silence inside me. I have some moment of control, though it doesn't seem very effective a lot of the time. However I fail or succeed appears to be largely determined by abilities I don't have much control over in the first place. I mean, how the hell can I read? Why am I able to speak and understand language? My heart keeps beating, my cells repair themselves, I somehow remember to breathe. I understand math, programming, but none of the internal mechanisms which make that possible.
I've come to the conclusion that my emotions are something to observe a lot before allowing responses, to whatever degree I can accomplish that, because I don't truly understand where they came from or why later on, let alone in the moment. The truth I'm living is a very arbitrary and subjective one at all times.
Like you say, these feelings and reactions are often based on "facts" that aren't really true anyways. Reality is a very thin veil over something I can hardly comprehend the physics or magic of.
If I can manage to develop better temperance and courage to restrain my reactions and questions my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, I think I'll be pretty content with that. The sense of sleepwalking through life is very apt. I've felt very alive, focused, and attuned to reality at many points in my life while being very much completely out of tune and dead to the rest of the world. I didn't know who I was, what was going on, anything. And I still don't.
Here's to trying to figure it out I guess!
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Whoa, you can't post like this here, and we ban accounts that do. No more of this please. I'm sure there's legitimate experience behind the feelings but it's not a good use of this site to allow them to turn into generational flamewar, let alone violent rants. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a fair bit, e.g. https://news.ycomb…
It would be helpful if you could clearly spell out the opinions the rules actually apply to.
I've been guessing wrong lately, it seems.
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
More reflection, sure. Experience. Humility. But also less hormones. Young people are hormone-driven action-reaction machines.
Everyone is just a machine
Everyone can be described as machine-like if you apply that particular lens. From a first-person perspective I am pure consciousness operating a meat suit. You may argue that reductive materialism allows you to reduce my claim to one about matter, but the onus is on you to prove materialism -- which I suspect you'll be hard-pressed to do in an HN comment.
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#249I'm 63 and for me the answer is simple: more self-awareness. I am aware of what thoughts my emotion is in response to. I am aware of how my emotions are cascading other emotions and triggering feelings based on memories of similar circumstances. I am aware of how my emotions are affecting the people around me and how their response is feeding back into my thoughts and feelings. Finally, with self-awareness comes the…
Agree, but you can only do that if you do the introspection work, like you did. I know some people in your age range who still react like a 20yo.
Yeah - there's some correlation with age just because you're forced to take in some inputs/experience just from existing.
I think there are exceptions though in both directions related to how much you try to directly get better at this kind of thing.
It's worth it I think - you're in your own head your entire life, might as well try to make it a nice place to be.
Re: Why do older individuals have greater control of their feelings?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last thing you wrote is something I indirectly think about quite a lot. Imagine a place (call it heaven if you want) where time and death don’t exist. What could you possibly care about?
I read somewhere that because people don't live that long, we don't have a collective memory of previous disasters or pandemics (anyone who was alive today during the 1918 pandemic wouldn't really remember it), so human history simply happens in cycles or waves. The underlying conflict is the same, but a new set of humans deal with it with the technological tools of the day. Simply put, if the human lifespan were lon…
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
There was an article about Dune on DLF (sorry it‘s in German) that makes exactly this point https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/denken-ueber-tausend-generati...