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Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

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71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link! The content of this video is pretty close to the perpetual internal dialogue happening between me and all of my selves. I eventually wrote a book about my findings thus far.

Is there a link to your book?

Not officially launched, but the beta is here: http://www.katabane.com/mt/table.html

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#72

Oh I got the perfect answer for this one. As someone who (now after about a year of therapy a while back) has my OCD managed, let me tell you what my brain still does with a moment of free time: Visualizes the worst possible scenario of any situation I’m in! Standing in line to get coffee: What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in…

Very interesting that you consider uttering a racial slur as one of the worst scenarios that could occur to you while standing in line at a coffee shop.

Fun note: there was a patient in the group sessions I would go through in therapy that had tremendous anxiety around losing control of his body in public places and doing things like saying something racist really loud, taking his pants off, randomly attacking a stranger in line with him, etc.

So for his exposure therapy (after a considerable amount of work to get to this point), our therapist had him go into social situations and do some harmless stuff to embarrass himself to learn not to really fear it. One example was like rambling gibberish while in line for coffee or awkwardly dancing while waiting at a crosswalk where passing cars could see him.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#73
post #59

I think a lot about words and meanings, and interesting things I've encountered. Like, what is the difference between catenation and concatenation? Why is unravel a word, when ravel means the same thing, and given that unravel has taken over the meaning of ravel, why hasn't ravel come to mean it's opposite? Why was the classical Latin pronunciation of "caesar" preserved in German but not English? Why are the common c…

"Occasionally I force myself to actually work on some of the projects I've daydreamed and planned out (forced, because for some reason that part is much less innately interesting to me than the planning and conceptualizing, even though I want to finish them)."

I have this too, and the reasoning I came up with for myself is that because the first part is the problem solving, it gets fueled by curiosity and passion, whereas the second part, the implementation, is often just grunt work to me. I do not work in a theoretical research field, but I'm inclined to also think that this predilection must be something shared by those who do.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an Eskimo girl would wear a pink finger ring while listening to Irish folk music while traveling between Mombasa and Easter Island for a conference about mouses who wear green umbrellas. any good absurd movies to recommend anyone? This seems like a good starting point for a scenario

Punch Drunk Love

I'l look into it, btw Are you related to the user aaaaaaaab ?

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#75
post #4

I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. No emails, phones, newspapers, books and the only laptop on board (for watching movies) got broken... It has been rough seas around Cape Horn but pretty smooth sailing later... Watching sunrise and sunsets, stars, clouds etc. The things that had started coming to my mind - like things long forgotten or put away and now coming back as fresh memories... Very…

> I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. What an incredible experience it must be

I could use a couple years o'that about now.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#77
post #31

Money, quantum physics, the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, sex, recent conversations I've had, admiring the beauty of nature, thinking about trips I want to take...

So close to mine: Accounting, cryptography, assessing if the top-most neglected chore can still be snoozed, calculating how long until I need to switch context (may motivate, may re-assess urgency of neglected chores), "I need a break" (hacker news), sex, simulating one of many ongoing conversations, "I'm so happy I have X" (with X = my balcony, my couch, my cat, my bike), "Did my cat jump off the balcony?" Interesti…

> “Did my cat jump off the balcony?”

A question I’ve had to ask myself many times.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#78
An ongoing rotation of work issues, mental planning of the next steps of my current side project, looking for the next hobby to obsess over (thinking about getting started with FL Studio making beats… previously focused on high-performance electric scooters), where I want to live next in SF, …. Writing this down, I’m starting to realize I might be a bit obsessed with moving forward to the “next thing.” I think I’m afraid to slow down and become content with normalcy.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#79
post #34

- On the malleability of culture, and the absolutely temporary nature of the world order that we think is stable. - On interstellar travel, and how completely bonkers it would be to ride on a steadily-degrading spaceship for a decade, with just enough fuel to stop when you get there, and no more. And what it might take to get our civilization to care enough to try (seems like a terrible calamity is the only way). - I…

> I firmly believe that there is a sequence of words that [...] would convince anyone of anything. What does make you think that? Have you seen or experienced something like this before? Your thought/ idea makes perfect sense to me and there surely is more potential to transfer ideas/ ideologies/ etc more compact than we do most of the time. I too, don't believe in good and evil humans but that everyone is capable of…

This is similar to a goal I had during childhood (very naive obviously) - that I should try and write a heartfelt essay addressed to all the terrorists around the world. And if all the newspapers published my essay on the front page, all the terrorists would, on reading it, put down their weapons and simply live peacefully from then on, with tears in their eyes as they reflected on their wrongdoing. I was sure there could be a sequence of words that would capture the hearts and minds of all oppressors and dictators around the globe. I just had to figure out what should it be, and then get newspapers to print it.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#80
When I'm outside, I notice I unfortunately always ends up thinking about race and ethnic issues. How people might be perceiving or judging me, how women might be put off by my bad hair or skin color, how men might be perceiving me as an outsider or poor. These thoughts are very tiresome, and I notice I keep coming back to them unless I listen to music or make an effort to think positive thoughts. It feels very important to me to resolve these thoughts, that's why I keep diving deeper into them, until I end up spiraling into the same negative thoughts - I shouldn't have immigrated, my kids are going to have shitty lives due to my skin color and emotional anxiety, I will never make good friends, and I will never be loved unconditionally. I have put my life in a cage and will spend the remaining 50 years of life just grinding with only brief moments of materialistic pleasure.
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