111–120 of 291 posts
> There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. Is this not trivially obvious at all moments of consciousness? The assumptions here make no sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For me contradictions are unavoidable when speaking about the mind. "It (seems like it) is my opinion that {some opinion}" has very few ways of going wrong, and has the side benefit of reminding one that they're dealing with a subjective map, which is in part the goal of most authors of such pieces, imho anyways. I think mindfulness gang could up their game.
It's a writing choice at the end of the day. If you have to spend so much time reminding people that this is your opinion, you're going to get the same criicism of pacing and meandering that any other fruity prose does to people who want to get straight to the point. Sometimes you just need a footnote in your profile of "thoughts are of my own" and to not worry about the peanut gallery.
> There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. Is this not trivially obvious at all moments of consciousness? The assumptions here make no sense.
Your heartbeat is a constant 24/7 but you rarely notice it outside of moments of quiet contemplation. Same deal here, we’re really good at ignoring most things because we would be unable to function without blocking just about everything else out. Arguably a great deal of our economy is based around people actively trying to avoid actually contemplating anything deeply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"curating your news sources with a focus on unsensational, fact-based reporting" -> curious how you do this!
News Minimalist [1] is one way, where it aggregates stories across outlets and uses LLMs to remove clickbait from titles. It also assigns loose 'scores' to each story to approximate how 'important' it is, which I've found to be directionally useful. Ultimately, it comes down to why one consumes news at all. If it's to have something to discuss around the water cooler or dinner table, that's a very different use case…
"Today ChatGPT read 6997 news articles and gave 0 of them a significance score over 6.5."
> There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. Is this not trivially obvious at all moments of consciousness? The assumptions here make no sense.
“realizes” Your heartbeat is a constant 24/7 but you rarely notice it outside of moments of quiet contemplation. Same deal here, we’re really good at ignoring most things because we would be unable to function without blocking just about everything else out. Arguably a great deal of our economy is based around people actively trying to avoid actually contemplating anything deeply.
> There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. Is this not trivially obvious at all moments of consciousness? The assumptions here make no sense.
It may be logically obvious but I don't think many people accept it and act with this in mind. Either due to emotionally not being able to accept it or because it's hard to apply to every decision.
Cognitive control is one of the most important issues of our era, IMHO: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back There are many techniques to increase our CC. The ADHD community is a trailblazer in this respect.