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Remembering things that haven't happened yet

bessstillman.substack.com

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Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#21

Post by darkerside »

One way of anticipating who you'll become over time, I've realized, is to look at your parents. The same flaws and frailties you see there are the ones that will manifest and cause terrible in your life. The same values and decision making processes will guide you down parallel paths. You will find that the challenges they are going through are the same ones you will encounter one day.

Be kind to your parents, and hope your children will be as kind to you.

This was a beautiful read.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#22

Post by chiggsy »

jyunwai wrote: post #11

Very sad, but beautiful. The following passage especially stuck with me: "Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll chang…

>as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.

This is literally true. Absent of a serious mind practice, our memories are built upon the sands of rationalization. Looking back is not a reliving, it's more like a realization that changes happen. Looking forward? We are notoriously poor at guessing our future mindsets, especially charting a course to happiness.

Aversion leads us towards suffering, the dissonance between what we think the world should be vs what it is. The same goes for desire.

Fortunately, we are adaptable, almost infinitely malleable, in the present moment, although our ego makes us resist this ... pliability.

I used to think in terms of future me and past me also, until I drew a line in the sands of my rationalizations, and focused on the present moment. Future me, his joys and sorrows, his problems and their solutions, are above my pay grade, because he is as far from me as the edge of spacetime.

There are two ways to help him: Live in the present moment, so he has memories of the wonder of incarnation, and cultivate mental and physical suppleness, so his options remain open.

I would say to the article writer... revel with thy beloved as you observe the wonder of the present moment. You are not responsible for all the moments that make up a life.

Goodluck.

Goodluck.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#23

Post by kqr »

jyunwai wrote: post #11

Very sad, but beautiful. The following passage especially stuck with me: "Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll chang…

I've used this observation when designing surveys. Ask people "How well do you know this code on a scale from 1 to 7?" and people reasonably experienced with the code usually go something like 5 or 6.

If you instead ask "Think back at how much you have learned about this code in the past two years, then try to imagine how much you will learn in the next two years. How well do you know this code today, on a scale from 1 to 7?" and the answer ends up in a much more realistic 2–5 range.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#24

Post by 4ggr0 »

That almost made me cry, damn.

My partner and I are together for 5 years now. We'll probably move into the same apartment in around a year and are both in our mid-twenties. We have serious long-term plans together (obviously).

The thought of loosing them to an illness or accident is very soul-crushing and I don't even want to imagine what the author of this article is going through currently, and will have to endure once tragedy has struck.

I really like this part: "Love isn’t just blind to ugliness, but to decay."

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#25

Post by throwitaway1123 »

> I’ve talked to friends who’ve lost a spouse, sometimes to death and sometimes to savage divorce, and they universally say that one of the unexpectedly hardest things is not being able to ask: Remember that one place? Or that time? Remember when I…?

Wow, the author managed to capture the feeling of loss perfectly here.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#28

Post by dwaltrip »

csdvrx wrote: post #8
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #4

> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306

> Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306 After reading her article and your link, yes, and that seems to be caused by the practical impossibility to brute force an optimized path when there're too many possibilities. It's like the curse of dimensionality but in a dynamic space: she can't ask for a complete set of videos to cover all the possibilities. She can't ask for the top probab…

The solution I’ve found is to try to optimize less. And to develop trust that your future self will be able to handle whatever comes. And to realize that shit happens and that’s okay too.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#29

Post by afpx »

sebmellen wrote: post #7

Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca's Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]: You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped. There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battl…

Now I know where platitudes like "Be your own spectator; seek your own applause." come from.

Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet

#30

Post by rafabulsing »

throwitaway1123 wrote: post #25

> I’ve talked to friends who’ve lost a spouse, sometimes to death and sometimes to savage divorce, and they universally say that one of the unexpectedly hardest things is not being able to ask: Remember that one place? Or that time? Remember when I…? Wow, the author managed to capture the feeling of loss perfectly here.

I've come to call that "phantom lover syndrome". Spending a long time with some one, they really become part of you (and vice-versa), and not just metaphorically. The brain keeps reflexively sending signals in that direction, and the void where there used to be a response can be very painful.
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