In Sleep is the Mate of Death Scott Alexander discusses the phenomenon that people often experience strange depressions in the morning, with symptoms getting much better throughout the day.

This is pretty close to my personal experience, upon waking I often feel sad for no reason, but before bed I'm usually quite happy.

Over time I've taken some measures to curb this, though I still occasionally feel it. Recently I've noticed that savoring recent fun experiences help with this. Thanksfulness previously helped too.

Afaik there isn't too much I could do the previous day unless I overload on wholesome social interactions, hmmm......

— Categorized under: #emotions

At some point when I was little, the thought occurred to me that I should never be proud of anything that I didn't actively contribute to. This counted pride in my family, my school, and my nationality. I'm not sure why the thought occurred to me, but as an adult I feel like this advice has largely served me well.

Recently, I've been wondering if I could take this advice further. I was watching a show called Vinland Saga, where one of the ostensibly nice characters commits pretty awful acts in part due to his wounded pride, and it reminded me of times when I felt like my pride was wounded. It very much felt like an alien emotion – really intense, and something I think isn't that productive overall.

In the book Impro, the improv comedy teacher Keith Johnstone remarked that in ancient times, artists were seen as conduits to muses rather than auteurs of their creations. The art piece only reflected the completeness of that conduit, rather than the personality of the artist themselves. I really like that definition – it lets people create without thinking about being judged according to their creations.

Recently, I've been thinking about whether this perspective applies to not just art, but being a person – can I be a conduit of good vibe and good outcomes, just like that of good art, and not have those vibes and outcomes be seen as a core part of my personality? Because I think identifying with those outcomes are what creates that sense of pride that can get wounded sometimes. I'd like to just be a good conduit, rather than sometime who's (self-perceived) to be great.

All of this feels very hand-wavy, as I am still trying to figure it out, but I think if I focus just on the craft and nothing else, imagine myself as a tiny nucleus of an atom in the middle of a balloon as opposed to the surface of the balloon itself, I'd be a bit closer to reaching a place without ego/pride, and would be able to let go of things much more quickly.

— Categorized under: #emotions, #interactions

Over the past few months I've had success becoming more emotionally self-aware. Applying the same type of learning methodology to social experiences though feels quite daunting.

One of the main challenges here is that even adding a single person makes the experience vastly more complicated. Think of the difference between playing basketball or soccer by yourself vs. playing soccer with other people, and the difference in complexity becomes immediately obvious. In a social interaction, not only do you need a certain degree of self-awareness, but you need to interact based on the emotional state of the other person, the predispositions of the other person, the nature of the relationship, the context of the situation, what the other person knows about you, and each person's interests as well.

Each new person brings an entire copy of these already-numerous variables to track, and I think that's why for the longest time I found hanging out with more than one person to be extremely exhausting. It felt impossible to track what was important for everyone and to satisfy all of them at the same time. It seems like with lots of recent practice, I'm feel much comfortable in group settings. More recently I've been thinking about how to make better social experiences, whether it's in a one-on-one setting or in a group.

Part of the reason is that it strikes me that there isn't really that much time to hang out with people. Unless I co-reside with someone, even for close friends I will probably only hang out with them 100 times or so in the rest of my life. And for other friends, perhaps a few dozen or less than a dozen times total. After that, each of us will get busy and move on with our own lives.

Part of it too is that it seems like such a waste for a hangout to be kind of lukewarm, when so many great experiences are possible out there. A lifespan is pretty short however you look at it, and it seems like we should make every effort to have hangouts be positive, memorable ones.

Finally, I think I'm just kind of interested in experience design in general. From psychological and design perspectives, the problem of “how to make a hangout fun” is really interesting. It's something that I find myself gravitate towards thinking about.

There might be some confidence component to my motivation too. I recently took an interesting study that suggests that I like people more so than my confidence in leading a social interaction. This seems largely true, and I'd like the two to be more on par with each other.

But again, the skill tree of social intelligence is quite daunting. Unlike emotional intelligence, the amount of variables at play feel exponential rather than linear in scale.

To make it manageable, I think I'll probably have to scope my learning. For example, there are various special social interactions like negotiations, difficult conversations, competitions, and courtship. I think I should kind of ignore those for now and focus on making normal hangout-type interactions better.

Thinking about these types of interactions, one particularly interesting part is that I think the vast majority of really positive experiences can be categorized, here are some examples:

• Deep conversations
• Funny bantering
• Spontaneous adventures

I think that this type of experience are monotonically good in that the more an interaction approach that direction, the better that interaction becomes. There's no “uncanny valley” of deep conversations or funny bantering – the deeper the conversation, the funnier the bantering, the better.

Some of these categories require another person (deep conversations), while others can be experienced on one's own (spontaneous adventures). Some of these I feel comfortable with (again, deep conversations), while others I don't have much experience in (yet again, spontaneous adventures). Overall, those that I feel comfortable or can be experienced on one's own are easier to learn, while the ones that require other people or I feel uncomfortable with will be more challenging to learn.

Moving forward, I feel like a good approach is probably to work on one or two at a time. Perhaps becoming more comfortable with certain categories on my own for one, while experimenting with social settings for another.

Anyways, here are the current categorizations I have in mind.

I feel comfortable with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Safety and comfort – Overcoming hardships – Very aesthetic experiences – Becoming better at a skill – Creating something new – Creating a sense of hero's journey

I'm not very familiar with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Spontaneous, fun experiences – Feeling new emotions – Play for its own sake

I have some degree of comfort, but cannot be experienced on one's own: – Deep conversations – Validation and acceptance – Fun bantering

Others that seem out there or really challenging: – Intimacy – Laughing until your stomach hurts – Performing something together (doesn't have to be music, could be any form of performance)

They seem like an okay place to start, but feel free to reach out if I miss anything significant. I'm actually pretty excited to dig into a lot of these more.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications, #emotions, #streamofconsciousness

Recently I was reading a book called What to Say Next by Sarah Nannery. It was a really insightful account of what life looks like on the spectrum, and one of the interesting perspectives from the book was that contrary to the opinion that people with Autism are less emotionally sensitive, they are actually more emotionally sensitive.

The idea is that people with Autism experience certain emotions so strongly that it often causes problems in everyday functioning. For example, people with Autism have trouble making eye contact, and this is because the amount of information and emotions involved in it is overwhelming for them. Similarly, autistic people tend to spiral into negative emotions easily, because those emotions are felt so strongly.

I think the idea definitely has merit, and it actually made me think about what people mean when they use the work “sensitive”. In everyday context, we generally say that a person is sensitive to something if they pick up on it easily or can easily be bothered by it; but actually, this is a side-effect of a more fundamental type of sensitivity.

As an analogy, we can think of sensitivity as having the volume knob turned up on some aspect of life. A person who is sensitive will usually have a easier time picking up differences between different sounds, but this is only true if the volume isn't overwhelming. If a person is so sensitive that everything is incredibly loud, then instead of being more discerning, that person will actually be less discerning because they spend all their time running away from the noise.

So saying that a person is sensitive to something can paradoxically mean that that person is worse at processing that thing. Thinking about it, in everyday parlance, the better word to use to describe when someone is good at processing a certain type of stimulus is probably “discerning”. To a certain degree it implies sensitivity, but either the sensitivity is not overwhelming, or that person has learned to rein in their strong reactions to information, and has learned to direct that energy productively.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #communications, #thinking, #emotions

I've been thinking a lot more recently about how different my headspaces are when I slept well versus not. Though now I'm much less irritable on low sleep, there are still pretty significant differences. The biggest one is that I feel like I have cyclothymic disorder when I don't get sleep – sometimes I'm very happy, sometimes I'm very sad. Things will suddenly become either extremely interesting to me or completely uninteresting, depending on the headspace I wake up in.

This is a pretty big problem when trying to choose a consistent life direction. If you sometimes find the same thing at times irresistibly compelling and at times utterly boring, you will likely have trouble getting anything that requires consistent effort. In addition, it makes it extremely difficult to visualize what a sort of “ideal life” would look like – it requires stable observations of my happiness under various scenarios in order to extrapolate.

Now, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,001 reasons in the universe to try to sleep well, but I feel like this is will probably be the overwhelming reason that pushes me above and beyond to try to sleep well consistently.

On a related note, I noticed that a lot of my recent writings have a sort of sad tone to them. That's actually not the case – I'm probably as happy as I've ever been right now, it's just that I'm currently in problem-solving mode, and problems have a tendency to be negative-sounding things.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy, #emotions, #irl