One of my goals taking the gap year has been to understand what it feels like to be on the edges of society, what I didn't expect is that this took longer than a year to fully emerge.

On a gap year, people give you unquestioned judgement to pursue anything you want for a year, but beyond a year, sometimes doubts on whether you are “productive” creeps in.

One thing I've been thinking about after the first year is how that perception affects certain interactions with people, and how the perception seems all about social status, which is something that works differently from zero-sum resources (food, water, shelter, money) in that it can be conjured out of thin air.

One example of this is Y Combinator, from Paul Graham (one of the co-founders):

A nontrivial part of the value of YC is that we give people a high-status brand under which to do low-status things. Being able to tell your parents “I got funded by YC” gives you cover to do things that don't scale.

And so “working out of the garage for years on your company idea” becomes a high status thing, rather than a low-status one.

When you see this, you start seeing signs elsewhere too. For example, Tyler Cowen's emergent ventures can be seen as another instance of this. After financial independence, many tech people adopt the label of being a Venture Capitalist. This bypasses the filter of productivity with generally small time and financial commitments each year. Business and profits can be examples of this, though I'm not sure how often this is the case.

In his article about status, Rob Henderson argued that Status works very much like food and water in that it is a primary motivator. We get sad (to the extent that even our immune system can get compromised) when we run low on it, and many of our behaviors are hardwired to seek them.

However, status is different from food and water in that you can create it out of nowhere.

In this way, status work less like a tangible resource, but more like a transmutable object. Understanding the pulse of this status drive can be valuable, such as demonstrated by the Y Combinator post. It gives people fuel to work on things that are more important than status.

One thing I think often about today's society is how the metric for status is not always aligned with what's creative, significant, and meaningful. There are status traps everywhere anchoring people in place. I think Y Combinator did more good than not in terms of meaning, and it did so in part with the ability to transmute status. From it, we can learn a bit about how to find our place in the world.

— Categorized under: #community, #psychology, #sociology

Today I was thinking about the various people who published their CVs of rejections out there, and it makes me wonder about something.

I know a lot of people who have anxiety around failure and rejection, and it's common advise to say that we shouldn't let them affect us because it isn't a reflection of who we are, but I don't think that advise is a strong enough treatment of rejection sensitivity.

The way I think about it, being sensitive to rejection is a natural condition of our ancestral environment. When we historically only lived around Dunbar's-Number amount of people, a single rejection would and should hit hard because there were likely only 3-4 opportunities out there for most people, and repeated rejections by many people are costly because it deals a reputation blow that paradoxically makes future opportunities harder.

One theory of depression and frustration advanced by Dr Randolph M. Nesse in the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings is that it causes us to re-evaluate our situation and to give up on the current approach, not through explicit re-evaluation of situations, but through making it really, really emotionally tough to want to try again. This is more reliable than simply making us reframe the challenge because it is more guaranteed to produce a behavior shift.

However, the problem is that this tendency is often too drastic of a solution. The correct response to an academic rejection in modern society is usually not “don't apply to schools altogether” but “apply to other schools”. But many modern institutions are disincentivized by legal reasons to avoid giving reasons an applicant wasn't selected. This lack of feedback turns the emotional reaction that would have been “thinking about how to improve things next time” to “frustration and thinking about giving up”. We see this type of negative emotional process again and again when failures don't come with negative feedback (and this is part of why failing in videogames usually feel much better than failing IRL). Our intuition detects an environment where “you will fail for reasons unclear to you”, and defaulting to frustration and depression is the natural way to pivot us away from the problem domain altogether. In this academic case and many other modern cases, this instinct is subconscious, automatic, and completely maladaptive.

How does one deal with the legal/emotional structures of a modern world that is misaligned with our natural instincts?

I think unusual structures do requite some sort of unusual solutions. And I think often these types of solutions are what we now commonly witness as modern stress-coping responses: – Compulsive shopping – Video games – Pornography – Substance addiction – Aggression

Sites on Rejection Sensitivity Dysmorphia often suggest medication as a way to combat rejection sensitivity, but I think barring actually pathological cases, I'm hesitant about this. Ideally, we want to search for something sublimating if possible – one that takes mal-adaptive instincts and utilize them for adaptive purposes. I think that in order to counteract how unusual our modern world is, this practice would necessarily look a bit intense or extreme or unusual, and I honestly think that the best ones I've found so far are meditation, art, and exercise.

That is, I think to deal with the unusual amount of modern rejection we face, we should try to project our depression and frustration to as much meditation, art, and exercise as possible. This (other than having an unusually good time with friends, which is one thing I'm still trying to figure out how to do) is the one way I can find to sustainable escape the modern conundrum of unaligned incentives and stress.

One line from Attack on Titan I always found interesting was the idea that “everyone is slave to something”. Characters that appear larger than life in that show often had some internal obsession that's pushing them to have inhuman willpower, even when those obsessions are not necessarily perfectly altruistic. I think that beyond all, cultivating this sense of unnatural obsession may paradoxically be one way to live naturally in this unnatural world, full of bizarre, unusual, and crushing rejections.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #sociology

Recently I've felt some anxiety towards going back to work, which has been interesting to reflect back upon.

While at Fractal, I've met some people who seem very brave to me – they are willing to forego conventional job opportunities to pursue things with very low odds of success/impact like starting their own classes.

When I ask them about how they found the courage to do so when they could have gone for very high-status things, they would say that if you think about it, failure doesn't say that much about yourself.

I agree with this on a rational level, but find it hard to square with on an intuitive level. When I asked them about this, they said that “surrounding yourself with supportive people” helps a lot.

Thinking about my recent mindset, I do think this latter explanation has a lot of truth to them. When you interact with a lot of new people (for me, this seems to happen recently in the context of dating), they tend to use employment as a judge of your worth. This doesn't happen when you are usually in a supportive community. I find that when I prioritize interacting with new people, my anxiety goes up accordingly.

What this provides at least, I think, is a tool to help deal with anxiety. If you believe that your community are essentially the correct one, then hanging with a community with aligned norms will help you with the unusual status signals of the real world.

But I think the question this begs is – what is the correct way to look at status? I'm not sure the broader population is by default “correct”. It is just the most popular option currently. And I think that defaults towards “correct”, but is not necessarily always so.

I have some ideas as to ways to look at this, such as the psychological health, connectedness, and the diversity & representativeness of the population composition of the community, but it's something I may want to save for later.

— Categorized under: #interactions, #communities, #sociology

I was chatting with a friend about the murals in Denver yesterday, apparently the street art in Denver is refreshingly positive – instead of “Fuck Society” and “Tear down the Power”, it's more like “Stay Kind” and “Love this City”.

This reminds me a lot a phase that people go through.

A decent amount of people I know went through an ironic phase of fashion, where they tend to dress dark, edgy, and loud. After that phase, the sense of fashion tones down a bit but you can sometimes tell that it's still present. Out of the people I know who went through that phase and came out the other end, it seems that they tend to be a bit kinder and more thoughtful than usual (though usually also less idealistic about the way that society works).

Thinking and talking to people about this, the common thread about that ironic phase was a sort of discontent with the world, a desire to distance from that world (blended sometimes with a desire to be unique), and an expression of both. This naturally make them feel a bit harder to approach while in that phase, but what does that say about people who went through that phase and dialed it down?

Thinking about it, I can come up with the following possibilities:

1. Workplace dress code
2. No longer discontent
3. Better to be integrated with society to change it
4. No longer feeling the desire to stand out
5. Feeling that the fashion choice doesn't express their personality
6. Not wanting the attention anymore
   

I think that outside of the first one and last one, the reasons are all indirectly connected with why someone who went through the ironic phase might appear kinder and more thoughtful compared against the average population. Of course, there are tons of kind and thoughtful people who bypassed the phase altogether, but I do think that someone who has gone through the phase is on average more able to discuss some important topics, albeit the ones that are darker and more personal in nature.

— Categorized under: #fashion, #psychology, #sociology

Theme spoiler warning: Revolutionary Girl Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of my personal favorite shows, and without spoiling the story content, one of the many interesting ways to read the theme of the show is how it suggests that the predominant thinking in society has been replaced from “kindness towards each other” to the toxic idea that “if you are stronger than others, then you will get your happily ever after”, whether that happily-ever after is through romance, reverting to an environment of idyllic childhood, or some other unfulfilled wish.

Though I have not considered that idea before, some of it resonates pretty deeply with me, I was reminded of this article about how ultra-rich people in the U.S. behave:

One thing Shteyngart noticed after spending time with this crowd was how competitive they were. “They’d compete against one another on their Bloomberg terminals all day and then at the end of the day they would play competitive poker with each other,” he says; this spirit of one-upmanship pervaded even the donations they made to charities. Shteyngart speculates that underneath this competitiveness is a need to seem smarter and more capable than their peers...

Shteyngart also witnessed the hedge funders making the sort of social comparisons that Norton and Harrington described, treating money as a “scorecard.” He remembers one of them saying something along the lines of “We don’t have best-seller lists and book awards. What we have is this—the number at the end of the day.”

It feels like there's this hedonic treadmill of status that people can't help but climb.

Looking at any form of mass media and studying any form of advertisements, it's really hard to escape the messaging that “success will bring you what you want” and that, if you are a girl, “attractiveness will bring you what you want”. While these certainly played a role even among other primate species, I suspect that their importance got severely exaggerated. The unfortunate part is that there may be a feedback loop – the more people are led to believe these things are important, the more people actually consider these things important, and now the chase for success or beauty can be rather suffocating.

Observing all of these phenomena, I definitely feel that this part of Utena's message have real-world applicability.

On the other hand, what about the show's proposed solution to the issue? The show's solution seems to just be “be kind and be genuine”, which, though both are things I try to be intentional about, doesn't feel like the whole answer somehow; though I fully concede that this may be a lack of personal growth in the area, and that the answer is intuitive to a lot of other people.

Somewhere out there, there's another system of emotions and personal values to be solved. Regardless, I really appreciate Utena the show for, among other important things, pointing out important problems like these about modern society.

— Categorized under: #theory, #sociology, #animations

America exports so much cultural values to the rest of the world that it can be kind of easy to forget that American values are a bit of an extreme case. In Hoftsteader's Cultural Framework, America ranks the highest in terms of individualism. This means that being different is likely considered more of a value in America than any other country in the world, and popular American media pretty often reflect this – Queen's Gambit, Spiderman – Into the Spiderverse, and Ready Player One being quick examples that come to mind.

It's hard to say whether things like this are good or bad – after all, America does do well in the world. It is also true that to a certain extent, I feel like I'm starting to internalize the vague notion that “normies” are “bad” as well. But still, whenever I hear or say the word normie, a sort of cognitive dissonance flashes through my mind, and I'm reminded of how much culture really shapes how people see themselves and others.

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Categorized under: #psychology #sociology

Postal letters are a pretty recent invention in the grand scheme of human's evolutionary history. The world's oldest postal service was established ~4,400 years ago, and back then it was only for kings and nobles. If you were a commoner back then, and you wanted to be in touch, you had to either talk in person, or just not at all.

It's interesting to think about this in the time of quarantine, when most communication becomes written, and face-time becomes exception to the norm.

The instant messaging features in the past few years have largely been try to make texting seem more in-person:

• The emojis act as substitutes for tone and facial expression.
• The typing indicators prevents people from talking over one another. * The various “like” buttons imitate facial expressions
• The “sent” and “seen” indicators solve the uncertain receipt problem.

But try as the IM apps may, they can't solve the cultural problem of vague norms around communications. When someone sends an instant message, did they intend to start a real time conversation, or did they intend it more like a memo? Is it rude to not respond to a message if it doesn't lend itself to a response, or would it be overzealous to try to respond to everything?

Unlike in-person-conversations where the norm is straightforward, in the world of IM, each person has their own rules. I think this causes a lot of confusion for a lot of people. What's interesting too is that there's no simple model that stands out as being the best, and regardless of that, since there is often a lack of direct feedback in these messages, it's unlikely for the IM norms to ever converge...

Is there a good personal or systematic solution to this? I wonder.

— Categorized under: #sociology, #psychology, #communications