The Problem of Inconsistent Preferences
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