"A Hallmark-card hallucination designed to insulate them from the terror of having been categorically, majestically wrong about everything, forever."
that's a pretty fucking big external judgment and imaginary reality contruction just just assign to other people. like, wtf? every bit of THAT is *inside you*, not them.
It really is a great sentence—it captures something incredibly complex in just a few simple words. Sure, I could’ve added nuance like, “not every old person whose brain is deep fried thinks they were wrong about everything,” but I actually don’t believe that’s true.
Because even questioning whether you were right or wrong about your life requires some degree of objective reflection. For someone with advanced cognitive decline, who is nearing the end of their life, this is the only way objective reflection really manifests. This is them stepping outside of their skittle factory to view it objectively.
And if we’re talking about how hard it is to do that—to see your life clearly from that distance—then I think this moment, at the very end, is the hardest. That’s why it’s so brave when someone in that state is still able to ask, “Did I do this life thing right?” It takes a huge amount of humility and courage. It’s the most hardcore reality to confront and it makes perfect sense that someone would counter this intense existential crisis by receding into a hallmark hallucination.
Also, in the larger context of the essay, I’m not judging others harshly. I’m saying this hallucination is coming for all of us. It’s part of what happens when we keep people alive with medical interventions, even as their brains were never designed for this kind of longevity. That’s why I said I didn’t know how to tie a bow around it—because it’s all really fucked up and sad.
But I appreciate your comment. Without that extra context, I can see how the sentence might come off as cruel or judgmental.
from my perspective, the important thing at the end is to realize that it is, after all, a game.
There' s no existential crisis to be had- consciousness cannot be destroyed, only the interface. No holy singular "objective" truth to judge one. Only experience and continuing.
That's one thing I love about this- and one reason I pointed this out. There is no reason for terror, no wrong. but by saying this- by judging people this way, you program *your* end of life into that model.
And that, int he context of the article, seems a bit sad. like, the whole thing you observed and wrote and you are insisting on not granting your own self grace- because it is necessary to see horror and mistakes in others.
I took it as a somewhat earnest exposition on how someone is interpreting their attempt to get closer to reality, or truth, or life- but this sort of universal judgment of the awfulness of others is...
oh! maybe it's a self-portrait of how to have a negative old age?
This is an eccentric person balancing the eloquence to turn a satisfying phrase with some level of off-leash tangential mania, which veers thoughtful and contains meaningful insight only incidentally. Writers in this style are essentially aesthetic in nature. You either enjoy reading it or don’t. You can have opinions about the content, but do you imagine the author will care? Do you imagine that engaging in reasonable debate will move any needle anywhere? It’s a lot more fun to engage with the form. It’s about fun
Thank you, I think you really nailed it. Also, when conversations about intense things like cognitive decline are only permitted to be done in a sober, somber manner, people avoid having these conversations entirely because they’re too intense. It’s fucked up and humor is kind of the only way you can interact with these things without totally losing your mind. When you go too deep into tragedy, you lose the ability to step outside of the factory
I'm not commenting for you, nor am I commenting to have you try to play 'capn saveaho' and try to explain down to me what you think some other person means.
no. I think you are one of those people Lewis talked about.
those who attempt to hold the universe hostage to your internal shittiness of viewpoint. To try and force others into a mold of your own shriveled being.
you have told me what I must read, how I must interpret, and what the author - MUST BE DOING- to satisfy you. or your ego. or your hormones.
You aren't important to me. I didn't write my comment to the author for you, and thus far you haven't even evidenced yourself as a real person (in what we could call a Gurdjieffan sense)
I hope it didn't hurt you too much.
And my intention was not to step on your dick or your emotional/hormonal sense of ownership if titty pics or whatever mess is going on in your subconscious.
Buddhists: You become the grooves you carve in your mind. Psychoanalysts: Unresolved patterns will haunt you. Neuroscience: Neural pathways get reinforced through repetition. Old grandmothers: “You’ll grow up to be a bitter old man if you don’t let it go.”
"Your mind doesn't randomly fall apart— it collapses into whatever thinking pattern you've practiced most throughout life. These patterns are rehearsals for who you'll become when everything complex is stripped away." I strongly disagree that dementia is some kind of reveal of your truest, deepest personality. I've watched it happen to two of my grandparents, two of the most wonderful people ever. It is absolutely nothing like you describe. It's the slow and relatively random destruction of your identity, leaving confusion and distress until there is nothing left and then a while later you die. Sure, brain pathways that are more used will in general take longer to disappear. But they will go too eventually, there's lots of randomness, and they also often have no deep significance. Apparently my grandmother's core personality is the weather. No, it's a thing to hold on to when you are struggling to follow the conversation, and thus later it survives.
You imply at various times that dementia is some type of choice and a way to hide from all your mistakes. I don't believe you believe that. It still made me angry in its silliness.
"I like to imagine what their dementia personality will be. What loop does their mind run when conversation dies? What story can they not stop telling at parties? What fear keeps them up at 3am? These things aren’t really personality— they’re programming. You’ve got to look past the surface, past what they do, to find the core motivation that drives everything else. That’s where the real fun begins."
None of these things secretly reveal your core motivation that fuels your life. That's just not true. Fundamentally, there is no core loop at the heart of a factory. People are complex and not boilable down in this way. This is just something that sounds profound and maybe can be true of some people sometimes, but just in general is obviously false.
"From this point on, you will adopt a single lens through which you filter existence." No? I don't actually think this is something inevitable that happens in adulthood. I certainly do not know ~any people who are like this.
"You tell yourself a story over and over, and eventually, you’re cast as the main character." I agree people cast themselves as the main character in a story they tell themselves. But that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the essay or dementia personality. The story can be complex and multidimensional.
"Optimism through a lifetime of misery isn’t luck or delusion. It's discipline disguised as temperament, paid for in a thousand grueling moments when they strangled their own knee-jerk pessimism." This part I don't disagree with. Yes, in general your thoughts become actions become habits, etc. As far as the point of the essay is that people form habits and it's difficult to break out of them, sure. But things are much more complex and constantly evolving in real life.
The end is also bizarre. No that is not why cognitive decline is scary, and no there are no redeeming features about this.
To me this fits a pattern of ideas where there's some core true thing that is important. But it is relatively obvious and not that interesting. It's just hard to actually implement in life. But then people will say it in a very extreme way that makes it sound super profound, but is just actually nonsense. Your writing is very good though. I'm mostly just bad because I find the idea that dementia reveals true personality offensive.
perfect. funny, useful and scary for the people who don't understand it. chef's kiss. I dropped by skittles earlier today (CPTSD! fun!) and I love when you find something on the internet that's like, thank god, someone gets it. discipline is contentedness' foundations, and if you don't WD40 and change the engine or rip the house down and start again, you just live in a shithole that can't survive climate change. Zero/zero about vibes or degeneration, it's as you allude to, pattern crystallisation. It’s about infrastructure.
If you don’t rewire your mental climate, it’ll kill you when the storm hits.
hahha anger which is actionable. very very good. +1 comment.
I mean weirdly I don't feel anger anymore. well I mean, I do, but it's not the same as it used to be before I got sober.
post-sober + medicated moi is like a "strange, kind owl you talk to" (housemates words).
usually when I smell systems failure on myself, if I can take sensory stimuli I will do what I call "tuning the descent" hahahah. this means finding music that matches whatever the hell the electricity in my brain has decided to pull the trigger on/switch drivers. can take a while, but usually find something - there is a reason I have 45 thousand playlists on Spotify, and why I was a music journalist before anything else career wise. sound nerds tend to have a really weird understanding of like, the effects of sound on neurology, and I wish more psychologists would wrench the Tibetan singing bowls from the yoga yuppies and look at why traumatised folk are hypnotised by binaural music, glitch, metal, spoken word insanity (e.g. Arab Strap).
otherwise, it's RPG time! usually find something to play that's usually in the vein of Citizen Sleeper (narrative immersive) || Stardew Valley (cosy) || something immersive like Baldur's (world building/explorer mode)
That doesn't work? I find something on the internet to learn. usually software, building apps, learning a new programming language, etc.
Or, chat to AI. not therapeutically, but just sending it thoughts I have and following the tangent, usually shows me what im actually thinking about that started the diversion. usually in these periods I write a lot of different thing, but never essays, always fiction. funny that hey?
I also allow myself to rigorously clean and arrange things whilst I listen to music, you could say it's a form of dancing.
Friends always know what's up because whilst "tuning" I'm always "narrating" the descent so they know when something's off. I have incredible friends. haha. an example was yesterday when I was trying to fast track a psych appt for a med refill, and they told me to "think about doing this earlier" and my house mate said:
"I'm surprised their booking website didn't get a suspiciously timed DDOS attack lmao"
always always during these = sleeping + running. the minute either occurs to me, I do it. I know it's the most important, the brain and the body needs blood flow.
okay that's a LOT longer than I intended it to be, but it sounds like you will entirely get it being in the land of dementia. I am hoping when / if I get to that point, or even just through natural matter deterioration, I'm placed firmly somewhere like Adventure Time the cartoon. That would be immeasurably the best result. Hahaha.
It sounds like you have a whole system for anticipating failure or your weak moments and I think this is so so critical. Ive started measuring my strength in terms of how much I can do on my weakest days instead of my strongest
Was stuck in a “negative thought loop” after second guessing a choice I made on a big life decision. This really helped me get over it, amazing write up!
> Optimism through a lifetime of misery isn’t luck or delusion. It's discipline disguised as temperament, paid for in a thousand grueling moments when they strangled their own knee-jerk pessimism. The rest of us just weren't watching closely enough to see the training program running in the background. We thought they were just being naive.
Not to be that guy, but you haven't read the Sequences. Some people live lives where optimism [/low risk-aversion] appears to solve things, and this itself is largely a product of luck. Most people live lives where low risk-aversion would be insanity.
I think you are committing the common TPOT/TLP error of noticing that rich/powerful/healthy people are happier than you, and harshly blaming some kind of perniciously invisible emotional deficit for your own misfortune.
What are the sequences? Show me the article that proves me wrong. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Optimistic people don’t simply have more “lucky” moments than others. It’s that they are better at looking for moments that have the potential to forward their happiness, and they are prepared to meet those opportunities because they’re believe that their happiness is deserved and justified.
It's not that a particular part counters what you're saying, it's that if you read any large % of it, it teaches you to think in such a way where you consider the most likely explanations for stuff rather than just the ones that seem to fit best.
So you would go, 'I have observed that certain people are in the category "doors open for them and they think more optimistically", and the rest are in the caregory "doors don't open for them as easily, and they seem to naturally think more pessimistically"'. And you would go, 'What's the simplest explanation for this observation?' and whatever the answer is, you would work hard to square it with your initial instinct.
My natural instinct is doors seem to open for them because they’re optimistic and happy, so people like being around them, so more people are willing to help, so they get more help, therefore doors open. The main point here is that their core loop is extremely pro-social. The opposite would be pessimistic, dissatisfied people: doors don’t seem to open as readily because their core loop is anti-social, people don’t like being around them, so there are less people around to help, so they get less help, so less doors open. Also, it’s important to remember that delusional optimism is just as bad as delusional pessimism, but delusional pessimism is made worse because it’s anti-social, whereas delusional optimism tends to be pro-social. In your opinion, what is missing in my understanding that reading the sequences might correct?
sorry i have not read it till now , i just have it booked marked on my incognito in the hopes that someday i will read it after a post nut clarity .
Anyway, I loved your essay so much that I ran it through Claude to generate a story on it, and I've been slowly chewing on it to consume it in its entirely. I'm genuinely in love with this 'skittle factory' way of looking inside ourselves and want to explore this
Some people have something to gain from eking out self-respect, I think. But that's not the same as optimism. Self-respect just says what you're worth; optimism says what you'll get and can be false.
You could probably some kind of self help cult off this minimalist personality pruning schtick. Really ties into that technologist optimization fetish thats all the rave these days. Isn't that basically what scientology is anyway? Just breaking down people to their nitty gritty core loop and then taking advantage of that.
The best way to ward off dementia is to be a loser. If you really focus on being bad at as many things as possible, yet still power through and commit to them, you're too busy to turn senile. Better to max out strange hobbies than stick to one thing.
Great post great article,
I cured Dementia by forgetting that I had dementia and got a chat bot to answer all questions..
And in the words of my 103 year old grandmother "What if you just forget to die."
“What if you just forget to die?” Is so hardcore. This is what I mean when I say that to them, it’s nirvana
Homeboy I was arguing with deleted his comments or blocked me or something so I can’t see your replies. But I enjoyed the read
Thank you :)
She learned how to game the system...
Yeah she’s on expert mode. This is why I liked hanging with super mega old people. Sometimes they will drop bongs
*bombs lol
Yeh well she did well.. and for sure experience of the old people should be listened to for sure they know stuff…
"A Hallmark-card hallucination designed to insulate them from the terror of having been categorically, majestically wrong about everything, forever."
that's a pretty fucking big external judgment and imaginary reality contruction just just assign to other people. like, wtf? every bit of THAT is *inside you*, not them.
It really is a great sentence—it captures something incredibly complex in just a few simple words. Sure, I could’ve added nuance like, “not every old person whose brain is deep fried thinks they were wrong about everything,” but I actually don’t believe that’s true.
Because even questioning whether you were right or wrong about your life requires some degree of objective reflection. For someone with advanced cognitive decline, who is nearing the end of their life, this is the only way objective reflection really manifests. This is them stepping outside of their skittle factory to view it objectively.
And if we’re talking about how hard it is to do that—to see your life clearly from that distance—then I think this moment, at the very end, is the hardest. That’s why it’s so brave when someone in that state is still able to ask, “Did I do this life thing right?” It takes a huge amount of humility and courage. It’s the most hardcore reality to confront and it makes perfect sense that someone would counter this intense existential crisis by receding into a hallmark hallucination.
Also, in the larger context of the essay, I’m not judging others harshly. I’m saying this hallucination is coming for all of us. It’s part of what happens when we keep people alive with medical interventions, even as their brains were never designed for this kind of longevity. That’s why I said I didn’t know how to tie a bow around it—because it’s all really fucked up and sad.
But I appreciate your comment. Without that extra context, I can see how the sentence might come off as cruel or judgmental.
from my perspective, the important thing at the end is to realize that it is, after all, a game.
There' s no existential crisis to be had- consciousness cannot be destroyed, only the interface. No holy singular "objective" truth to judge one. Only experience and continuing.
That's one thing I love about this- and one reason I pointed this out. There is no reason for terror, no wrong. but by saying this- by judging people this way, you program *your* end of life into that model.
And that, int he context of the article, seems a bit sad. like, the whole thing you observed and wrote and you are insisting on not granting your own self grace- because it is necessary to see horror and mistakes in others.
It’s a slapper of a line though man you’re misunderstanding the point of this kind of essay
well, then. why don't you explain it to me.
I took it as a somewhat earnest exposition on how someone is interpreting their attempt to get closer to reality, or truth, or life- but this sort of universal judgment of the awfulness of others is...
oh! maybe it's a self-portrait of how to have a negative old age?
This is an eccentric person balancing the eloquence to turn a satisfying phrase with some level of off-leash tangential mania, which veers thoughtful and contains meaningful insight only incidentally. Writers in this style are essentially aesthetic in nature. You either enjoy reading it or don’t. You can have opinions about the content, but do you imagine the author will care? Do you imagine that engaging in reasonable debate will move any needle anywhere? It’s a lot more fun to engage with the form. It’s about fun
Thank you, I think you really nailed it. Also, when conversations about intense things like cognitive decline are only permitted to be done in a sober, somber manner, people avoid having these conversations entirely because they’re too intense. It’s fucked up and humor is kind of the only way you can interact with these things without totally losing your mind. When you go too deep into tragedy, you lose the ability to step outside of the factory
good job with the AI slop, there.
I'm not commenting for you, nor am I commenting to have you try to play 'capn saveaho' and try to explain down to me what you think some other person means.
or what I do.
check the hormones.
AI avatar guy thinks human writing is slop
no. I think you are one of those people Lewis talked about.
those who attempt to hold the universe hostage to your internal shittiness of viewpoint. To try and force others into a mold of your own shriveled being.
you have told me what I must read, how I must interpret, and what the author - MUST BE DOING- to satisfy you. or your ego. or your hormones.
You aren't important to me. I didn't write my comment to the author for you, and thus far you haven't even evidenced yourself as a real person (in what we could call a Gurdjieffan sense)
I hope it didn't hurt you too much.
And my intention was not to step on your dick or your emotional/hormonal sense of ownership if titty pics or whatever mess is going on in your subconscious.
now, off with you.
Incredible
Thank you!!
Thank you- seventeen times, on repeat - so much. This is the kind of writing I came here for. X
This means so much to me, thank you for reading it🤍🤍🤍🤍
Buddhists: You become the grooves you carve in your mind. Psychoanalysts: Unresolved patterns will haunt you. Neuroscience: Neural pathways get reinforced through repetition. Old grandmothers: “You’ll grow up to be a bitter old man if you don’t let it go.”
The old grandma is always right tbh
Wow! I think that is the best piece on mindfulness, um, dementia, er, philosophy? Following your dream but guiding your, ah, something something?
“Just pure 24/7 monkey tits. No justifications. No apologies.”
I laughed so hard with your multiple turns and twists.
Thank you for starting my morning right!
Thank you, I love this comment. 24/7 monkey tits is my new life philosophy
This is pseudo-psychology nonsense that has no relation to reality.
What frames or ideas do you specifically disagree with? Genuinely curious
"Your mind doesn't randomly fall apart— it collapses into whatever thinking pattern you've practiced most throughout life. These patterns are rehearsals for who you'll become when everything complex is stripped away." I strongly disagree that dementia is some kind of reveal of your truest, deepest personality. I've watched it happen to two of my grandparents, two of the most wonderful people ever. It is absolutely nothing like you describe. It's the slow and relatively random destruction of your identity, leaving confusion and distress until there is nothing left and then a while later you die. Sure, brain pathways that are more used will in general take longer to disappear. But they will go too eventually, there's lots of randomness, and they also often have no deep significance. Apparently my grandmother's core personality is the weather. No, it's a thing to hold on to when you are struggling to follow the conversation, and thus later it survives.
You imply at various times that dementia is some type of choice and a way to hide from all your mistakes. I don't believe you believe that. It still made me angry in its silliness.
"I like to imagine what their dementia personality will be. What loop does their mind run when conversation dies? What story can they not stop telling at parties? What fear keeps them up at 3am? These things aren’t really personality— they’re programming. You’ve got to look past the surface, past what they do, to find the core motivation that drives everything else. That’s where the real fun begins."
None of these things secretly reveal your core motivation that fuels your life. That's just not true. Fundamentally, there is no core loop at the heart of a factory. People are complex and not boilable down in this way. This is just something that sounds profound and maybe can be true of some people sometimes, but just in general is obviously false.
"From this point on, you will adopt a single lens through which you filter existence." No? I don't actually think this is something inevitable that happens in adulthood. I certainly do not know ~any people who are like this.
"You tell yourself a story over and over, and eventually, you’re cast as the main character." I agree people cast themselves as the main character in a story they tell themselves. But that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the essay or dementia personality. The story can be complex and multidimensional.
"Optimism through a lifetime of misery isn’t luck or delusion. It's discipline disguised as temperament, paid for in a thousand grueling moments when they strangled their own knee-jerk pessimism." This part I don't disagree with. Yes, in general your thoughts become actions become habits, etc. As far as the point of the essay is that people form habits and it's difficult to break out of them, sure. But things are much more complex and constantly evolving in real life.
The end is also bizarre. No that is not why cognitive decline is scary, and no there are no redeeming features about this.
To me this fits a pattern of ideas where there's some core true thing that is important. But it is relatively obvious and not that interesting. It's just hard to actually implement in life. But then people will say it in a very extreme way that makes it sound super profound, but is just actually nonsense. Your writing is very good though. I'm mostly just bad because I find the idea that dementia reveals true personality offensive.
Thanks, excellent read!
Your writing style is entertaining and hilarious whilst perceptive 👍🏻💡
having spent much time with old people affected by dementia I tend to agree with your assessment. .
Thank you! It’s hard to be funny in writing and it’s very funny to *me* so it’s nice to hear that others agree
perfect. funny, useful and scary for the people who don't understand it. chef's kiss. I dropped by skittles earlier today (CPTSD! fun!) and I love when you find something on the internet that's like, thank god, someone gets it. discipline is contentedness' foundations, and if you don't WD40 and change the engine or rip the house down and start again, you just live in a shithole that can't survive climate change. Zero/zero about vibes or degeneration, it's as you allude to, pattern crystallisation. It’s about infrastructure.
If you don’t rewire your mental climate, it’ll kill you when the storm hits.
love this xooxox
I love this comment so much. What is your wd40? I think mine is dancing and a certain level of despair that turns into anger which is actionable
hahha anger which is actionable. very very good. +1 comment.
I mean weirdly I don't feel anger anymore. well I mean, I do, but it's not the same as it used to be before I got sober.
post-sober + medicated moi is like a "strange, kind owl you talk to" (housemates words).
usually when I smell systems failure on myself, if I can take sensory stimuli I will do what I call "tuning the descent" hahahah. this means finding music that matches whatever the hell the electricity in my brain has decided to pull the trigger on/switch drivers. can take a while, but usually find something - there is a reason I have 45 thousand playlists on Spotify, and why I was a music journalist before anything else career wise. sound nerds tend to have a really weird understanding of like, the effects of sound on neurology, and I wish more psychologists would wrench the Tibetan singing bowls from the yoga yuppies and look at why traumatised folk are hypnotised by binaural music, glitch, metal, spoken word insanity (e.g. Arab Strap).
otherwise, it's RPG time! usually find something to play that's usually in the vein of Citizen Sleeper (narrative immersive) || Stardew Valley (cosy) || something immersive like Baldur's (world building/explorer mode)
That doesn't work? I find something on the internet to learn. usually software, building apps, learning a new programming language, etc.
Or, chat to AI. not therapeutically, but just sending it thoughts I have and following the tangent, usually shows me what im actually thinking about that started the diversion. usually in these periods I write a lot of different thing, but never essays, always fiction. funny that hey?
I also allow myself to rigorously clean and arrange things whilst I listen to music, you could say it's a form of dancing.
Friends always know what's up because whilst "tuning" I'm always "narrating" the descent so they know when something's off. I have incredible friends. haha. an example was yesterday when I was trying to fast track a psych appt for a med refill, and they told me to "think about doing this earlier" and my house mate said:
"I'm surprised their booking website didn't get a suspiciously timed DDOS attack lmao"
always always during these = sleeping + running. the minute either occurs to me, I do it. I know it's the most important, the brain and the body needs blood flow.
okay that's a LOT longer than I intended it to be, but it sounds like you will entirely get it being in the land of dementia. I am hoping when / if I get to that point, or even just through natural matter deterioration, I'm placed firmly somewhere like Adventure Time the cartoon. That would be immeasurably the best result. Hahaha.
It sounds like you have a whole system for anticipating failure or your weak moments and I think this is so so critical. Ive started measuring my strength in terms of how much I can do on my weakest days instead of my strongest
Mad. That's smart. Love that.
Was stuck in a “negative thought loop” after second guessing a choice I made on a big life decision. This really helped me get over it, amazing write up!
Hearing this means so much to me, thank you for reading it and sharing this.
Brilliant read!
It’s monkey tits all the way down…
Thanks nick :)
I respectfully regret reading this.
> Optimism through a lifetime of misery isn’t luck or delusion. It's discipline disguised as temperament, paid for in a thousand grueling moments when they strangled their own knee-jerk pessimism. The rest of us just weren't watching closely enough to see the training program running in the background. We thought they were just being naive.
Not to be that guy, but you haven't read the Sequences. Some people live lives where optimism [/low risk-aversion] appears to solve things, and this itself is largely a product of luck. Most people live lives where low risk-aversion would be insanity.
I think you are committing the common TPOT/TLP error of noticing that rich/powerful/healthy people are happier than you, and harshly blaming some kind of perniciously invisible emotional deficit for your own misfortune.
What are the sequences? Show me the article that proves me wrong. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Optimistic people don’t simply have more “lucky” moments than others. It’s that they are better at looking for moments that have the potential to forward their happiness, and they are prepared to meet those opportunities because they’re believe that their happiness is deserved and justified.
i think he may be talking about this https://www.readthesequences.com/
Can you show me which part is countering what I’m saying?
It's not that a particular part counters what you're saying, it's that if you read any large % of it, it teaches you to think in such a way where you consider the most likely explanations for stuff rather than just the ones that seem to fit best.
So you would go, 'I have observed that certain people are in the category "doors open for them and they think more optimistically", and the rest are in the caregory "doors don't open for them as easily, and they seem to naturally think more pessimistically"'. And you would go, 'What's the simplest explanation for this observation?' and whatever the answer is, you would work hard to square it with your initial instinct.
My natural instinct is doors seem to open for them because they’re optimistic and happy, so people like being around them, so more people are willing to help, so they get more help, therefore doors open. The main point here is that their core loop is extremely pro-social. The opposite would be pessimistic, dissatisfied people: doors don’t seem to open as readily because their core loop is anti-social, people don’t like being around them, so there are less people around to help, so they get less help, so less doors open. Also, it’s important to remember that delusional optimism is just as bad as delusional pessimism, but delusional pessimism is made worse because it’s anti-social, whereas delusional optimism tends to be pro-social. In your opinion, what is missing in my understanding that reading the sequences might correct?
sorry i have not read it till now , i just have it booked marked on my incognito in the hopes that someday i will read it after a post nut clarity .
Anyway, I loved your essay so much that I ran it through Claude to generate a story on it, and I've been slowly chewing on it to consume it in its entirely. I'm genuinely in love with this 'skittle factory' way of looking inside ourselves and want to explore this
Oooooo I want to read it!!
https://claude.site/artifacts/7cff7889-ef28-409d-bbc3-80aa3e315f6a
could not share the whole story in comment due to length so shared the claude chat link
[yes, thank you!]
Some people have something to gain from eking out self-respect, I think. But that's not the same as optimism. Self-respect just says what you're worth; optimism says what you'll get and can be false.
You could probably some kind of self help cult off this minimalist personality pruning schtick. Really ties into that technologist optimization fetish thats all the rave these days. Isn't that basically what scientology is anyway? Just breaking down people to their nitty gritty core loop and then taking advantage of that.
The best way to ward off dementia is to be a loser. If you really focus on being bad at as many things as possible, yet still power through and commit to them, you're too busy to turn senile. Better to max out strange hobbies than stick to one thing.
beautiful. you have such a way with words, and this was just what i needed to read at the most impactful possible moment. gracias
this is really beautiful, and useful to boot, thank you for writing