If part of you doesn’t want to do something, then that’s a conflict that should be rationally resolved. Trying to just do it is suppressing part of yourself and is a win/lose attitude not a win/win solution.
Similarly, planning to do CF later after you reach a career milestone is unrealistic. If you can’t/won’t/don’t fit it into your life now, why would you later?
What’s the point of trying to fit CF into my life now when I know there’s a good chance ill get stuck or end up doing something dumb like gaslighting or passive agression? I just don’t understand a way forward with CF without already having a lot of useful life skills. Whenever I text something i already feel like i messed up. I just don’t get it sorry
So I assume you don’t want to gaslight or be passive aggressive, but you think you have problems with doing that sort of thing and have done that sort of thing here before.
You’ve come back (after a year) that tells me that you do value being involved here.
You’ve made some serious mistakes, but you seem to want to improve on them.
Those specific mistakes are major obstacles to your ability to communicate and learn, and you know this. I think it’s safe to assume that you make similar gaslighting/passive aggressive mistakes in other ways you deal with people. So it seems to be very much in your interests to work on them.
A way of making useful progress on those issues might be to go back to when you’ve done that in past posts, and do some serious introspection and brainstorm what went wrong and how you could do better in that sort of situation in future.
(to be clear I’ve only been active here for a few weeks and am not familiar with the posts you seem to be talking about, I’ve read and observed CF/FI/curi content on and off for years and have my own subconscious obstacles and big mistakes)
A way of making useful progress on those issues might be to go back to when you’ve done that in past posts, and do some serious introspection and brainstorm what went wrong and how you could do better in that sort of situation in future.
I could try your suggestion but what do I do after trying it a couple times? Imma just end up out of context with what i need to learn. Im undecided on doing your suggestion
You have a good chance to fail at anything. Many people take up chess and fail to become competent players. Many competent chess players aim to become great players and fail. A significant portion of great chess players aim to become the best in the world and fail (some of them end up happy and successful in the chess world despite this failure). It’s the same for every sport, cooking, diet, exercise, math, science, etc. People fail a lot at careers or college majors.
It also depends on your goals. If you want to be a great thinker, there isn’t a reliable alternative to CF. I have argued that a lot of the philosophy alternatives are basically counter-productive and have approximately zero chance of success (their ideas are decisively refuted and they have no representatives who will discuss/debate the matter). But even if they weren’t refuted, none of them claim to offer a reliable way to become a great thinker, and many aren’t even trying to create great thinkers.
If you have some other goal(s) besides being a great thinker, then the relevance of CF and many alternatives could be considered for whatever those goals are. Parts of CF can be useful in more modest ways. People do often fail at smaller goals due to irrationality, poor thinking, poor problem solving skills, etc. CF could help with those things.
What I criticized in the quote was someone with a goal to do CF but who plans to do nothing related to CF for years and then do CF later. That is generally a bad idea that results in a lower success rate. I would have a similar opinion for other things, such as self-help, meditation, chess or a paleo diet: if someone wants to do them but plans to do nothing for years and then get started later, I doubt that’s a good plan.
It sounds like you’ve had some sort of failures or inner conflicts that you haven’t shared. If you want to talk about them then make a new forum topic (since it’d be off-topic in reply to this article) and you can share about what you’ve tried and what you think went wrong. If you share that and want advice, you can ask for it. It’s hard to say anything very helpful without knowing what you’re personally getting stuck on. I and the other forum members don’t currently have much knowledge of what’s going on with you.
And while it should go without saying: If you don’t want to talk about your problems in a forum topic, then don’t. You’re the one reading my articles and coming to my forum by your own voluntary choice; I haven’t asked you to do anything and you’re free to leave and stop paying attention to me at any time. If you feel pressured in some way and you think I’m doing something to pressure you, I would appreciate information about it because that is not my intention and I don’t think writing impersonal, philosophical essays is pressuring, but if there is some problem with my activities then I would like to fix it.
If you don’t want to talk about your problems in a forum topic, then don’t.
Yeah, something just keeps bringing me back here.
but if there is some problem with my activities then I would like to fix it.
I wouldn’t be able to give you a non problematic answer if I tried.
I don’t want to add on to the dumb harassment campaign on you. I don’t want to cause trouble. I’ll cya
It’s not unusual for a problem to take multiple tries to solve. I’ve had similar problems before, they can be hard to change, I remember feeling like there was so much going wrong that it was hopeless. I gave up multiple times. I’m not even confident now that I’ll stay active here because of the difficulty these kind of problems pose and the way the ideas can hide until a moment of stress/emotion to surface. I can’t say there’s an easy way to make progress or give you a sure solution. But I want to live a happy, successful life and reach my goals, and my subconscious mistakes stand in my way. I’ll never do very well until I face them and work to improve, and progress is noticeably easier now than it was when I started out.
It’s hard to be more specific, and though I could look for your old posts and pick something to analyse I understand that this sort of thing can come with a lot of subconscious conflicts. If I were to pick something myself, I might pick something that brings up a problems which you’re not comfortable with.
If you were to go through them and find one past post of yours that you think you made these kind of mistakes in, I wouldn’t mind looking through it. But if there’s something else specific you want to focus on, any improvement is good improvement.
What do you think you need to learn?
Rationally resolving something sounds like it would help a lot with getting started on things. So many times I start by “just doing it” and it doesn’t end well. Like after “just doing it” once I have to do it again and again until the next morning when I “just don’t do it”.
Posting vs not posting on the forum is something to procrastinate about. One side of me sees posting is good so I can engage with CF content and practice, but the other side is saying don’t post cuz there’s gonna be so many errors. I had more to say, but I cut it out so I don’t get ahead of myself with this post.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to read self help stuff but from articles online(I can’t afford books rn). It felt great at first to transition from youtube self help videos to articles, but the parts of me that don’t want to do any of this is still there. It sounds dumb to just ignore the signs. I can see now how learning will take a long time to do.
Libraries are free.
That’s what I was thinking of. I’m gonna have some books checked out and see if I want to transition to them from youtube.
I read the article during a break at work the other day. Today I decided to start going through it and writing down notes and thoughts I have on it.
If part of you doesn’t want to do something, then that’s a conflict that should be rationally resolved. Trying to just do it is suppressing part of yourself and is a win/lose attitude not a win/win solution.
If you find you procrastinate on something, or partly feel like procrastinating on it, then part of you doesn’t want to do it. That is a conflict. If you were unconflicted, you wouldn’t even be tempted to procrastinate.
If you have trouble with getting started, but you like something once you start, then you have a conflict – part of you dislikes it. There’s a problem to solve there. The problem is not with becoming more motivated or learning “life hacks” to avoid procrastination. The solution shouldn’t be to find more ways to get started (you can do that, or not, but it won’t address the primary issue). The problem is there is an objection – a criticism – inside you which you have not refuted and should not assume is wrong.
For chores, I’d suggest brainstorming a list of negatives of chores. What are the downsides that part of you may dislike about them? You seem more aware of positives but could brainstorm those too to get a written list and in case you come up with some more.
For fatigue, people have limited energy relative to time. You can’t just do high-energy stuff for most of your waking hours every day. You have to manage your energy budget by finding ways to mix in some lower energy activities and deciding that some high energy activities aren’t worth doing. (I don’t know if you’re already doing these things. I’m just speaking generally.)
There are also lifestyle changes which may increase your energy budget. You could brainstorm a list of those if you’re interested.
I do something similar where if I’m sleep deprived I don’t want to do philosophy. Like I’ll feel better about it the next day if I get more sleep. It doesn’t sound worth it doing posting when sleep deprived. I wonder too sometimes if what I do is the same as procrastinating.
How to view this depends on how frequently you’re sleep deprived. If it’s 2 days a month, or 20, those are different scenarios.
Oh yeah, I think it’s around once a week for me.
Some more thoughts on the article from today:
People often fail to recognize these things as inner conflict, or fail to view them as disagreements between pieces of knowledge, or don’t even try to do problem solving about the ideas themselves. They do meta problem solving based on assuming a conclusion. Like they blame poor motivation and try to find ways to be more motivated and get themselves to do the activity. They don’t respect the other side as having an substantive disagreement and possibly being right. Maybe you shouldn’t do the activity or should make changes to the activity before doing it.
They think it’s a conflict between e.g. “this is a great activity that will benefit me a lot” and “lazy”. It isn’t. Part of you doubts it’s great or beneficial, or perhaps part of you thinks the activity is so horrible that it isn’t worth the benefits that come later. You need to recognize that if you’re avoiding doing something, part of you thinks it should not be done (as-is with no modifications).
Hmmm. If you’re sleep deprived here and there that could be just some variance in how things go in someones life, but if its all the time that signifies that maybe you just don’t care about sleep. If someone struggles to get their sleep schedule together they have reasons why they like staying up late, or they have reasons as to why they like a sporadic schedule (maybe they have a bunch of friends with different schedules that they want to game with or something).
They may also not see a value in not being sleep deprived. I get a bit of backlash from this at work due to my reasoning for refusing to open. We open at 4:30, we have to be there 30 minutes before to open the store. So opening shifts start from 4:00. I’ve shared that I’ve noticed how much better things have been for me after getting enough sleep, no one really cares. Oh yeah, to clarify there’s somewhat of an expectation to open as a supervisor. I told my manager I’ll take the pay-cut and step down, but I’m not opening. I’m a good worker and he’s willing to work with me, so it hasn’t been an issue.
Hmm. Yeah I probably will soon. I think this is true for a lot of stuff in general. I’m aware of the positives of things, not necessarily the negatives. Or, in some cases, I may be aware of the negatives but mentally I feel the positives outweigh the negatives, so I don’t bother addressing the negatives.
That makes sense. I’ve been aware of these concepts previously. I struggle to take my energy being limited seriously. I think I’m quite short-term on stuff, so when I feel good I think I can do more and when I feel bad I try to lesson my load. I struggle to carry the lesson from when I overreach and do too much to not do too much when things are going well.
Hmm. Here’s a short list for now: