Comment by cplusplusfellow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cplusplusfellow | Hacker News Reader

cplusplusfellow

Having to give everything some weeks or months or years of outrage, and only able to subside when the new outrage target emerges has a tendency to make everything [feel] less stable.

Maybe it’s not less stable, we are just reacting to it more.

We act like no one has ever seen inflation or a stupid war or a recession. It’s got to be the worst thing that’s ever happened with no future left for humanity (I won’t even digress into the climate discussion, but I could).

I don’t think this is healthy. Being addicted to your own brain stress hormone chemistry isn’t a beneficial disposition. So I somewhat refuse to participate. I accept that 8 million in the world died of covid and that some stuff will cost more this year than last, and that I may not get the same proportion of a raise. Maybe I’ll go 8 years between new cars instead of 6, but am I really that abused by this?

TLDR; I stopped hyperventilating over every thing social and traditional media told me to be outraged about, and I’m happier.

This is a type of learning called habituation.

Learning about new dangers is beneficial to a new organism or tribe. But once you have to start triaging which dangers to care about, you eventually have to set a threshold for what can even take your attention. And in a world with a vanishingly small attention budget, this is everything.

So your response is natural and correct, a fundamental approach to dealing with a problem of this scale. But we have to ask ourselves, is this something we want to habituate ourselves to? Are we placing too much emphasis on reducing energy costs for the individual mind vs the tribe's best interests?

One way or another, it's a sign of the times. We only feel the need to habituate to these signals because they're becoming background noise to even larger problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning#Habituation

I think no matter how one gets to this perspective, it’s the only way out. We must care less, because if we care too much, we can’t handle it and we fall apart. Humans aren’t built to live with constant fear and stress.

Of course that needs to be balanced, (eg with the environment) we have to care enough to act, but not be so attached as to lose our grounding.

Be careful. There is a school of thought that equates this form of apathy or indifference to complicity with the greatest of societal evils.

We always have attachments; the question is whether we've been guided into pragmatically useful ones. "Care more about everything" as a rallying cry is simply anxiety-inducing; too many of these things aren't within our control, in the Stoic sense. And in the way it's usually used, it comes with an implied political angle: care more about this group, not that one. This person should be deserving of access to resources, not that one. Always trust these people, not those people. And so on; a scramble to establish and normalize an order within society that positions groups A, B, and C in their "correct" spot, manipulating their identities into victims, heroes, or villains as necessary.

But the good actually comes from a place of strength. Carefully saving and deploying your own energy, willpower and resources allows you to contribute while protecting you from getting sucked into an impoverished state yourself. That kind of thing thing has very little to do with the political order, and a lot to do with personal conduct. And it's much harder to be taught personal conduct of this sort than to fall into some group identity; to be met with the messaging of A over B each day and say not "that's right, go get em!" but "I can't focus on this, I have to tend to my own affairs" while actually applying virtue to your affairs.

Extraordinarily vague rationale used to caution one away from a positive mental health. I’ll pass.

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