Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2019-02-01T13:30:55Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com February 1. http://ranprieur.com/#2e82468e47549f1891cf46c5bfdfb1352fa4ec2e 2019-02-01T13:30:55Z February 1. Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports? The article mentions three reasons. The first is selection bias, that triathlons are expensive. The second is that endurance sports provide something missing from most white collar jobs, "a clear and measurable goal with a direct line back to the work they have put in." And the strange third reason is the pursuit of pain.

Back in 2017 I did a post that linked to this long post, The opponent-process theory of emotion. Everyone knows that pleasure often rebounds into pain, and vice versa; but sometimes the rebound is stronger than the initial feeling, so someone could feel more pleasure by actively seeking pain.

That's never happened to me. That post doesn't even consider the possibility that different people get different amounts of hedonic rebound, but I think it's obvious, and I'm wondering if that difference is related to some kind of personality difference, like the old Type A - Type B theory.

It's easy to assume that everyone's inner world is like your own, but they might be radically different. The other day there was a short Ask Reddit thread, What does anxiety feel like? The answers are all over the place, and the most interesting difference is that some people feel the wrongness inside them, and some people feel it out in the world.

For me anxiety feels like the world is made of needles and knives, all poised to stab me if I make a move to extend myself. And I've made some progress against anxiety by seeking pain: when I notice that something bothers me, I try to amplify that feeling as long and hard as I can. It feels terrible, and it doesn't feel good when I stop. The mechanism is not like a rebound, but like draining my pain battery, until the charge becomes weaker and less frightening.

It's actually a lot like this technique from the meditation subreddit, an extended metaphor of hunting baby thoughts. Edited:

To catch baby thoughts, first build a fortress -- normally your own breath, but it can be anything. Soon, the baby thoughts will start knocking on those walls, and the method to kill a baby thought is simple: notice it.

If you don't notice it early, the thought will get older and eventually die after several long minutes. During those minutes, you will be absorbed by that thought, and then another thought will wait for its turn, and another. This is what happens to people in their everyday life: the birth, growth and death of long strings of thoughts.

During meditation, you shorten this cycle and hunt the thoughts as young as possible. After many hours of hunting, as you get better at killing them, they will come more sparsely, until you will find yourself alone, in peace and silence.

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