http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2019-04-03T15:10:28Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#7486cd85154e43ee608875876ddad75a1fbf276c 2019-04-03T15:10:28Z April 3. Continuing on personal stuff, years ago a friend told me he was having trouble dealing constructively with his emotions. I said, I don't know what that means. To me, emotions were not something you could deal with. They were like clouds in the sky. If they're good, appreciate them; if they're bad, ignore them. Also, do what feels good, and don't do what feels bad. It was that simple.

Somewhere in this decade, that strategy stopped working for me. Now, more of the things that feel good make me feel bad later, and more of the things that feel bad are impossible to avoid. And it turns out that ignored bad feelings don't actually go away.

The thing I'm getting better at, that I didn't want to get better at, is absorbing emotional pain. I understand now that pain is a muscle: to completely feel the pain, as it happens, is like lifting weights, and the more you practice, the more you can lift. But it still feels bad. And I'm paranoid, that the better I get at absorbing pain, the more pain the world will give me.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#2751a00b9ca20a32a01cabba0a46b0016a3b88aa 2019-04-02T14:00:10Z April 2. I was in bed with the flu on Saturday, and my brain still hasn't recovered enough to do a good post. Here's a pretty good article, The Disease of More. It has some interesting details, but the main message, to stop trying to improve yourself for the sake of improvement, is not something I need to hear. I have the opposite problem. I fight and fight to make my life easy and boring, and I keep losing. All I want to do is play games and get high and do creative work, but things keep going wrong and forcing me to get better at stuff I don't want to get better at.

I wonder if this is a class thing. Young urban elites are highly driven, and they can pay other people to do the grind work of modern life, so they have excess energy to put into dumb stuff like mountain climbing and clean eating. The rest of us just want to chill, but we have to keep solving the problems that appear as the system slowly collapses.

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