I'm EXACTLY like the daughter mentioned in the article. My ruminations make me more creative and poetic while making me careless and depressed.
Does anyone here have any ways I can tackle the downsides of being this way ?
Does anyone here have any ways I can tackle the downsides of being this way ?
Do more of that thing every day. Do less web surfing and less rumination.
It's all about mental habituation.
Allow me to randomly speculate that in your mental world, reading some Intellectually Fascinating Article has an extremely high priority, whereas eating dinner is just some stupid thing your body demands, and so because of this configuration of like/dislike or attraction/aversion you tend to chow down whatever is easiest so you can get back to the Fascinating Article.
That habit becomes deeply learned by your neural networks, reinforced by daily training. Fortunately your species has evolved the mysterious capacity of thinking and willing, so you can in fact make decisions that are counterintuitive to your own neural training.
You may find that you need some violent tactics such as temporarily cutting off your internet supply. That snaps you back to reality (oh, there goes gravity). Makes it way easier to focus on prepping veggies.
Isn't part of the problem that electronic or thought-based stuff moves too fast, is infinitely elastic and offers too little real friction-based resistance? Which leads to a stagnation of patience with actual passing time and physical reality. So I suggest doing whatever requires and encourages patience. Cooking is a great example because if you try to do it as fast as possible you will burn your garlic and that can very effectively train your neurons to chill out and do one thing at a time.
In my oughts and teens, I trained classical piano. Some days toward the end I was practicing for 4-6 hours during and after school, and I interviewed at the Boston conservatory. They told me they most likely would not accept me, but that's not really why I stopped. I knew I had to stop because despite over 15 years of serious intensive practice, I could still not make it through a 3 minute piece without my mind wandering off on some tangent of curiosity. At best my playing was distracted and unconvincing, and at worst (usual) I would screw up in the middle when my conscious attention came back to the present.
The only way I can stay task focused for longer than a few minutes at a time is by putting on headphones with a driving beat (EDM or similar) and stimulants. Caffeine is usually enough to get me through the workday. I'm a programmer now.
I made it through grade school and undergrad with respectable grades thanks to aptitude and quick learning, but I probably have an attention disorder that went undetected because of it.
>thinking and willing
One doesn't simply think away the structural defects in one's mind, any more than neurotypicals could transform themselves into genius IQs through force of will. A mind is shaped over time by internal and external influences, but plasticity drops off rapidly after the developmental years. Don't know your history of study, but why not browse through some videos of congenitally or traumatically brain-damaged individuals on youtube for some insight?
I agree that you can't think away structural stuff. What I wanted to say is that you can use clear thoughts and intentions to guide you to do things that deviate from your habits, which I think is mostly true.
For example, working around your attention problems by consciously using music and caffeine is something you could remind yourself of consciously in case you would forget. That type of thing.
I know that willpower is a tricky thing. That's why I emphasize thinking about something that you already enjoy and that takes you to a different mind state from the one that is causing problems. For me, that's cooking, but also riding bikes and walking. If I consciously decide to do slightly more of those things, that seems to be an effective and not-too-painful way of "improving" my average mind state.
I literally just chowed down an easy meal and rushed back to my computer to continue this Fascinating Article, only to find this sentence, which described exactly what I was doing.
I confess I don't rightly understand the meaning being applied in the Wikipedia page there.
Mapping this to the domain of psychology, it becomes a thought process where one is going through the same steps over and over and over again; you can pick apart any situation you find yourself in, in excruciating detail. The only thing it doesn't lead to is an actionable plan of what you're going to do about said situation.
>a thought process where one is going through the same steps over and over and over again; you can pick apart any situation you find yourself in, in excruciating detail //
That's a very clear description, thank you. If that's all they mean then IMO the page is absolutely terribly written.
Herzog is a brilliantly creative person, and if you read "Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin", you'll see someone who is connected to the external world so much, full of life and vigour, like the son of the author, but has deep insights into the human nature that we typically attribute to those who live in their heads, the tortured geniuses.
On the other hand, Logicomix is a brilliant read on the angst of mathematicians, especially Bertrand Russel who sought to make the foundations of Mathematics more rigorous, coming from a deep childhood conviction that reality can and must be explained from objective truths. What a contrast to his inner life plagued by demons of depression, which as the reasonable effectiveness of Cognitive Bias Therapy proves as coming from an illogical way of looking at the world. Russel even wrote The Conquest of Happiness, which meant that he was trying to solve the puzzle for himself and dedicated great energy in that pursuit.
The other book that captures the life of the tortured geniuses is Colin Wilson's The Outsider, which does a fantastic study of artists like Camus, Sartre, Van Gogh, Hesse and many more. He quotes from Bernard Shaw's play "John Bull's Other Island", which for me captures the essence of the depressed soul:
Keegan: You feel at home in the world then?
Broadbent: Of course. Dont you?
Keegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.
There are no magical cures - this is a question that humanity has been pondering for ages, and till we learn to decode and manipulate our brains and hormones, we'll keep asking. Apart from living externally, there are a few things that do help. Meditation and CBT are specific ways to control our mind from brooding into negativity, and much has already been said about it.
The other way to avoid sadness is to be happy, not in a hedonistic sense which we adapt to really quickly, but as in how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines the state of Flow. To work, to be challenged, to grow in complexity, and to forget ourselves in the process.
Something else that I don't find often mentioned in popular literature, probably because of the woo-woo nature of the topic, is to look at the finitude of our lives. Death is probably the most philosophical moment of our lives, but unfortunately it leaves us no time to contemplate it, which is a pity, because it could've helped us deal with the relatively petty griefs of life better. The oft-referred BBC Article about Bhutan's secret to happiness (http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150408-bhutans-dark-secret...) does go into it. They meditate on death a few minutes every day, giving them the right perspective to look at their daily lives.
In the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche quotes Montaign thus:
Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come—to them, their wives, their children, their friends—catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!... To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
So I guess that is my cocktail of tools: meditation, CBT, work, and being mindful of our impermanence.
Hope that helps.
As a self-diagnosed neurotic, I keep telling myself "This too shall pass".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
I also wanted to recommend Atul Gawande's excellent "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" to help get a more visceral understanding of death. He talks about how the human body starts degenerating as early as we hit 30, and paints a memorable picture of how every next moment is a moment closer to our death.
I recently discovered that the people/subjects I don't understand frighten me. And that causes load of other negative feelings. Exploring those subjects removes the fear at some point. And they are also often lot less negative in reality.
So personally I've found that "ignorance is bliss" only works as long as you are not at all aware of the shit. Once you are aware, it's best to go all in.