Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retr0spectrum | Hacker News Reader

> As one child described it, they feel "like abandoned aliens waiting for the mother ship to come and take them home"

This is exactly how I felt. I can remember thinking those exact words when I was very young - although I didn't really start questioning the nature of reality until my early teens.

At some point, I realised that these thoughts were only causing depression, so I decided to simply stop thinking about them. I also became apathetic, and detached from my own emotions.

Ultimately, my own existential depression led to self-destructive behavior - perhaps this was related to the coping strategy of "Seeking novelty and adrenaline rushes".

Edit: I would like to add that I do not consider myself gifted. I simply have a rather narrow set of interests which I have become good at. I think it is particularly common for "technical" people to be told they are gifted, because to the untrained observer their skills can seem like wizardry.

View on HN

I know where you are coming from.

I felt that I was a member of a different species, to the point where that idea quite literally manifested itself as a concrete possibility in my head.

You're right man, it's all thought based...it's all brain weirdness. It's a conflict between biosocial and intellectual factors.

The only way to push past it is to change your mindset. I can't speak for others, obviously, but for me that's been a long and arduous process.

There are ways to question the nature of life and the world and to remain calm and serene about it. To remain level.

I found too that little things are a big help...I lived a long time not bothering myself with "minor" and "vain" concerns... i.e. fancy clothing, delicious meals etc... but truly taking care and investing in these little things, concerning yourself with the quality of the little practices you partake in everyday really does begin to help.

Caring about yourself in little ways slowly but surely leads to a more positive overall conception of your own self and your movement through the world.

I had a sudden "wake up call" about a year ago, and since then things have been getting much better. Partly because I have become more independent, but also because I have perfected the art of simply not thinking about things that I want to ignore. I'm not sure if that's healthy or not, but it seems to work.

I think it's healthy, especially if those things are truly and deeply beyond your influence or control.

Do you have any advise on how you accomplished that? Meditation?

I'm not sure really, it seemed to come naturally. Perhaps even as a symptom of depression.

It might have helped that I stopped carrying a smartphone. I guess things like sitting on a train without any entertainment counts as meditation, although I never really think of it as such.

Disclaimer: I've had an anxiety disorder most of my life and I already have had some professional CBT training to help with difficult times. I think if anyone reading this is really down / troubled, then seeing a professional would be wise. There are really good caring people out there that can help.

I've recently experienced something very similar, I would like to share with you my story on getting (mostly) through it in hope that it may help others.

First step for me, just getting out in the wilderness helped me immensely, even just a nice park and some sun/rain helps. It sounds really alternate but getting out and touching trees, just sitting under them has been a kind of medicine, watching animals in as wild of a setting as possible is nice too.

Walking, or "wandering" for a long period of time has also been a great way to settle the mind, you could call it the most primitive form of meditation, but if you get the chance to walk for 1-2 hours along a quiet beach, consider yourself blessed. Just not having a set place to walk but just exploring is what I mean.

More formal meditation practice is very, very good for me; however, it has to be taught / practiced properly. Getting the wrong idea about something like Buddhism can be quite destructive, especially for those in a vulnerable place.

I found socializing to be critical, if you can talk to someone about the problems specifically it's even better. We are social beings.

My episode I now consider a little bit of a gift, it has made me realize the value of our natural surroundings and how important their conservation, protection and our return to them is for us humans. Maybe more than some of us ever realize.

I read the ancient Greeks would treat people with mental distress by giving them a nice quiet place to stay near the sea, maybe they were onto something?

Meditation has been a weird journey for me. Took a few tries to find something I'd stick with, and so far, it has made it easier to stop thinking about some things. Basically, meditation for me is a time to detach from my thoughts. Give myself something to concentrate on (drums for me), and do that for 20 minutes daily, and when the mind wanders, just go back to the sounds. And after a while, it is like your mind gets more used to doing that - I don't dwell nearly as much. It isn't perfect, but better.

Some folks find mediation makes them feel worse, depending on the technique and what is going on inside the person's head. Some of the repeated thoughts can happen in depression and anxiety. Meditation combined with either illness can be weird - some folks get a lot out of it, especially if they have comparatively mild symptoms, and some find it makes it go awry, for lack of a better description. Also, for females, hormones can cause sticky thoughts sometimes. This sort of thing might make medication a better first helping choice than meditation.

I accomplished it by squelching the conversations in my head about random shit - most of which was speculating future scenarios. These conversations of the past or future events are primary for me because I don't visualize - i.e. I don't have spontaneous visual memories or willful recall of visual detail of a memory. The conversations begin slowing when I began working on solving dissonant thoughts that lead to additional future telling of events. Now my mind is quiet, although full of questions about reality. It's a double edged sword!

Stop reading the news.

Being called gifted only made it worse. I was not. None of them were. I'm still not. It was a lie. Why couldn't people just give me credit for working hard? That was the truth. Why was my success some magical unexplainable innate attribute?

At any rate, psychologists will tell you how harmful it can be to tell a child how smart they "are", rather than letting them know they've simply "done" a good job.

The distinction seems to be between being and doing, with the former being static and the latter dynamic.

Well, probably to not feel bad about themselves. If your skills were obtained through hard work, they could have done that themselves. Whereas if it was handed to you by magic then there's nothing to be done, right?

Cognitive ability is an innate attribute. This is observationally true. We can't pretend that everyone has the same capabilities, even with applied effort. That's false. However, I still think that showering someone with praise and sectioning them off into separate classes throughout childhood is not necessarily the best strategy for dealing with highly intelligent children, either. My own experience was that socially, I was years behind my peers in high school due to the isolation of gifted classes. I think it would be best to have gifted students advance in grades but still have them integrated with the general student body along with some social interaction with peers of their age group.

At some level, everybody works hard, but some are incredibly more talented than others.

But I agree that it's misleading to call someone gifted. Intelligence is such a diverse thing. Some people can be gifted for one thing and totally deficient for some other things. I'm not even sure that a very high IQ is predictive of success in science for instance.

I also very highly doubt a very high IQ is predictive of science success - those are simply the folks we hear about because it is more popular than bragging that a philosopher or a musician is such. All three can be brilliant, but their minds simply work in different ways from each other.

Very high iq is certainly correlated with science success and predictive of it to a degree. That degree is not 100%, it's probably less than 50%

IQ is quite heritable, something about h = 0.7 for adults is a good average I've seen from a couple reviews. That's quite strong, though interestingly it's lower for children.

Now, you can argue about interpreting IQ all you like, but it's really a moot point because the metric captures some of the variation humans have in cognitive ability. It doesn't mean that there's a neat linear scale (a simplification like IQ metrics leads some to falsely conclude this), but there is variation nonetheless, and it's mostly due to your genes, not your upbringing.

Does that mean you were gifted? Not necessarily; advantages in some aspects of cognition likely come with a trade-off for others. Those we consider gifted likely just have a good match of abilities with the challenges they face.

However, I would caution against the other extreme; you did not simply pull yourself up by your bootstraps in some sort of meritocratic Riefenstahl-ian fantasy. You most certainly had some advantages and fortune.

I became so much happier when I realized how much my education-minded parents and my environment gave me a leg up (even in the economically declining Eastern Europe of the time). Helped me chill out a lot and feel less pressure (and hence have much more actual productivity).

Starting advantage does not mean you are not working hard now. Just means that you should do good things with that advantage. Make it shine!

You can certainly say that for yourself, but ascribing it merely to "hard work" for everyone is facetious.

I didn't work hard at all. I've never had a class which seriously taxed me mentally and until college at least I could get As without even trying at all.

Even more directly, on my first time taking the SAT (with 0 prep) I scored better than anyone else in my class, including people who had studied like crazy and gone through extensive prep courses.

Thinking that I'm anything but incredibly lucky would be arrogant of me. That being said, I do dislike the "gifted" terminology, primarily due to its theological and duty connotations.

I was a gifted kid, I got D's all through school because fuck doing that busywork, and then slept through college and did the bare minimum to graduate with honors, which means only studying for the exams in the car on the way to school... Meanwhile other people worked really really hard to graduate with a 3.0

Please tell me how my success is due to my hard work and not the luck to have been born to my smart-but-relatively-poor parents.

I know other people can spend their life working hard and not get to where I am, and people can work less hard than me and get a lot further. This isn't a game with very structured rules. Life is chaos, and you're doing yourself and society at large a disservice by ascribing your success solely to "hard work", because applying that dogma to people with an IQ of 90 isn't going to work out well on a large scale.

Or, a different interpretation: what's the benchmark for gifted? Who's picking these people out of the crowd, and how? The programs I saw didn't test objectively, were absurdly vulnerable to parental arm-twisting, and in some cases were drawing from a student body that was, on average, performing well below grade-level.

(N.B. Amount of hard work still dwarfed by blind luck.)

Highly selective colleges are the mother ship. When the handful of isolated gifted students are plucked out of their widely dispersed high schools and collected in one institution, one dorm, it's incredible. People feel home for the first time.

That was not my experience. I found that as I worked my way into elite institutions people were just playing more sophisticated, elaborate forms of the monkey-see-monkey-do game they were playing everywhere else.

It was mine.

To be fair, I think there is a tier of elite institutions which primarily attract the prestige/wealth crowd (Ivy League, etc), and a tier just below them in rankings which attract the nerds who want to do hard intellectual work.

This is entirely my experience. A lot of people at highly selective colleges are hyper focused on one area of study to the exclusion of others, for example a lot of my friends who are brilliant engineers hate the arts. I think intelligence is broader than IQ, because I think there's something to be said for the intelligence that allows you to recognize the value of many different intellectual pursuits at the same time. You can learn so much more if you get along with intellectuals of all kinds.

Some people take their specialization too far, in my opinion.

I suspect the cognitive effects of depression may serve this purpose well. An endeavor (specialization) is a good way to battle depression. My inclination is to agree with you. Then I realize this "intelligence" you've described is essentially an adaption to the sluggish nature of dissonant reasoning. The more axes involved in mediating dissonance the more the set of thoughts becomes partially ordered vs fully ordered. This partial ordering demands active mediation. This is the domain for which this intelligence is just another specialization. I realize it's good but it isn't wholly superior to avoiding it outright. For instance, in noticing this I'm only more ambivalent and ultimately... depressed. I can see how I would be able to execute faster if I defaulted to the other heuristic.

This is so true. I was on one of the mother ships. The bests of our class won a coupe of gold and silver medals on the Internationale Mathematik Olympiad.

After leaving school I "realized" that the universe is filled with happy morons and I have always wished to be one of them. But some day I realized that this wish makes me a moron because it's like to wish the sky were green. So actually a became one of them.

> People feel home for the first time.

I tend to believe that people that have relational issues continue to have them even when changing environment. Moreover, elite institutions can be competitive and it can be hard to deal with too.

I went to Oxford and even though everyone else there seemed pretty smart too I still didn't really make friends or develop meaningful relationships. It took me many years of basically just being isolated from others before I learned about the concept of "attachment styles" and started working on "Earned Secure Attachment" which basically means you build your own sense of attachment as an adult to correct the problematic aspects of your attachment style from childhood. It's unfortunate that kids who don't really "fit in" and end up being fairly isolated socially even though they are intelligent don't have a way of finding out how to solve that problem and that people just go around encouraging kids to be more socially active and suchlike. Even if you are socially active, you are probably not going to be able to form successful adult relationships without help if you already fall into the category that the OP is referencing.

I've met swathes of extremely accomplished people who clearly give very little thought to things existential (their studies or other passions are often a distraction from such thinking).

Highly accomplished people also often engage in "just world fallacy" thinking and consider their success as rightfully deserved due to their inherent virtue. This again is used to avoid thinking about things like the randomness, injustice, and suffering involved in existence.

So I don't think inserting yourself into a bubble of overachievers is a solution by any means.

my home called to me pre-college at 10 years old in a nationally administered gifted program. i only realised a few years later that everyone there was just like me and totally different from everyone else at the same time.

university, even the most selective ones, are just ever so slightly different to not be the home I belonged to for 7 years.

I know the feeling. There's the existential depression, and than there's that special kind of loneliness of being isolated by having a different set of knowledge to that of your peers. I try not to mix the two...

About kids thinking they are aliens or, as another commenter, that everyone is a robot but them — or the reverse: I thought I was a robot like Daryl :) — it's really quite common, like kids thinking their parents are not their parents, etc.

There is a nice comics that start from this common thought in kids, and, well… you'll see! It's called "the astronauts of the future"[1], and it's about a boy and a girl who believe there's alien everywhere or that everyone is a robot, respectively, and try to prove each other who is right.

[1] http://www.eurocomics.info/astronauts_of_the_future.html

Wow.

Maybe about a year ago I wrote a comment on reddit it read almost exactly like that abandoned aliens sentence.

I think I said something like "waiting for the mother ship to take me to my people.".

I just latched on to an intense fear of death, and struggle with sleep. It's hard to deal with existential crises when you're nine, and it tends to leave a mark.

I remember being very convinced that everyone else was a robot for a couple of years in my teens. Really freaked me out.

Mostly it was just that I was an only child in a stable household so everything around me was very routine and predictable.

That makes me wonder if an overly stable household is actually a bad thing.

If nothing particularly unusual happens to you as a child, overcoming adversity in the future is probably more difficult.

To clarify, I was interested in a lot of things. The routine of everybody else around me was just so consistent.

Dad got up and ready and out the door for work at the same time every day. Mom stuck perfectly to her routine. Birthdays, holidays, football season, school, church, etc. There just wasn't any really drama or family crisis that disrupted things.

Unless you are a robot...

> I would like to add that I do not consider myself gifted. I simply have a rather narrow set of interests which I have become good at.

Are you Bryan Mills by any chance?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com