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Comment by looperhacks | Hacker News Reader

This article feels equivalent to "Feeling sad? Just feel happy instead!"

Kind of, but it came across to me as more of a challenge; "feeling sad? Have you unpacked why you feel sad or are you just wallowing in it?"

Is your inaction a rational decision?

Aren't most articles screaming this anyway?

If my inaction was a rational decision, would I be reading an article with a title "How to Do the Thing You've Been Avoiding"?

(And no, I haven't unpacked why I feel sad; I tried it a couple times, which is how I discovered my sadness is stored in a bag of holding[0]; in fact, I suspect the bag actually contains within it a portal to hammerspace[1], explaining why it's always full, no matter how much stuff I pull out of it.)

[0] - https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4581-bag-of-holding

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerspace

Advice-wise, it's like "Getting fat? Consider looking over what you eat and adding more activity to your days!"

It's actually kind of good advice, but it's hard advice, it's hard to actually follow through.

If you go see a therapist, it's often the type of stuff they have you do (challenging thought patterns, asking the hard 'why's). And it actually works pretty well, you can do it yourself too, but that's even harder.

Speaking as someone who has both successfully lost weight and gone to therapy, btw.

"Just feel happy instead" does seem to work in certain contexts and frameworks [1]. For instance, if you become decoupled from the current agent, that is, you start paying attention that whatever you call you is just an observer of an implementation of an agent and the feeling of anger, hate, envy, and so on is the care of that particular agent, not an absolute, then you can just switch agents, having whatever feelings the previous agent cared about seem as insignificant as it can get.

In practice, being able to sustain the kind of attention required to catch hold of the underlying agent is strenuous, drugs [2] could maybe help, make it easier to attain the observer state, but its early beginnings.

[1] 2021, Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

[2] 2019, Ketamine as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder: a review, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6457782/

The article is more about motivating through excitement than motivating through insight (I call this 'puppy motivation' vs 'insight motivation').

I sometimes have the same reaction to things - I remember once being baffled at the lack of insight in a writing course I was taking, only to begrudgingly admit it was motivating me anyway even tho it was pretty stupid... like a puppy wanting to play.

At least for me I think the root of that comes from a closed mode vs open mode way of thinking [1]. When in closed mode we'll only accept new information whereas in open mode we can be playful and accepting new motivation. Different content demands different states of mind.

[1] John Cleese's video on creativity is worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

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