throwaway839246

This isn't the right metaphor. I'm not trying to force a path; I have a very strong internal sense of a general direction I need to go. But there is no path in that direction. So I'm trying to forge one.

As for why that direction, I don't know of course. But if I were to speculate it's because I have a strong intuition that that's where my personal growth is.

Thank you, that is excellent advice.

No, they are not.

As to the rest of your post, I get your metaphors, but the path from understanding the metaphors to understanding how to turn that understanding into action is longer than you might think.

Could you give specific examples from your own life or from the lives of others? What does it mean to write down your conflicts? Is it writing down what all the subpersonalities want that's usually conflicting? And what do I then do with it? What does it mean to snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history? Become an activist? What does it mean to burn off what my lovers want burnt off? So far I've only burnt off what my lovers wanted me to keep, which is why they're not lovers anymore.

I appreciate your advice, but I need more specific guidance for it to work. Would you be willing to take the time to write that here? Also, could you tell a little bit of your own story? Who are you? What is your life like? (I'm not just asking out of curiosity; in this case it's important to know for the advice to work)

But my god, the integration is hard. No one really prepares you for it. The old role models don't work because they're unwittingly or deliberately blind to this. (For example, I've never heard pg talk about this, even though ycombinator is practically a factory that inputs idealistic people and outputs people with experiences like mine) Biographies cover this quite superficially; you basically never hear from the person in their darkest hour.

I'm sure many people have gone through this, but to me it really feels like uncharted waters.

I've read (and watched) everything on your list of recommendations. Perhaps I should reread Deutch's chapter on optimism, but I don't have the same conviction that you do. Where does your conviction come from?

I think about that sometimes. Had I been one of the young optimistic CEOs running around talking about how to improve the world completely unaware of the tech underbelly, what would my life be like? If I had a button in front of me that would teleport me into that life, would I press it? I'm honestly not sure, but I'm leaning towards no. I want to learn how to integrate all this and learn to operate knowing what I know. I don't think I'd choose staying hopelessly naive for another thirty years. (Then again, I don't think they'd press the button to teleport into my life either.)

> I found that learning about politics and history-- specifically the history of engineering-- really helped me sort out my feelings.

Is there any specific reading you'd recommend?

> Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering?

I know what you mean and know what you're getting at. But I feel compelled to point out this particular example isn't quite the same. I never sought the immigrant family out, then told them that my motivation is to support amazing cooks rooted in authentic traditions. I just bought the food.

VCs will lie, literally. They explicitly say they will act in a particular way in a specific situation, and then, protected by nuanced 300 page contracts, will do the exact opposite of what they said they'll do. Assuming you accept that lying to people is unethical, people act transactionally with immigrant vendors, but not unethically in the same way.

To live in the present moment one has to unsee the cant. That's the difficult part. How to keep the mind from focusing on all the bullshit that it can't unsee. The burnout, the disillusionment, the politics, the faded friendships. That's what's hard.