having peace in a world of chaos

Peace through love, love through acceptance, acceptance through standards, standards through experience, experience through failures

• Overarching Themes
• Creatures of Emotions (and feelings)
• Self-Awareness & Mental Frameworks
• Introspection, metacognition, awareness
• Cognitive Biases
• Shoshin (beginner's mind)
• Emotional Regulation & Attachment
• Emotional tension, availability, vulnerability
• Attachment vs detachment (caring vs clinging)
• Hope, fear, expectations
• Trauma relativity and individual capacity
• Agency & Response Patterns
• Psychological reactance (autonomy threats)
• Values & Identity
• Psychological Dynamics & Paradoxes

Overarching Themes

• Degradation & Awareness
• Maintaining & Optimizing
• Improvement & Sustainment

Improvement (gaining capabilities)

• Investment: Losing with the intention of gaining
• Progression: gaining within the intention of gaining
• Gambit: Risks and Sacrifices (not knowing if you lose or gain)

Creatures of Emotions (and feelings)

Working with emotions rather than against them

This subchapter is based on Dale Carnegie’s quote from How to Win Friends and Influence People:

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”

• Thoughts, decisions, actions, and behaviors
• (Initiator) Thoughts: What is the initial idea/input? This is without any consideration of logical and emotional figures
• (Internal) Decision: What do you do with that thought? Take action, ignore, avoid, ruminate, etc
• (External) Action: how do you convert that decision into the real world?
• (Programming) Behaviors: Is this the way of life? by repetition, path of least resistance, comfort, efficiency

Self-Awareness & Mental Frameworks

• Introspection, metacognition, awareness
• Cognitive biases (curse of knowledge, functional fixedness)
• Shoshin (beginner's mind)
• Cognitive burn-in vs burnout

Emotional Regulation & Attachment

• Emotional tension, availability, vulnerability
• Attachment vs detachment (caring vs clinging)
• Hope, fear, expectations
• Trauma relativity and individual capacity

Agency & Response Patterns

• Psychological reactance (autonomy threats)
• Choice, responsibility, options vs desperation
• Self-fulfilling prophecy, Pavlovian conditioning
• Intentions vs actions

Values & Identity

• Dignity, pride, duty, honor vs ego
• Preservation of identity
• Sufficiency, mastery, sovereignty
• Purpose, relevance, continuous improvement (Kaizen)

Psychological Dynamics & Paradoxes

• Hedonic treadmill, baseline tolerance
• "When good intentions go bad" effect
• Logical path vs emotional path
• Winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners

Self-Awareness & Mental Frameworks

• Awareness
• Logical path vs emotional path
• Cognitive burn-in vs burnout
• Cognitive resources
• Stoicism

Introspection, metacognition, awareness

• Introspection: the threat assessment and self-surgery of pride and ego
• Introspection is broader - examining any aspect of your inner experience (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, desires)
• Introspection can be for self-understanding, philosophical inquiry, or simply observing your mental states
• Introspection often happens after the fact (reflecting on past experiences)
• Metacognition
• Metacognition is specifically focused on cognitive processes - thinking about your thinking, learning, and problem-solving
• Metacognition is typically goal-oriented - improving learning, problem-solving, or decision-making performance
• Metacognition frequently occurs in real-time (monitoring your understanding while reading, adjusting study strategies mid-task)

Cognitive Biases

• Curse of knowledge (where knowing something makes it difficult to imagine not knowing it)
• Functional fixedness (being unable to see new uses for familiar objects or solutions to familiar problems)
• Present bias (or hyperbolic discounting) is the core of what you're describing - we overweight immediate costs and benefits while undervaluing future ones. The lack of immediate pain makes the future consequences feel less real or urgent.
• Optimism bias plays a role too - the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes while underestimating negative ones. You're preserving the possibility that maybe this time it won't be stupid, maybe the pattern won't repeat.
• Temporal discounting is closely related - future pain or consequences feel abstract and distant, so they carry less psychological weight than present comfort or possibility.
• Motivated reasoning - when we want something to be true (like "this isn't actually stupid"), we become very good at finding reasons to believe it, even when we intellectually know better.
• Uncertainty effect might be involved too - sometimes we prefer the discomfort of not knowing over the definitive pain of a clear negative outcome. The ambiguity itself becomes preferable to resolution.

Shoshin (beginner's mind)

• Shoshin (a concept from Zen Buddhism that refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when approaching a subject or situation, even when studying at an advanced level)

Emotional Regulation & Attachment

• Emotional tension
• Infinite patience, finite tolerance
• Learn to let go
• Desire vs yearning for the unattainable
• Convenient communication and emotional effort

Emotional tension, availability, vulnerability

• Emotional Tension
• Emotional tension is one of anticipatory feelings I have. It’s the perception that I am in a place of potential danger and that I need to see if everyone else is either on board or not.
• Essentially, is the person I am talking to worth my time and can I relate to them? If so perfect, keep going. If not, don’t worry about it and move on.
• This is almost extreme value status and time management condensed down to a subconscious thought and reading body language.
• Emotional availability and vulnerability

Attachment vs detachment (caring vs clinging)

• Emotional Attachment and Association
• Recognize that suffering often comes from resistance to what is
• Practice observing emotions without immediately acting on them
• Distinguish between caring and clinging
• Accept impermanence as a natural part of life
• Focus energy on what you can influence rather than what you can't

Hope, fear, expectations

• Hope: the good and the ugly
• Fear and scared: anticipation of the unknown
• Expectations

Trauma relativity and individual capacity

• Trauma is relative to the individual's experience and capacity. A person drowning in 6 feet of water isn't less legitimately drowning than someone in 60 feet.
• I remember jocko and chris williamson talk about how everyone is fighting their own battles and that a soilder who just witnessed his friend get blow up by a IED will mark that as the most traumatic moment in his life where as a corporate worker might say his wife divorcing him and taking the kids is the most traumatic moment of his life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W64WGFy-Js&pp=ygUNbW9kZXJuIHdpc2RvbQ%3D%3D
• Is comparing the two side by side and saying that the solider has a legitimate trauma where as the corporate worker has a less legit trauma just perception of fairness? that one must be equal to the logical factors at play (in this case life or death isn't as bad as a marital seperation)?

Agency & Response Patterns

• Sufficiency, mastery, sovereignty
• Psychological reactance, responsibility, choice, options
• Being desperate, assumptions, speculations, projections
• The opportunity cost/responsibility of choosing
• Self-fulfilling prophecy, placebo effect, delusion, entitlement
• Pavlovian conditioning, maintenance vs stagnation
• We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

Psychological reactance (autonomy threats)

• Psychological reactance is a psychological phenomenon where people experience a strong motivational drive to restore their freedom when they perceive it's being threatened or eliminated. When someone feels their autonomy or choices are being restricted, they often react by wanting the forbidden option even more intensely.
• It's the psychological phenomenon where you lose motivation to do something the moment someone tells you to do it, even if you were already planning to do it. Your brain basically rebels against the perceived loss of autonomy.

Values & Identity

• Dignity, pride, duty, honor vs ego (your whole Manson reflection)
• Manson: “Sex is the most valuable thing a man can attain, and it’s worth sacrificing anything (including your own dignity) to get it.”
• Sacrificing dignity (though i don’t know what it means yet) seems like sacrificing self. Losing a part of you in search for something that is perceived as whole, which probably isn’t, just gets you to be less you and unsure of what exactly “you” is.
• Then you do more expecting more only to lose more and getting less.
• Being extraordinary doesn’t mean not being human and being average doesn’t mean failure. Clarficaiton: Being average compared to other people is failure. But being average compared to you a year ago is. You shouldn’t be able to look back and say “Hell, I haven’t changed at all in the last year.” And that has to do with being human. You are what you want to be, your reality is the one you earned with the work you put in and the change you were willing to make. That, strangely enough, is extraordinary because being uncomfortable when you have every opportunity to be comfortable is the what makes you different.
• Also ties into mediocrity. If you’re afraid of being mediocre, chances are you aren’t doing anything that leads to that. To fear something is to acknowledge it exists and that you want or don’t want it.
• Preservation of identity
• Adaptive traits
• The extraordinary vs average distinction
• Insecurity and what people latch onto
• Winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners
• I’m good with someone who is ignorant because they are stupid but not someone who is stupid because they are ignorant
• Purpose
• Is what I am doing, at this very moment, relevant to my goals and serve a purpose to long-term sanity, even if it doesn’t seem like it does?
• Basically, is there a legitimate reason for me to do XYZ or will this just waste my time?

Psychological Dynamics & Paradoxes

• Baseline, tolerance, patience, hedonic treadmill
• Low expectations but expecting failure
• Intentions (judging ourselves vs others)
• Reinvent the wheel
• "When good intentions go bad" effect
• In psychology research, this is sometimes called the "when good intentions go bad" effect - studies show people who publicly commit to goals (like donating to charity or exercising) sometimes become less likely to follow through because the social recognition satisfies the same psychological need as actually doing the thing.
• The first step is always the hardest, but seems like a no-brainer in hindsight.