Comment by hshshshshsh
2 years ago
I suffered from this.
The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created.
I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty.
OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.
This speaks volumes for me. I always wondered how as a kid I would bust my face until I can be good at the hardest video games because those happened to be purchased as a present or from myself. And also I have font memories of my first IT job building software for work and would make something working in a few hours.
And my conclusion so far is: standards. I didn't had standards of what constitutes "fair difficulty", "good code", and more. So I would just give myself reps in both activities to become better without care.
Now that I'm older I second guess myself and worry about the things I attempt to build or play, all the time: "is this best practice?", "am I building it right?", "this game is too hard, it must be because it's unfair or poorly game designed".
And so I've decided to give myself room to enjoy myself without a single care in the world: I completed a game called "Metaphor Refantazio" on Hard, without looking at guides, without worrying about "best team comp", "where to get best gear" etc. and when I got stuck instead of looking things up I took a step back, looked what classes and gear I had to work with and figured things out on my own.
Don't get me wrong: the ideas and approaches I came up with were far from optimal (I can find videos of people killing the hardest bosses in one turn). But what matters is that they were my ideas. This game had been therapeutic for me in many ways, and this was only one.
But my point is, just like doing this makes you a better gamer, doing this in moderation can make you a better programmer. I'm not talking about "pretend the standard library, books and docs don't exist" but I mean "pretend tutorials on YouTube don't exist". I feel like tutorial hell can stem from exactly the same insecurities and desire for higher standards.
The video game example resonates. I realized recently that I load up walkthroughs by default. Before I’ve even turned the game on, I’m already following someone else’s ideas of best practice.
I think it comes from a misplaced belief about saving time and optimizing for “best” solutions. Taking a less optimal path is scary, even in a game with 0 real world consequences. I’ll consider that next time.
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I know it’s a bit of a personal question, but can you elaborate on your ego diluting experience?
I think it would be really hard to understand without experiencing it. But I will write down anyway.
So before dilution I had this strong idea of who I was. I had this back story. There were certain things I do. And certain things I don't do. I used to judge everyone. I had a very high opinion about myself and used to constantly do or find things to validate that.
Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Each and every moment is intense. Sunsets are absolutely beautiful that you cannot describe through words. Spending time in nature is surreal. You do the right thing instead of doing things to validate your narrative. The dopamine hit I used to get when I used to do certain things is gone( i use to confuse these dopamine hits as me doing something right). This unlocks doing things more from Intuition and less from memory. There is less fear. There is more flow. More creativity. No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe.
That said it's not all great stuff. You also have to work through some existential questions which you were previously isolated by the ego. Like mortality. Impermanence of everything. Aging body. What happens after death. Nature of awareness. Why I am aware. Is awareness eternal and it's implications etc etc.
> Now I don't have a story in which I live on.
Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one character.
You say you've lost your 'story' and your 'character', that you don't 'act' anymore.
But, it just feels like you've made another story and another character for you to fit into. You've got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that's what the 'character' you try to fit would do.
And by acting like that person in your head would, you start to feel the same way too.
I think it's a lot more complicated than how I'm thinking. But I really do have a strong intuition that people feel the way they think the person they're acting like should feel, when physical feelings are non-factors.
Really, I don't actually know. Like, what we actually do and what we say we do; what we actually think and what we say we think. What we say we do and think feel like things we're saying to trick ourselves into doing and thinking those things. That's I guess the core of my intuition.
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Happy to hear that worked out for you, that sounds like a great place to be. What facilitated the change though, or how did that happen? Was there a catalyst?
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I've been heavily dealing with the existential questions you are referencing but it only gets worse. What helped you in resolving those issues or come to terms with them?
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I really enjoyed this post; thank you.
"No regard for authority or beliefs. Everyone is equal. You want to know and not believe." I am often amazed / in awe of the internet for leading me toward this place. My mind and equanimity opened much further as a result of the knowledge share that occurred over the last 20 years. Much less judgment, more curiosity. Paradoxically this has led me to revisit areas, like religion, that are often dismissed as irrational.
Although, I try not to use words like that because I am still working through it.
How are you working through: why I am aware?
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So basically, you were an opinionated functional-language developer and now you can throw down Python or PHP (ok, let's at least be realistic... JavaScript) with a straight face of eternal calm?
(I mean this partly in jest of course)
Your new enlightenment sounds like the product of a productive drug trip (no judgment implied whatsoever, possibly some jealousy though)
Mortality of the self is not a big deal, at least if the illusion of ego was already overcome. On the matter there is for example Epicurus classic thought that self death is not a concern as while alive self won’t experiment it’s own death, and once dead there is no longer any self to observe death. That one requires accepting there is no "afterlife" for the self.
Thus, only death of others is a relevant topic of concern, but taking care of them while they are alive is certainly far more important.
Impermanence of everything "only" applies to contingent matters. So statements like "everything (that happens through some contingency) is impermanent" always match some absolute truth. So the apparent contradiction that "if everything is impermanent was true, so should be impermanence and then not everything would be impermanent", is only indeed apparent.
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Interesting what you say about having to face some existential questions if you remove some ego enforcing ideas about yourself. Ernest Becker's book 'Denial of Death' suggests that this 'narrative' we have about ourselves is to deny our mortality, which we really got me thinking.
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How did abandoning your ego impact your morality compass? Is there a not caring anymore dimension to it?
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That’s a lot of “I” statements for the egoless commenter.
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Thanks for sharing your story here! I think your comments and answers are thoughtful and well stated. I don't share the Buddhist worldview but can relate anyways in terms of art. When learning to model in 3D I started looking at things around me differently. Instead of looking at a chair and in my head thinking "chair", I looked at it as a shape and a surface with a texture (not thinking those words, just looking). This opened up a world of beauty, not only in natural objects, but also in man made things, especially in metals. The key change was to not categorize or label the things but instead become vulnerable to their features and let them move me. It had unexpected but pleasant everyday effects, such as stopping at a door I always used and in awe contemplating the door handle.
That is quite interesting. What you stumbled upon yourself is a technique used by many meditation teachers to help in awakening. I think the the idea is the moment you categorize something you stop knowing what the thing is and replace it with belief. Glad you are having fun with it :)
This is spot on for the audiobook I’m listening to “Mindset: The Psychology of Success” , it’s resistance to effort that preserves belief in effortless ability and prevents any real progress
"Reading and writing more" are just aspirations. Those don't translate well to new behaviors. BJ Fogg (Stanford prof, behavioral scientist) lays out how to build new behaviors in Tiny Habits. You need to make them easy and attach the easy thing to something you already do regularly. (When I sit down to lunch, I read one page...) https://tinyhabits.com/
Secondly, your mind is interfering with its own work. Tim Gallwey talks about this in the Inner Game of Tennis (which is not really about tennis! ;). Your critic is not allowing you to "run hot" and put down some words that are less than perfect. It would be helpful to find something to focus your mind on, a simple count, like key strokes or word count. Alternatively, there's the practice of Morning Pages from the Artist's Way. Just let yourself write anything for a while. It's not for publication. You need to open the gates and you can do that by lowering the stakes involved with putting a word on the page.
Inner Game
https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...
Artists Way
https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431...
I wrote about some other stuff here that helps.
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...
I am suffering from this.
Every word you wrote stabbed me in my past, which means dissonance, somewhere.
Subconscious self-sabotage to rip the proverbial band-aid off, induced manic/delirium from a small infection, rumination/paranoia, catatonia.
Took less consciousness away from my delaying of problems. My ego didn't handle it, the manic iD, did.
I had successfully ran away from all my problems, failing upwards just enough to irk out a cowardly existence.
If Moses had an antibiotic, or had flossed more, the 4(0?) days of desert-delirium may not had been so fearlessly familiar.
after day 4-5 of catatonic rumination and paralyzing anxiety: I cried aloud, "just give me an ounce of strength"; that let me ruminate as to why:
I was asking for help: I am not allowed to. why not? skip that token, backprop later.
Why an ounce? and why of strength? and why am I asking aloud? and who am I asking?
...
Why an ounce? Why not a ratio of my body mass? Why not an arbitrary....because I have 0.
Zero what? Strength?
Why am I asking for strength? Because I am a coward.
and Occam's Razor clicked, all my problems stemmed from cowardice.
I awoke to find myself identifying with "depersonalization" for once, which was embarrassing. But embarrassing/cringe is dissonance, so my ego deconstruction began.
Morality is cowardice in disguise. <-- Stuck here, unable to proceed. Too axiomatic.
Not out of the woods yet, but at least I know I am in a familiar forest.
It’s an interesting concept; I am in the process of learning Scheme and I am not very good at it at the moment.
I can see that my ego is getting in the way of doing more practice; the reading of Scheme books is much easier than writing some simple programs such as the practice ones at RosettaCode…
It's hard to get more ironic than farming upvotes on the internet talking about how you transcended ego or whatever.
Moreso than riding a moral high horse while violating etiquette and explicit guidelines?
Spiritual awakening ego is a real thing :)
I don't think anyone go fully egoless. Maybe with exceptions of people like Ramana Maharishi.
It's just the ego is diluted. There are varying levels of ego one can experience. I think a reduction in ego makes you more present and do things with less judgments. And be more open to new ideas.
I haven't transcended my ego!
One of the biggest and hardest lessons in Buddhist (monk) practice is that self deception is as fundamental, and as hard to avoid, as breathing.
I get the idea but I would also be skeptical of Buddhists acting like they have it all figured out.
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Or maybe they just wanted to share something connected to the article
It’s a signalling problem, a 31 day old pseudonymous account is pretty always going to enjoy vastly less credibility than say a 10 year old account with hundreds of thousand of karma.
If the latter wrote the above comment, nobody would question if the real intention was farming for this or that, since it would make practically no difference for the account holder or the passing reader.
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Never claimed I transcended ego. I said my ego was diluted. Of course I have ego. It's just much more less than I used to have.
Why did you delete the links? Your comment regarding the ego stayed with me, and today I wanted to access again the links you shared, and saw that were deleted.
Do you mean mean this one ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103115
I also recommend Waking up with Sam Harris. That's what got me started.
By “accidentally went through” do you mean without a specific trigger or cause? Or do you mean there was one (or more) but you had no control over it?
Kind of sounds like they accidentally had a big dose of shrooms or something like that.
This mirros my experience during my studies. The first few years were excruciating.
Yes. I am just at my first year. It has been really bad in beginning. Now I am getting used to it slowly.
That hurt. Is there a name for this?