So you wanna de-bog yourself

they've created a bespoke system of abstract beliefs

swatcoder, can you please tell me how you particularly manage to learn from your mistakes?

Some people create personal theories of how the world works, and then put their theories into action: A successful example is Charlie Munger and heres his talk explaining some of his excellent theories: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv7sLrON7QY

Some people overthink things and label things. That can be unhealthy, and Adam touches on that with his "Stroking the problem" section. But the opposite can be unhealthy too: not thinking at all and repeating over and over making the same mistakes.

catchy names

Useful when communicating with others if it is an uncommon concept. I like to search for the perfect word or perfect catchphrase when thinking about a problem or solution because it helps my thinking.

various example cases

How do you do it? Don't you look at specific issues you find in your own life? Examples yes? And then generalise from that?

I just don't understand what you're complaining about. The closest I can think is that you're anti-intellectual or you're a "Just do it" prosyletiser - the implication being that thinking is unnecessary and the problem.

Academic over-thinking is its own problem: is that your issue?

Like most things: we need to find the right balance. Thinking too little is bad in a different way from thinking too much.

intellectualize and systematize and engineer things

I'm just gobsmacked at your choice of words: is systemizing and engineering bad? I define engineering as making good compromises. Maybe you could find some catchier phrases from what you are trying to say ;-). "intellectualize": is thinking good or bad?

I suspect I'm falling into the trap you mention - perhaps we both need to learn to write as well as Mastroianna!!

It’s hypnotic writing in the style of Yudkowsky, Ron Hubbard or supplement scam videos on YouTube. On one hand it is pretending to be thinking rationally about things but with a heavy dose of fantasy mixed in that can put readers in a muddled mental state. They drone on and on and on so that you either give up reading it or go into a trance.

Intention is cleansed in the process of forward motion.

Before reading the article, I was nodding along reading your comment. Having read the article... it's actually pretty good! "Just doing things" might be the right general approach but I feel that sometimes it's easy to get stuck contemplating. I think the post offers some interesting heuristics for getting unstuck.

Edit: Reading even further, it's actually one of the best posts of this kind I've read in years. The author is spot in the behavioral patterns he's noticed. Damn.

"Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun.

These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava."

The article all throughout points to the same root cause you point to. It clearly presents a mirror where we can see reflected all the stories we often fabricate to trap ourselves. Perhaps the author created a system. But I saw it rather as a device to better bring to awareness common but elusive mental patterns that keep us stuck. Although I'd agree with you that intellectualizing is often part of the problem, how do you then treat a disease, if the only medium available to administer the medicine is also the cause of the disease? How do you tell people that their mind is the reason they suffer without telling them?

Even your own comment, as valuable as it is for pointing it out, feeds exactly the same beast that it accuses the article of feeding. That's the real irony.

The blog author does well to id/categorize the issues. People need a way to quantize+act on the issues - various systems exist for that. Key is to feel progress (on a particular direction/plan or at least in hindsight).

Ideas that track such progress:

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1-3 high quality decisions per week (credits to Bezos, tho he does 1-3 per day).

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1-2 important/not-urgent tasks per week.

1-2 small, not-important/(semi-)urgent tasks per day - these are also a form of "toothbrushing" that each adult has to do.

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Bullet journal works well for both.

At the very least it led me to some self-reflection, was a short read, and very entertaining.

I agree that most people are not biased towards action, and fixing that is the first step. However, the article is clearly aimed at people who have made that change and now are faced with the more subtle question of "how do I think about the problem such that the action I choose is likely to be appropriate."

"When we constantly pull everything apart trying to see how it works, we may end up with only an understanding of how to destroy something. We can have piles of spokes, rims and axles, but the beauty only happens when we see the wheel rolling." - Nick Sand

Thanks for sharing this link. My god there is something about this writing style that's just incredibly entertaining to read.

Most of the time I get so bored reading such long articles, like the New Yorker ugh. But this is the first time I've enjoyed such a lengthy read! I hope I can decrypt what the author is doing to make reading such fun.

There is a liberating side to toothbrushing problems: the stakes of any given unit of effort are low.

With diploma problems, if you blow it, you really blow it, with often irrevocable long-term consequences. All of your effort is building to a high stakes climax and if you miss your shot, that effort can all end up wasted. It's videogame permadeath mode for life.

But with toothbrushing problems, you can have an off day and usually make it up today. Of course, every day's effort does matter. You can't make every day an off day. But I find something very comforting about problems where some random variance in my output does smooth out to the mean over time.

I'm floored by how good this article is, and I just read another, and was also floored. His writing reminds me a bit of Raptitude in its - everything-is-fucked-heh-let's-try-to-function-anyhow attitude. And the writing is so, so good, and wildly relatable.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/its-very-weird-to-hav...

"Everything needs maintenance." It's not just something a wise old engineer would say; it's life. Life itself is a Toothbrushing Problem.

That is to say, if all your problems are Toothbrushing Problems then you're doing pretty good! That means you're living. At that point you can do one or all of these things:

    * Complain about your Toothbrushing Problems (<- you are here, haha)
    * Bring NEW problems into your life
    * Work to make your Toothbrushing Problems a bit less troublesome

Indeed; it seems like being happy is a lot of work; I wonder if the type of people the author mentions in the "Impossible satisfaction" section aren't wrong.

He has "history" in the name of his blog and he thinks that knights expected to fight dragons? I mean, it is like that in a manga but not in real life.

Quite a few knights in the day were nobles who had large landed estates to manage but were expected to impress their peasants in time of war. They were lucky enough to go to war with heavy armor and mounted on a horse whereas the peasants might get some weapon that is easy to handle without a lot of training like a spear.

Well, then how would you turn this into a listicle?

"17 ways you get stuck in a bog (in 3 categories) (and also: what is a bog) (and also: what it means to get unstuck from the bog)"

Seems a pretty shit listicle; maybe it should be a full article :)

Y'all probably also know that bog means "toilet" in British English...

Some say bog mode is harder to exit than vi.

Huh! There is a YA novel I really like, The Girl Who Drank The Moon, and this casts that in a very interesting light.

There is a bog -- a swamp -- that covers the known world, and this bog is treated in a religious way by the author as the embodiment of nature, of the fertility of the world. The bog also spawns a bog monster, who may have been the first living creature.

"In the beginning, there was the Bog. And the Bog covered the world and the Bog was the world and the world was the Bog."

Bogged has also come to mean something like 'having had drastic plastic surgery' in some circles, the expression being derived from 'Bogdanoff'.

I know I'm setting the bar low, but compared to other pieces in that genre I found it well written, entertaining and insightful.

this is now a chicago thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

The author scrounged together enough time, energy, and motivation to write the article. This suggests that they got out of the bog; at least for a little while :shrug:

Escaping the bog is a toothbrush problem, not a diploma problem.

What makes you think that?

That's not what I got out of it. It sounded like he instead was making an effort to recognize and categorize some of the problems he's experienced, and thereby create plans to avoid or mitigate them.

Fellow Neon Genesis fan here. Watching the original series was an incredibly frustrating experience for me. It does not follow the typical hero’s journey. There few wins, if any. Mostly losses. Idiot Shinji was a helpless and pitiful protagonist, so much so that you eventually stop rooting for him. The 1.11, 2.22, 3.33, and 3.0+1.0 rebuilds were much, much better in my opinion. But they also lacked that depressing trajectory that made the original series so unique.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is just fantastic. I think it’s well worth your time. I’ve read it a few times now. With each subsequent read at a different point in my life, it’s been interesting to see new insights and perspectives emerge. If you end liking it, another one from Kundera I particularly enjoyed was “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”.

It is made fairly clear by sentence #5 what the author means by "bog". And by sentence #7 it is made crystal clear.

You barely need to start reading to understand what the author meant.

I don't agree. If the article started explaining how and why to de-bog oneself without defining bog, that would be annoying. But this one simply has a short, helpful, interesting introduction and then immediately defines "bog" before moving on. It's well structured IMO

Failure to define your meaning of "unneeded frustration" in the opening paragraph of your comment leads to unneeded frustration.

Yeah, I agree, that metaphor lacked an explanatory conclusion.

If I had to fill one in, I'd say that people often blame the external world for not providing the ingredients necessary for happiness, when they actually do have them on hand already. What they are lacking is choosing to compose them into a meaningful whole, which requires effort on their part.

Second, start working to deconstruct capitalism and the state

Or just kill yourself, it will achieve the same result, but faster.

That parable came to mind immediately. There is in fact a god that labels unanswered nagging as acting unjust. A lifetime ago in seminary I knew a guy who rage quit after spending months contemplating the implications of that passage and observations about how common it is to see others unanswered prayer. Don't know what happened to him but he would just mutter that his beliefs didn't matter since "jesus defacto makes the claim he is unjust and defeats himself", the problem of suffering indeed.