Looooong (post)cat, Rip your nightmares apart. Trolls, the Joker, a cheat code for life that almost no one uses

It’s Tuesday. This should say something about the level of busy that I currently am at. I have a long blog post I wrote on the plane ride back from Austin, a week and a bit ago. It’s very long, and I still need to edit it. I’ll see if I can do that for this week, though it will be a little dated.

I think the limerence phase of love is partly the attractiveness of new things. New anything is exciting. But that by definition can’t last forever. That’s one of the reasons it’s a poor time to make related long-term decisions. What you will have to live with is what’s there after the limerence wearers off, in a few weeks or months, possibly a year or two? I’m trying to remember what the studies said about the outside ballpark length of limerence. Just did a google of it, and it seems like it can last quite a while, but usually that’s when it’s neither clearly rejected nor clearly accepted. And it sounds kind of unhealthy, being often related to love addiction and affairs, at least from google searches.

In any case, just to say, their is a really wonderful friendship there, which is what makes me enthusiastic about the longevity of this relationship. Even when the limerence is gone (though I’m not even sure this is limerence, given how intense it sounds on the internet) there will still be some deeply compelling reasons to stay in the relationship. What I wanted was a partner who felt like one of my very best friends, and that’s what it feels like, so far. Amazing.

OK, now it’s Wednesday. That’s how busy things are.

Attempting to edit blog post quickly...
Here it is. Took me about twice as long because of technical difficulties. I’m writing a lot from my iPad, and no matter what they try and do, it really is a deeply inferior experience from a full fledged laptop. It’s just so much less flexible. The web browser doesn’t work as well... it’s just second best in a lot of ways. Really, the only thing it’s better at is drawing stuff. Anyhoo. Here we go.

Blog post April 27th 2019

Well, I actually have a bit of time today. Though I don’t know if that will make it longer. There are always other things to do, once my blog is done, so I don’t want to spend too long on it.

I vaguely recall there being a lot of things that have happened, and that I want to talk about, but mostly I think they’ve been forgotten.

I had a cool dream. I only remember it because my girlfriend mentioned to me that same morning that she’d had a weird dream, kinda nightmarish. It reminds me how I used to almost constantly have nightmares, really intense ones that would wake me up, soaked in sweat, profoundly grateful to have awoken from it and afraid to go back to sleep. But nowadays, though I still have some pretty creepy dreams, they are more adventure stories.

For example, this last one, though I don’t remember all the details now, I know it was a bit creepy, I was being a sneaky hero, saving people, I think I had a phasing power, kind of like shadow cat from the x-men, or vision from the Avengers. Anyways, I ended up facing this creepy end-boss type thing that was in charge of things and I had been avoiding them, because I couldn’t just kill it, and it was chasing me and the people I was trying to protect/rescue.

It felt very much like one of those monster dreams, where you’re being chased and can never seem to really get a way permanently. But I didn’t run. I turned and faced it, and started fighting it. At first it was invincible, like so many boogeymen are, but I just kind of... exerted my will against it, kept pushing it back, trying to rip it apart, and slowly gained ground until I had fully ripped it apart, killing it. And then we were safe and the tone of the dream changed to a positive feeling. A nice dream. It felt quite triumphant.

The metaphor is obvious here: facing your fear, not giving in or running away, and simply using strength of mind to overcome the negative forces, like fear, that are haunting you. While it’s true that what you resist, persists, there is another way of fighting with your mind, where you do not resist or fight it exactly, you just kind of stand firm and hold to your reality, focusing on something inspiring and strengthening, a positive mental action. It takes finesse, it takes practice, but it is possible, obviously, since I do it often, including in dreams.

You’ve heard the old trope: “don’t think of a pink elephant.” And then the person talks about how it’s nearly impossible to successfully not think of it, when your trying to not think of it. That’s like “try not to be afraid of the monster” or “try not to be afraid of all the responsibility you have, as a new teacher.” You need something positive to think of, and you need to not worry about that other thought coming up. So, for example, with the pink elephant, if your trying not to think of it, for some reason, a more successful strategy might be:

“It’s totally fine if you happen to think of a pink elephant, just neutrally accept the thought and don’t worry about it, but focus on a purple ant-eater, and if your mind happens to go to something else, once you realize it’s wandered, just return it back to the purple ant eater.”

For the teaching thing, it might be, “if you feel afraid or worried, that’s fine, just neutrally accept the feelings as ok, and then imagine surrendering the results of your actions to a higher power, imagining them taking over responsibility for the results of your actions, then just pay attention to your inner guidance and follow that, knowing that’s the best you can do, and that’s enough.” ... a little more complicated, perhaps, but I wanted a real example, rather than “...just focus on an image of you, a year from now, feeling confident and relaxed while you’re teaching.” Since I don’t know how well that would actually work.

But you could probably try focusing on how all the challenges your facing and mistakes you might make are just stepping stones to becoming a great teacher, all you have to do is add some self-reflection about what went wrong and how you could make it go right, in the future. Growth mindset stuff (which is so important for everybody. I feel like people should be teaching and taking classes in growth mindset. Few tools are more useful for happiness, reduced anxiety, and achievement.)

Woo, just heard the announcement that we’re landing (I’m typing this on the plane.) and glanced over what I’ve written, and it’s already super long.

I guess I’ll just bullet point the other things I want to mention

-the relationship continues to be amazing. When a relationship is really positive and nurturing, it is amazing how good it feels. This is not limerence stuff, this is a deep sense of well-being that is clearly having positive impacts on my general mood, resistance to stress, and physical health and energy levels. I think Gottman was the one that pointed out that having a nourishing, positive committed relationship was better for your health and longevity than exercising every day. So if people who were gym rat’s would just spend half the time they put into working out, into working on their relationship, they’d get significantly more health benefits.

This makes me think of another thing Gottman said, that’s stuck in my mind: relationships are entropic systems. Meaning, like the earths ecosystems, they need constant energy input from outside, or they will tend to loose energy, wind down, and eventually stop. The sun provides that for the earths systems, for the most part. But often people seem to think that relationships will just grow on their own, without any additional work or maintenance work. And that’s crazy. That’s why so many relationships dwindle. They don’t have to dwindle, they can just get deeper and richer, though the limerence stuff will absolutely die down.

One anonymous reader posted a comment (which I didn’t approve. All comments have to get approved by me before showing up, and additionally, bloggers platform is borked and often I don’t even get comments that people try and post, I find out about it later, because my family member talks about the comment they made and I look and it’s not there at all. I may switch platforms some day. Wordpress maybe.) anyhoo, a comment saying, “people were having good marriages before Gottman came along.” Which, along with some other stuff and the kind of patronizing tone, at first just ticked me off. It sounded like, “stop being a Gottman fanboy, listen to my advice instead. You are too dumb to realize that people got married and sometimes it worked, before Gottman came along. you’re listening to him too much.”

My first, immediate response was something like, “Fuuuuuuu!” My second response was, “what the hey, why is this anonymous person deciding to tell me my favorite source of relationship advice is dumb. It’s times like these that the difference in actual tea and digital tea becomes clear: first off, there is no anonymous tea in real life, so I know who I’m talking to, and that alone tends to make certain people about 10 times more polite and gentle in their speech. Anonymity is the cesspool from which trolls are born. (Or perhaps transformed, when certain otherwise normal people fall in. Like the Joker’s origin story where he falls into the vat of chemicals.) Second, if someone is rude in person I can just say, “if you are going to be like that, you’re not invited to tea.” And they will either stop giving abrasive unsolicited advice or stop coming to tea (or I’ll stop inviting them.)

(I should add that this is just one person, among the vast majority of very enjoyable comments (some of which are even advice-y, which is fine, as long as it’s not abrasive) I get from you. If you’re worried it’s you, just imagine if I knew who it was posting the comments. If you’d be fine sending the message as an email to me, it probably isn’t you, and your comment is fine. And you might want to send it as an email or facebook message anyways, since I apparently don’t get half the comments that people submit.)

Anyhoo, by final response, after I’d cooled down, was, “that poor person. They’ve just dismissed out of hand the best bet they have for taking their relationship to the next level, wherever it currently is, and avoiding the most negative of what relationships have to offer.”

It kind of astounds me, how the great majority of people ignore even the most mainstream, well proven good advice. It’s not hard to do a little research, and improve your relationship, your sex-life, your habits, your... just about anything.

It almost feels like a cheat code for life, doing this, because so few other people are doing it, but it’s not exclusive. You all have the ability to do this.

Though I suppose I can relate. It took me a while to track down good advice, and sort it from the bad. It took awhile to get the advice that would help me apply the other advice (the stuff on motivation, habit change, etc.) and it does take time, learning those “how to apply” skills isn’t instant. I guess it’s a mixture of all the emotional baggage we carry with us, and the difficulty in information overload without a good way to sort it, and all the things in life that distract us almost constantly, that makes it super hard to just sit down with a book or something, read for an hour or two, and commit to adding the one most useful 2 minute habit you can think of, to practice every day.

I’d create something that does that for people, cutting out all the excess research time, distilling advice and vetting sources, and make a lot of money, but I’m certain it already exists, so really I just need to do some curating (which is way easier and less lucrative.) Though I haven’t found anybody who explicitly said they were teaching the skills so you could learn all the other skills. Those skills are pretty specific. From understanding how habit change works, (and doesn’t work) to understanding and dealing with the things that get in the way of doing the most important and useful things, to dealing with setbacks. To maximizing willpower and good choices.

In any case, the active unwillingness to learn often leaves me scratching my head. I can understand feeling like you don’t have the time, but there are a lot of people who wouldn’t do it, even if they did have the time. It’s like...they resent being given advice... hmmm, is this turning back on me? Perhaps it’s the same feeling as the anonymous person: unsolicited advice, even if it’s high quality, can be so abrasivly delivered that it’s almost impossible to listen to it. It’s like, the advice has been laced with the idea that I as a person am inferior, so for me to choose to swallow the advice, I also have to swallow the unstated assertion that I am fundamentally bad, or low or something.

Perhaps that’s what’s going on with other people, all the time, when they hear good advice and don’t follow it? I think it’s more complicated than that, but it makes me think of the debunkers handbook, a short treatise written by climate change scientists, to try and help people who believe in science talk to people who are being super dumb about what they believe (like that climate change is a myth... I wonder if I’m gonna get people angry from saying that... I don’t know who would read my blog who’d be offended by that though...) They collected the scientific research about how people change there minds about things, and it turns out that actually changing people’s beliefs systems is deeply illogical. It’s almost all about emotion. You need a believable alternative story, but it being super scientific is not really gonna help much. That’s why so many people believe things that are so deeply illogical and unscientific: people who have little interest in truth are using the same techniques, to convince them of other things. And they’re better at it, because they’re more used to doing things that way, because they don’t have the science on their side. 

And one of the scientific findings is that changing deeply held religious beliefs is just really really hard.

Not that science is infallible: often the unscientific people are quoting their own “scientific studies”, and though most of the time they are using bad science or cherry-picking studies, etc., it is often the case that even what we think is good science, turns out to be not so good. Have you heard of the reproducibility crisis in science today? Especially with social science experiments, but even medical stuff, they are finding that a large number of studies that they thought were sound, cannot be reproduced. Oops!

Even so, science is better than the alternative, (and it’s more reproducible about less squishy subjects, like physics and chemistry and such. And they are going back over things now, at least, to try and weed out things that are not reproducible)

OK, definitely went longer because I had more time. What’s that called? The something paradox? The work expands to fit the time allocated to it? Well, there’s that experiment done. Next time I know it would definitely be valuable to set a timer or something, if I’m hoping to get other stuff done.

Seriously, good grief Charlie Brown, I was trying to do a short bullet-point list and it ended up like a whole other blog post. Or two.

Have a nice week, I will be doing my final Observations (for my Montessori AMI certification) this coming week. Then I can get back to panicking about how much work I have left before my summer classes start. Oh dear. It’s a lot. I’m gonna need to go into emergency mode for the next month and a half, and stop all non-essential activity’s, just focus on being ready as my top priority. Even so, there are so many other balls in the air that I can’t just drop... We’ll see. I need a planning session where I take a cold hard look at exactly how much work I have left to do, double how long I think it will take, and figure out how to give myself that time to work on it. And still keep up the other essential things. To that effect, this may be the last long blog in a while. (If I can help it. Must remember to set a timer, and stick to it!)

Take care, enjoy spring!

-I