Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Civilization can be construed as a hack programmed onto our collective evolutionary codebase — a codebase that has very finite space and is rewritable. The language used is complicated and easy to misunderstand.
Truthfully, I’m not 100% sure what willpower means. Is this when we convince ourselves that the immediate thing in front of us has salvific importance, or that the failure to pursue it opens the gates of hell, metaphorically? In that sense this it’s a kind of meta-social managing of ourselves, what Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations and what Goggins does in his podcast. There’s a great Louie CK bit on Goggins that I adore: “it’s hard to be that guy — you can be that guy, and then you’re tense all the time, and then you die. It’s not like you become that guy and then you break into some infinite perfection. You just become that tense guy and then you die”. We can see why people don’t become that guy: (1) it’s unpleasant and humans are designed to pursue pleasure; (2) the pleasure which Goggins receives as compensation for his pain is a hyper-socialized glee at his superiority which is instantly diminished the more that people become like him. In other words, who is going to watch him carry the boat? Who is there to yell at? Jocko has one kid, by the way; the fat comedian has two.
Nature has its own consideration of success. We don’t have a say in it. All we have is our hacks, and there’s little telling whether our hacks are better than the hacks the previous coders came up with.
A wise man once wrote:
You have competing instincts. There’s a bunch of social instincts, which in their optimal form will make you do the prosocial behaviors which you’re complaining that you don’t do (this includes exercise, diet). Then there’s more animal instincts: not waste energy, to eat more, and so on. Then there’s the omnipresent antisocial super-stimuli which are a virus to your social instincts. This is the algorithm that shows you a bunch of social information, some validating, some alarming, etc. Video games. Etc. If you feel important, high-ranked, competitive, engaged, desired online — or chasing these regardless — then why would you go to the gym to be Goggins? You would have to exercise for eight months to maybe get a few more likes on an Instagram post, and it’s questionable whether that will really lead to anything, and besides, maybe women online are more attractive? This is reality without Goggins-tinted goggles. What a lot of weight lifters will do to increase motivation is (1) look down on everyone else, (2) believe that exercise has cosmic import. The first is morally bad, the second is Frank Yang. In any case, you would need to continually convince yourself of this motivation with reminders, cues, variability, pilgrimages, dark nights of the soul…
To continue the quote above,
We can interpret this atheistically. The flesh, the sinful body, this is all of the lower anti-social instincts and viruses. The Christ, the Lord, this is the hyper-social, omni-social exemplar, the pious and continual thinking of whom acts as an antivirus which can free the codebase and allow us to implement our own hacks again (which may or may not be better than the original hacks).
I don't think you have to be in a constant unpleasant state to grow. Growth is unpleasant in some ways, but pleasant in others. It's especially pleasant when you cash in on it, for example becoming rich and then going on vacations a lot. But I do generally agree that "suffering is the root of growth", meaning that it requires great conflict between yourself and the world, or between yourself and other parts of yourself, to grow the most. The greatest growth also puts the individual at risk of destruction.
I'm not puzzles much by competing instincts. Even craving dopamine seems somewhat justifiable to me. It's the craving for what destroys you, or the craving for nothingless, which seems weird. The former might be a way the body is forcing itself into growing, but this mechanism seems more destructive than constructive. The latter seems like the "death drive" or nihilism, but it might be similar to going into a coma, with the body simply wanting rest.
I read in some of Nietzsche's work that people keep themselves ill, and that this triggers healing. Kind of how fasting and cold showers increases longevity. If this is true, then it makes sense that people keep themselves in a constant "just barely surviving" situation. It just seems irrational from the outside, since it's less pain overall just to do something about ones problems.
Your comment seems correct overall, but I don't think that pro and anti-social instincts explain everything. I'm autistic, so the social instincts in me just aren't that strong. I don't care too much what other people think, and I don't even do good things because I felt that I should. I just do what aligns with my sense of aesthetics.
I don't like the idea that the body is bad. I have to agree with Nietzsche that instincts should be tamed rather than suppressed, and that he who says human nature is bad or evil is merely projecting. Rather than "If you're a good person, you will be happy", Nietzsche's stance is "If you're happy, you will be a good person". Merely being in a good mood tends to make you treat other people better. So when other people fear my nature, they fear parts of themselves which they perceive in me. Anyway, this would be the "good/evil" perspective. My confusion is about the "good/bad" perspective. A good way to put it is "One seeks that which tends to be bad for them, and in nature, this works out, because it's gated by that which is good for them". For instance, you want to relax, but you must first work. You want to waste resources, but you must first accumulate them. You want peace, but you must first win it through war. In the modern world, wire-heading, self-hacking, artificial rewards, etc. become possible, and we sometimes manage to solve some of the problems which exist to make us healthy. "We did it, we overcame the need for hard physical labour!" excellent, but if exercises is no longer required, what will stop your body from breaking down? We're meant to try to win, not to win. We're meant to fight for peace, not to achieve it. But I guess this partly answers my original question, thanks for your thoughts!
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