(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

I don't think I'm cut out for heroic responsibility

I found the concept inspiring, at times. I want to be the sort of person that sees a problem needs solving, that it isn't being solved, and says "I will". Even if other people don't see the problem and taking a stance on it is weird and socially costly. Even if it's a difficult problem and requires cleverness and hard work. I am clever, right? Surely the hard work would come around.

Turns out, no. I don't respond to a need for hard work by working hard. Sometimes I try and burn out, sometimes I just get avoidant and distract myself with something else. It turns out also that recognising that this is a bad pattern is not enough to stop it, I just become avoidant and self-aware about it.

My motivational system is broken, or maybe I just don't know how to direct it. Maybe it works exactly as it should, by which I mean it notices I am doing something unpleasant with no immediate benefit to me and tells me to go do something that feels nice, and it doesn't care about s2-level arguments about it being actually really important. And maybe some people know how to work around that, people argue themselves into doing unpleasant, not-immediately-rewarding work for long stretches of time all the time. Which just goes back to 'maybe it's broken, or I don't know how to use it'

I don't even know what the fuck I'd use it on anyway. Should I be trying to mitigate existential risk, or did I just get sucked in with a group of people who think that's important and I believe it because they seem smart and I want them to think I'm smart? Should I be trying to stop fascism, or did the people arguing for it as a rising threat just hijack my emotional system and I want them to think I'm a good person? Should I be trying to convince the people I agree with not to embrace their enemies worst tactics, or is that just refusing to use the methods that work because I want to feel principled? To what extent do I let my perception of what other people think of me control what I let myself believe? More than I'd want, obviously, but again it's not a matter of saying "well, then I'll stop doing that". Should I just use all that hard work I can't do to figure out the right answer? If I'm gonna do the impossible, might as well do the impossible twice, right?

Comments

[feotakahari]

If you don’t know what will do a lot of good in the world, then find something that you know will do a little good in the world, like a soup kitchen. Effort isn’t necessarily wasted just because it could have gone somewhere else. And if you can’t do it for a long time, then do it for a short time.

[sigmaleph]

yeah

i don't worry about how to do a little good in the world. I can give to charity, at least; that does not require much wrangling with my mental illness. I can be kind to people in the moment.

It's when I want to go beyond 'a little' that I run into a bunch of problems.

[contrarianarchon]

This is a hard thing to be stressed about, but I think you answered your own question a bit; it's "heroic responsibility". We need heroes, but that's in large part because most people aren't heroes, and we don't know how to fix that. It's okay to try and be good in the mundane "Be better than 50% of the population kinda way". That's kinda just formalizing your avoidance, but at the same time, what else can you do; be a good person in the means you have, not in the way the random shouting people on the internet say you must be?

(I'm sorry if this is a terrible and counter-productive answer, but it's what I have come to after wrestling with those ideas?)

(... I also don't want to demphasize that being a good person is important, and that all your impulses to be a good person are mostly genuine, even if the details of your priority ranking might be biased.
One could even make an argument, I think, that bias like that keeps people working on all the moral irons in the fire, rather than everyone specializing in the most important problem and letting the second-most important problem get us?)