02-20-2021, 06:03 AM
And I'm overdue for a few more observations again, I think. This week's stand-out volunteers (with a lengthy amount of elaboration) have been:
- Encountering more fearfulness and less emotional self-control than usual. On the surface, that might seem like the opposite of what I'd want, and, for all that I know, it may be exactly what it seems. But, that possibility aside, it's no less plausible that the increased fearfulness could follow directly from the outcomes of decisions that I'd never have risked making before (in other words, fearlessly choosing metaphorical room B might result in new scares that room A was never capable of hosting) and that the reduced self-control might be a side effect of facing my emotions more directly (taking down filters that I originally put up out of fear). Or a handful of other potential explanations, such as regressing and finding a creative way to excuse it.
Either way, I'm not rushing to the superficial conclusion that 6 months on 2 OF versions is making things worse, even if my mid-process results might seem to paint that picture. Two things that look the same from the outside may be very different on the inside.
- Still not feeling any more freedom than I'd felt before I'd started. As before, I'm not proclaiming loyalty to any one explanation. It could relate to baseline adjustment, incremental progress, or only a short distance covered. Or it could be because OF's suggestions are encouraging me to max out my efforts. Or because my standards, if not my expectations, keep me at arm's length from that freedom, feeling perpetual (if not verifiable) certainty that there's always more ground that could be covered. Or because of the Covid restrictions or my previous health-related limitations. Or, or, or.
Plenty of answers, but, in the end, I have no idea which ones contribute the most. I know that there's a tendency to want a single, simple cause that explains everything about the effect, but effects are often a conglomeration of several contributing factors. So, in absence of wiser options, I'll fall back to persistence and process of elimination over time (if determining a cause is even necessary -- I suspect that it isn't), and I'll keep my mind optimistic that the process will get me closer to where I want to be, even if I never reach an imagined ultimate destination where I've finally run out of road.
- Continually being hit on the head with the irony in how much of what I have feels taken away by others insisting on what I "must" acquire instead. Or, more simply, I'm even more irritated than usual by the overused "everybody does/is/has/etc" being offered as a reason for me to do/be/have/etc. Throughout my life, I've made numerous decisions not to do/be/have numerous things (certain relationships, property, tools, territory, etc that others consider ubiquitous, mandatory, and desirable), as I find happiness in their absence, not their presence. One man's trash, everybody else's treasure.
While unwanted intrusions into my material "needs" by others' values isn't even slightly new, my tolerance of it has been hitting new lows. To be clear, given recent popular controversies that I'd rather not mention, this lowered tolerance is about others invading my private choices, not about others encouraging public responsibility. My annoyance comes from the relentless expectation that I make choices that don't really benefit my life or anyone else's (with "everybody's doing it" as the only reason), not from health/lifestyle suggestions that have multiple (albeit debated) reasons behind them.
And what's actually nagging at me is that I feel as if I'm being pressured to remove value from the few things in life that do matter to me and reassign that value to whatever cultural fad excites the supposed majority. Especially when there's more than enough value to go around. If I'm not presuming to tell others what they need (when I have no way of knowing what's right for them, specifically), I don't understand why I'm undeserving of reciprocal respect. To the best of my knowledge, what little I value isn't harming me or others. Not sure if this irritation relates directly or indirectly to OF (maybe a DRS-related suggestion?) or if this is just a pressure point that's aching more while under the increased stress of an OF run.
- Doing less "homework" before making decisions. Don't like this change much, as I'm reflexively reading it as increased carelessness and depleted work ethic, not fearlessness. And I have curiosity, passion, ambition, and several other motivators in my utility belt, not just fear, so reducing fear, unless it had been supporting mistake-aversion, needn't be all that demotivating on its own. Either way, adequate research has historically been how I've made more informed decisions and has, as far as I'm aware, reduced the negative impact of wonky interpretations and conclusion-jumping.
Of course, the easy counter-argument against preparatory information-gathering, one which doesn't necessarily outweigh its benefits, is that so-called "informed" decisions may also be misinformed decisions. There can be a lot of difficulty in establishing the veracity of said information (beyond testing directly or indirectly, followed by success and failure), and the information's source may be incorrect, no matter how reputable or trustworthy I subjectively find them to be.
It's (hopefully) safe to say that humans, even the most trustworthy of us, are fallible and may be likely to be wrong more often than we're right. As far as I can tell, we're frequently learning something new, re-learning what we thought we knew, or stubbornly refusing to learn or change what we think that we've learned already, often bragging about which one it is and "helpfully" trying to impart information to (read: foist our imperfect beliefs on) others that, in a more objective sense, isn't guaranteed to be helpful. To me, it's like saying, "This is what I'll eventually be wrong about in the future, but I'm definitely right about it today." That's why, even in my postings here, I try not to qualify things with more certainty than they've earned.
But, to return to the counter-argument, more information can't easily be relied upon as being wholly true, wholly false, or a clearly-defined mix of the two, so being more informed doesn't necessarily increase accuracy as much as it increases perception of accuracy (or certainty of what isn't necessarily certain?). If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that people, both individually and collectively, appear to have an impressive capacity to blur the lines between facts themselves and their personal interpretations of (and conclusions about) those facts and what they supposedly mean. One blinding example of this seems to be when people cite sources, as they often do, to support conclusions not actually found within those sources, merely extrapolated (sometimes, very poorly) from their contents or, worse, from their title or abstract alone.
Still, having more information ahead of a decision can improve the outcome, assuming that the person possesses more skill at critical thinking than at they do at demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect (a concept whose own supporting study has been debated as misinterpretation of the facts). In any case, doing more homework before making a decision can still confer benefit to a skilled critical thinker, even if it can also mislead an unpracticed one, and, whether I'm one or the other, increasingly skimming through the prep work doesn't really feel like a positive step. Even provisionally.
