I don't see the point in the whole charade of "use words, colors and body parts to describe what you feel" - okay, I'm aware of what I feel, and I've assigned some arbitrary positions on my body to my feelings.
Now what? Do that every day? It feels patronizing and seems like just a way to distract myself. Might as well spend my time playing Factorio, it'll distract me as much.
I hope there is some crucial factor that I don't understand yet, and that someone will explain it to me in a reply. Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake.
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Due to the negative tone of the above comment, I feel I should point out that it is a criticism of (or attempt to understand better) the concept, not the website itself. The website was very smooth and easy to work through, the author must have put a lot of effort into making it. Kudos, and if it helps people, that's a good thing regardless of my opinion and understanding (or lack thereof).
The website just tries to teach the first part of emotional intelligence, which is to interrogate what you are actually feeling, so that you can find the real problem (if any).
This is really basic, but it's well known that people who are stuck with certain emotions (and behaviors) can begin to transform them by:
a) understanding what the feeling is, and
b) why they are feeling it.
Once you have that information, and are sure of it, you can extrapolate where it's coming from and correctly associate it with your real situation/problems. Often that means lessening the burden of the emotion because you realize it's "just X".
For example, a couple of years ago I started to have panic attacks when ruminating about weird things like the infinite vacuum of space, the simulation hypothesis, the nature of sensory signals, etc. Then I thought about why I would get scared and how I felt that fear, and realized it was because I was scared of being disconnected - essentially afraid of being alone. I recognize that as the true fear, and it's a lot easier to manage than "nothing is real and nothing makes sense", which is essentially just my imagination extending that base fear.
Of course the truth is that the pandemic era caused a lot of alienation, created deeper political and cultural rifts, and destabilized the entire world. That's my actual situation, so it's no wonder I feel that way, and I can address it however I see fit.
It's a way to ground yourself and break out of things that hold you back mentally.
You were lucky because you could act on your fears, but many of the people can’t. A person having to hustle with two jobs because that’s the only way that she can afford child care or to pay down student debt doesn’t get much help from being told: “you’re sad because you’re being materially exploited”.
There’s almost nothing that that person can do to improve her situation in the near term. As such, many of those people deliberately choose to ignore said material realities. The great lines from Pulp’s “Common people” are an example of this attitude:
My layman theory is that therapy is only useful for second-order emotional suffering.
Many people are miserable because they live miserable lives, identifying the emotions involved and the needs that aren't being met is good but the emotions are there and the needs aren't being met for very practical reasons, and reframing isn't going to do jack to solve it. That's first-order emotional suffering.
Then there are the emotional pathologies that develop on top of that, the second-order emotional suffering, and that can be treated by therapy. For example, if you're miserable because you're poor, therapy won't help solve the anguish and stress of making rent, but it can solve second-order emotions like feelings of shame and self-hatred. Or if you have a life altering accident, it won't solve the baseline misery dealt by the terrible life consequences, but it can help with the residual panic attacks from the trauma of the accident.
Most poor people are not emotionally miserable, in my experience.
They deal with very tough situations, but have learned to find happiness in them.
A lot of emotional misery is found in other groups, often groups with more material wealth, because they haven’t learned to find happiness in their circumstances.
Happiness is just as often about letting yourself be happy than anything else, and that’s a cultural and emotional situation independent of circumstances.
I’ve seen poverty that I suspect is out-of-bounds, for many folks on this forum.
I can say that the most astonishing thing, to me, is the healthy attitude, of many of the folks I’ve met, that live under those circumstances.
“Healthy” does not mean “happy.” They desperately want to escape their circumstances, but they do accept their challenges, and do their best to live [a hard] life.
My guess is a lot of what we’re talking about comes down to expectations, and definitions.
I haven’t experienced what you have to that extent directly. I was poor growing up by American standards, and that is a different bar.
I’m curious about your take on this -
Someone being able to enjoy their kids growing up, or see the value they bring to the people in their lives, or feel the importance in their role in keeping everyone alive, is a large part of my definition of happiness. It goes more towards ‘contentment’? Or purpose.
It includes processing the hard things, and finding the value in getting through them too, and the feeling of being good at what someone does and who they are.
For others, their definition of happy is the excited state of enjoyment (laughing, glee, etc).
For most, it’s a mix of the two.
Near as I can tell, getting rich often requires a significant degree of not being reasonable or content with the status quo. Sometimes ‘getting rich’ here is more about not being poor. Sometimes, it can be ‘there is never enough’.
Being content for someone in that state can happen of course, and after someone gets to a certain degree of wealth, tools to make it easier to get or maintain it are more readily available, but so are tools to hurt oneself. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt themselves on this front over the years.
A lot of the contentment elements here are also quite difficult to feel productively for someone with material wealth. Mucking out a chicken coop because it’s nasty and you need healthy chickens to survive is a very concrete thing with a clear chain from ‘problem’ to ‘solved’.
The idea here is adaptive traits becoming maladaptive over time as a situation changes. So you develop a coping mechanism that, temporarily, is better than not coping with the situation you're in, but as either the situation changes or becomes long-term, it ends up disrupting your ability to engage in higher-order functioning or pursue "happiness" or "meaning" in your life.
The fact that stuff happens in life that makes you suffer is something you generally learn to deal with early on, and most people can handle a bit of suffering, but where things get challenging is when the "second order" stuff stops you from being able to see the goal you're shooting for, the light at the end what makes the suffering something you were able to tolerate.
I always thought the line was "you'll never watch your life slide right out of you" which hit me hard.
Of course, distractions and addictions are our coping methods du jour - but they are backward escapes and keep us stuck.
We need to get people to break away from those behaviors and get on the hard road of self-actualization, and those who have an easier situation should be the first ones to do it.
I cant tell if you are arguing for your own position but spoken in the third or if you are upset that this solution doesn’t work for everyone (for whom you are creating an example and arguing on behalf of).
It seems a bit cheap to attack the qualities of it for not being able to solve a theoretical.
Not a native English speaker so I’m aware that I might not have been the most explicit.
My point was that I think the OP was saying this: “a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems, she should become aware of those inner problems, potentially solve them, she’ll then be less sad, potentially even happy”.
I think that the onus of OP’s point (and of persons making similar points) is that the person from my example might not want to go through the “become aware of her inner problems” step.
I was saying that many persons choose to not go through that step because it would be futile, mostly because of material and societal external conditions that they cannot control and which make solving the problems causing the inner problems impossible.
I didn't mean that at all. That would be ridiculous, and totally worth criticizing.
It's simply about untangling your mind. Often people get so wound up in pathology due to their problems that they make things worse than they need to be, so in that sense it can make things easier.
I never said in my example that my realization caused my problem to vanish. In fact, in some ways things quickly got worse, because now I'd started trying to deal with it without deflection.
> a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems
A person is sad because something's fucked. If she doesn't even know what that is she's going to have a have a harder time dealing with it. Maybe it's something simple to fix, maybe it's not.
your emotions, your brain, your body. They are all just meat. Much as lifting weight will make you stronger, studying will make you smarter, practicing recognizing your emotions and where they come from will help put you in charge of your feelings.
Think of a triangle. Each corner is think, feel or do. You can change the inputs on each corner and it'll affect the other corners. Having a feeling problem? Interrogate your thinking or actions around the feeling. Change them and see what happens to your feeling.
I haven't read any of the comments besides yours yet. I'm a pretty cynical person - I am drawn to skepticism in a discussion, hence wanting to reply to your comment. I went through the exercise in the link and found it really interesting. I wasn't particularly interested in the final output, or in making my own practise out of it. But it was valuable finding some nuance in 'how I feel'. I chose 'good' but when I split it into 3 different terms it didn't look so good, so I took a short break, which is something I should do more often.
So I guess for me there were two crucial factors. The process was more important than the output, and I gained value from it without considering I'll ever do it again.
I agree with most of the other replies, so I won't belabor the point that learning to properly introspect is hugely valuable.
But I will say that Factorio is terrible for my mental health.
It's super fun, and in small bursts it can be great. But it's a crutch on par with alcohol for me. I tend to binge when bored or unhappy. I'd encourage you to find other ways to deal with whatever it is you're distracting yourself from. Using tools like the above, or meditation, can help you confront and neutralize it.
My therapist is fond of a similar exercise and I've learned to adopt it.
While it may seem a waste of time, visualizing an emotion, giving it a colour, consistency, texture, material lets you be an observer to it. By forcing yourself to study it, you need to step outside of its bounds, separating the you from the emotion itself. That distance you have created and held for a few moments is a welcome relief and often makes it apparent that you are a separate entity from your pain. The further away you are from it, the less painful it is. And the more you look at it, the weaker it seems. At the end of the exercise you are more aware that whatever tormenting you was just a fleeting moment with little power over you.
I find it is a brilliant and incredibly powerful concept to internalise. You can find this is the exact idea expressed in stuff like Dune's Litany Against Fear (by reciting it, you are visualizing your fear as a third party, outside of you), or meditation (remaining a passive observer to your thoughts)
To my way of thinking - and in no way does this mean it works for you - different parts of the mind are like different programs running on one computer. They're not all written in the same language, so passing information between them can be hella difficult. Words, colors, proprioception in different body parts etc. are all different languages, testing them out is a way of passing information between the various regions of the psyche so that they can all 'get on the same page' as it were.
Book #3 in my linktree talks a lot in this vein if you find it an interesting metaphor.
> They're not all written in the same language, so passing information between them can be hella difficult. Words, colors, proprioception in different body parts etc. are all different languages, testing them out is a way of passing information between the various regions of the psyche so that they can all 'get on the same page' as it were.
So the purpose of the exercise is to communicate information between different parts of the brain?
Does it really help? If so, do you have any explanation for the underlying mechanisms? Metaphors are convenient, but unless they're a proxy-explanation for some harder-to-understand mechanisms, I don't really see their value...
The mind is more than a singular entity, it is made up of a lot of processes each with their own evolved purposes and ways of looking at things, but also their own limitations as regards expression of their state. Understanding what each part is saying, and why it is saying it, can help integrate and align the components towards the same goal.
Think of it like a meeting, where everyone there has their own narrow view of what's going on in the business and what they think needs to happen is based on that, so during the meeting you're sharing all your different perspectives so you can make an informed decision and orient everyone towards a plan of action. Doesn't always work and not everybody walks away happy, but they're generally satisfied with at least being heard.
As far as I understand this is one of the underlying benefits of making art in a theraputic session. There is a nearby former state mental hospital that now gives tours, and part of it is a museum of artwork that patients made - it is some very powerful stuff.
Something fascinating I think we're just getting to the point of being able to explore is taking the words, colors, artistic expressions, etc. that we come up with in examining our emotional state, and feeding them into an AI like stable diffusion. I can't help but think there is real potential here that could be very empowering to patients and help people manage their thoughts and emotions in a personal, healthy way.
> Now what? Do that every day? It feels patronizing and seems like just a way to distract myself. Might as well spend my time playing Factorio, it'll distract me as much.
What are these things a distraction from, in your opinion? I would have thought introspection the opposite of distraction.
1) that the website is directed towards people who struggle with general feelings of discontent
2) that the purpose of the exercises is to help people feel better
So it would be a distraction from the feelings of discontent. You feel discontent, but you assign them color, body part, etc., in other words, you externalize them, which I suppose distracts you from the thing you're feeling.
In what way is it supposed to encourage introspection?
> In what way is it supposed to encourage introspection?
You actually pay attention to how you’re feeling. Hopefully you do it on a regular basis so that you get better at it, it comes more easily, you do it faster and with less effort and sometimes you slip into it unconsciously as a matter of habit. Some people are easily and unconsciously in contact with their emotions, as others are with their bodies. Others aren’t. I am much more aware of my posture and breathing for years of running, yoga and weightlifting. Even though I do far less of all of those than I did before I had children I know my body much better now than I did at 20. Some people need equivalent things for emotions.
> You actually pay attention to how you’re feeling
I see, so it's similar to the mindfulness concept taught in Gestalt therapy? I guess that's why I don't like it - paying attention to how I'm feeling doesn't really change the way I'm feeling, which frustrates me, because I'm expecting it to affect my feelings, when in reality... it just makes me more conscious, and things stay as bad as they were before.
Assuming it's not supposed to change how you feel (directly) - what is the purpose of being conscious of how you feel?
Being conscious of how you feel gives you a second perspective on your feelings, one that your rational, problem-solving mind can look at, rather than only the instinctive one where all you can do is react to them.
That second perspective also adds a layer of relief between you and the emotions. You're now looking at them rather than being at their mercy. You can act now. You're back in a role of agency. Even if the options available to you are limited, it's very rare that you actually do not have any, but the element of your brain that's overwhelmed by the emotions can't see that.
Even if the only option you recognize from the second perspective is, "I cannot currently think of anything I can do to improve the situation, so I choose to continue with my current course of action, waiting and looking for a change I can make as things change (and things are always changing)," you're now in a situation where you've exercised some level of agency. You're not powerless. You're waiting and thinking and observing for now. And that sits differently.
Sometimes it does help, but, imo, the point of mindfulness is not to be happy, it's in the definition itself: to simply be more aware. I don't feel happy when I'm aware of my misery, I just am aware I'm miserable.
That awareness can often lead me to a solution because I wasn't even aware of the problem until I sought awareness. I'll be kicking around the house pissed off, not even aware of it, and then do a dumb mindfullness activity, and thus the annoyance is brought full into my conscious attention, "oh right I'm pissed off right now. Why? Shit, I forgot to eat breakfast, I'm hungry." or "I didn't walk today, that probably isn't helping," or, "I'm stressed about the three tickets I gotta get done, lemme just write them out as a TODO to at least externalize the stress." And then I can feel a bit better.
Or, not, I'll be like "I'm too pissed off to even think about why I'm pissed off." At least I'm not a slave to my emotions then, which is an important value to me: control. Even if I'm going to be angry or sad or whatever regardless, I like the additional awareness.
> And what's the point of that, if it doesn't help?
It does directly help some people and even more people realise how they are feeling and do something about it once previously subconscious knowledge is conscious.
> Assuming it's not supposed to change how you feel (directly) - what is the purpose of being conscious of how you feel?
Because it can manifest in how you communicate and treat others. Recognizing your emotional state doesn't necessarily change it, but it can change how you react to your feeling. Recognition precedes reaction -- or rather, reaction with conscious intent.
I think the main goal is to make you think about how you're feeling, instead of suppressing it ("I'm fine / it's nothing") and/or pushing it away ("it'll pass, it's just a shit day/week"), because that will just maintain the status quo.
I think a lot of people just lack the ability to analyze their own mind and a lot of therapy is oriented towards that. Personally I think I'm rather good at analyzing my own thoughts and feelings and so I find exercises like this pretty useless and silly.
Like "who knew you could feel more than one emotion at a time?"... people don't know this? Hell, a lot of the time I feel entirely contradictory emotions simultaneously, it's incredibly common.
During a session recently my therapist said something like "that sounds like depression" and I responded "yes, that's kinda my default state. Labeling it doesn't make it go away and just because these thoughts come from a place of depression doesn't mean they are wrong" and she seemed a bit confused as to how to proceed from there, like just pointing it out is enough for most people or something.
It's a very soft science (and is very helpful to admittedly soft folks like me). I found value in forcing myself to realize positive emotions in light of the overwhelming stress that I'm currently under.
I like to think that contentment is NP-Hard in that at its core, the only way to find it is to continually strike in the dark until you land on something that works. However, like many problems, there are strategies for optimizing the search, i.e. heuristics. Give the feelings descriptors and you get heuristic parameters when there were none before.
Eventually one reaches a point where one has to take responsibility for one's emotions and emotion-driven behaviors, and many people discover at that point they have no idea how to do that. Anyone not needing help in this growth is either enlightened or ignorant.
I discovered a book back in the 90's called "Focusing" by Eugene T. Gendlin. It's about paying attention to your body. Not just the obvious parts - arms/legs, etc, - but including your thoughts and feelings. I found it extremely useful for dealing with nearly any kind of emotional discomfort or stress.
The OP is of a piece of that.
Here's a short 12 minute video with the author of the book describing the process.
I’m going through a lot in my life right now, including the recent death of my husband. As one data point, I found this exercise enlightening to better understand what I’m feeling.
So I was just reading a book that talked about this in a way that was powerful for me, so I'm going to post an excerpt below. It's from _Your Resonant Self_ by Sarah Peyton. Warning, it's self-helpy, yup.
It's interesting to me that you think focusing on your emotions might be a way to distract ourselves, it makes me curious about distract ourselves from what? I think some people find they actually spend a lot of time distracting themselves from their emotions, so naming and describing and locating their emotions is kind of the opposite of distracting themselves. (But distracting yourself can be a fine thing and useful coping mechanism too; in fact Peyton includes "distraction" as a method of "self-regulation" in the same section on "self-regulation" I'm about to quote from. but, I think, a different thing than naming emotions).
Anyway, I'm no expert and I'm not trying to convince you, if it's not something that seems to resonate with you, then maybe it's not for you, right now anyway. But since you asked, I figured I'd post an excerpt from the thing I was just reading that touched on what you are asking about, in a way that really struck me -- although I don't know if just these few paragraphs will be as striking as the whole book so far as been on me!
> If you have doubts that talking about feelings will help you, you are in good company. Research shows that most people don't believe that putting words to emotions helps at all. People don't think that it makes things better to name what's happening, even though the effectiveness of that approach can be seen with fMRI. Perhaps this is because many people cope by paying no attention to their emotions or their bodies and the naming of feelings is unfamiliar and thus uncomfortable. But the experience of naming what is happening not only works to calm us down; when it is done with a caring other it can also create relationships of warmth and trust, no matter how old we are. Bringing these relationships inside (importing them into our own brain and carrying them there as a memory) helps people feel more secure in the world. This can have unexpected long-term benefits, including improving immune system function; the sense of meaning and purpose in life; resiliency in the face of trauma, depression or posttraumatic stress; and relationships with others and with ourselves…
> …Putting words to inner experience is helpful in another way, too. When people can't read the messages being sent by the body, they are in what scientists call alexithymia, or body blindness. Did you ever meet anyone who was stressed out and angry but didn't seem to realize it? They might not even have known that they had an increased heart rate or tension in their belly or that their eyebrows were pulling together. These people have a hard time knowing what their emotions are, let alone being able to talk about them. When people don't know what they are feeling, there's nothing they can do to remedy the situation. People who are body-blind show increased stress on their immune system and have a harder time with their relationships. There is also a link between being body-blind and being depressed. These people also suffer more from posttraumatic stress, and some research even shows that they have shorter lives.
> To sum up, developing a conscious practice of naming emotions is one of the sweeteest and most counterintuitive forms of self-regulation (in which the brain takes care of itself without accessing external behaviors or substances, as opposed to self-management, which uses work-arounds such as addictions). When naming emotions is done with warmth, it can foster the mothering relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that securely attached children receive from their childhoods. Happily, as people start to name what is happening, they can learn to accompany themselves through emotional experience and support themselves and their immune systems while doing so.
I used to, and still do sometimes, feel similarly about "things like this," I think as you're feeling now. I would describe myself as extremely cynical, would you? Do you feel similarly about the following? I do / did:
1. Mindfulness
2. Religion
3. White lies
4. Meditation
5. Astrology
6. ENTP whatever that pop psych test is
7. Sharing feelings
8. Psychology
9. Being very supportive of someone making obvious mistakes
10. Description placards on abstract art
11. Professionalism
12. Using the word "spaces" i.e. "creating spaces for contemplation"
This is just me thinking out loud, not necessarily describing you here, but I've noticed that I myself share a sort of way of thinking with the 4chan / net-present crowd I grew up with. I'm not sure if our personalities drew us to similar places on the internet, or if we were sort of fostered into a similar set of personalities because of the nature of these environments and cultures.
My best effort to define this vague sort of culture / personality / ideology is a sort of radical valuing of the truth, and seeking truth in all things.
> Sure it's rude to call him fat, but if I was fat I'd want someone to tell me, how are we supposed to get better if we don't know what's wrong with us?
> Depression is bullshit, everyone feels sad, you're gonna pay a psychologist 200 bucks an hour to tell you that? Life sucks, so it goes
> Yeaaah I'm not going to "talk about my feelings," that sounds like a waste of time, let's just go do xyz instead
I would feel angry if someone suggested meditation. What a fucking joke, sitting around doing nothing for 8 minutes to an hour? Come on. I would see people being really supportive and roll my eyes. "Yeah right, secretly they hate eachother / judge eachother. Take food away from both of them for just two days and watch how quickly they'll stab eachother in the back."
Again, this is not me describing you, your comment just happened to remind me of how I used to be. Looking back, I don't understand why I was so full of hate, judgement, and arrogance. I really believed that the happy people HAD to be lying about it, because I wasn't happy. I really believed everyone was secretly judging eachother, cause that's what I was doing. I really believed that various psychological techniques just had to be total bullshit, because I never genuinely tried them in good faith, and just assumed they were konk science.
I learned over time that being aware of my feelings was important and difficult, and that the various strategies I assumed were bullshit (like the ones in this post) actually can be interesting and effective ways to learn more about myself, if I set aside my anger, hatred, judgement, and genuinely tried them. I realized I was carrying a LOT of anger around, some of it directed at me for having insanely high standards for myself, my morals and values, and my failure to live those standards out perfectly, a lot of it directed outwards at other people for not being the way I thought people should be.
Regardless, activities like this, silly though they may be, were all tools in a toolbelt of self discovery. As a general rule I've learned that new skills and experiences are earned through discomfort or suffering of some kind, and thus naturally to develop myself, my Mind, my personality, I had to suffer through some stuff I really thought was just so stupid, and some of it I still do, but I try to keep an open mind and do genuinely find myself surprised at what I learn when trying these things out.
If I stop assuming I already have all the answers and give an earnest and good faith try to some of this stuff, I learn. That's basically the TLDR.
> I would describe myself as extremely cynical, would you? Do you feel similarly about the following?
Yes, and yes.
> I've noticed that I myself share a sort of way of thinking with the 4chan / net-present crowd I grew up with
That explains it. I spent a part of my youth there, too, while it still had the "secret club" vibes. I guess it left some influence on my way of thinking.
> I really believed that the happy people HAD to be lying about it, because I wasn't happy. I really believed everyone was secretly judging eachother, cause that's what I was doing. I really believed that various psychological techniques just had to be total bullshit, because I never genuinely tried them in good faith, and just assumed they were konk science.
I resonate with this a lot.
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Thanks for this. It's useful to see your perspective described from outside, by someone who actually understands. Makes it easier to take myself less seriously.
I see in your "about" section that there is a "please feel free to email me" sentence - if it's okay, I'd maybe like to contact you for further conversation.
> I see in your "about" section that there is a "please feel free to email me" sentence - if it's okay, I'd maybe like to contact you for further conversation.
always open to this!
it makes me feel validated that others identify with similar feelings, and the ties to the net community. I honestly just threw the comment out there as the first time really putting those thoughts and this theory i've been kicking around into words, half convinced I really was just, idk, a uniquely angry internet person
As someone who also grew up in those places, I've done a 360 and embraced a lot of those things on the list. Life feels _a lot_ better. I'm still cynical but at least now when I'm cynical I feel like I'm actually right, rather than lying to myself.
For me: did a bunch of drugs (MDMA, LSD, ketamine) with friends. That didn't change anything but it definitely triggered some changes. Also at some point isolated from said friends and people in general for about ~1 year (not during Corona). Then got into a long term relationship. So.. just personal growth I guess.
Definitely... Since last night been chewing on a blog post on the idea.
The long work was I read a lot of philosophy and talked to a lot of people, but there's two critical things I think caused me to dramatically shift my direction and perspective: first, I read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. It was a good first start to an open mind because his writing style is something I'd put on the list above, but, I was convinced by his research and experience that what he was writing about in terms of managing human relationships was effective, and I wanted to be effective, so I resolved to grit my teeth and try his ideas. They primarily resolved around empathy and letting go of pride, so the behavior necessary was the opposite of my running theory of how to live.
Second was I started dating a girl that was also basically the opposite of my personality and some of my interpersonal values. She was basically the nicest person at my university, the least selfish person still that I've ever met, and because we were dating I got to see again and again that nope, it really was genuine, she really did just feel and act that way. I'd interrogate her about it and she'd put up with it, telling me she didn't really have an ulterior motive, she just felt that's how she wanted to behave. Likely because of how she behaved she was by far and away one of the most well known people in our slice of university life and enormously successful in all things she did, and last I heard that continues in her current life somewhere buried inside the USA government. Thinking on this, my experience with her could probably be replicated by finding someone suspiciously selfless and trying to talk to them about it, maybe befriend them.
I was ambitious and had high standards for myself so I thought ok, apparently high empathy, selfless strategies get phenomenal results, I wanna be a Big Successful Business Guy, I need to try this, even if I'm faking it. But faking putting yourself in someone else's shoes is just putting yourself in someone else's shoes. I found myself very very slowly saying yes to more things, sometimes because I was being a sly little experimenter in the project, sometimes just surprising myself with a new interest.
The more stuff I tried the more stuff I found to be effective at achieving things for myself. Meditation, for example. I tried it enough to learn about it, then one night out in a field at my friend's ranch when we were all laying about looking at the starts I did the breathing technique someone had shown me and went through the exercise, and never again have I been as relaxed or calm as i was that night. So that's a good feeling, that I enjoyed, and forced me to recognize that meditation can be a good thing.
That superdense period of personal epoch shifting was basically all of college, 4 years. There were some stunts abroad, including a year after college where my ugly personality caused me to tremendously fail at a job I was brought out to Taiwan for, that probably contributed a lot to the journey.
Since the "unlocking" of empathy it's just been more and more times where when I bother to learn someone's perspective and feelings, I'm finding myself understand and emphathising ("I've felt that") or at least sympathizing ("I haven't felt that but I can understand why in that situation someone might"). So it's been a journey now of I guess nearly ten years.
Now I've read a great deal of philosophy and participated in some direct action and have a logical and ethical basis for living this way and thinking this way. I feel as strongly on the side of empathy now as I previously thought it was bullshit, but I'm happy I'm a skeptical person because my position was hard-fought,
and I can be confident in the basis for it (using logic, deduction, evidence, etc). Skepticism isn't inherently bad, it just means you need some convincing, and imo that can be good because it can lead to better formed, more well researched, more effective positions.
Btw the other poster said drugs so just throwing it out there that I've never done anything more than some weed and alcohol so don't think it's necessary for changing ones fundamental perspective, though, I have heard plenty of similar stories about this, particular regarding shrooms.
Edit: now I'm thinking on it more and I also feel like just not being surrounded by people who are all reinforcing this depressive skepticism was probably important. Like on 4chan if you dared show hope or be happy you'd be mocked relentlessly. The attitude had to be aloof and mercilessly aggrandizing or you wouldn't survive. It was similar in my friend group before college. We told each other we were toughening each other up, and I don't regret it because I've been able to transform it into a healthy way of not taking myself too seriously.
But anyway by being with people with whom I can actually have these conversations without being mocked, it makes a difference. Note here that we're getting a generally positive reaction to sharing our thoughts. If we were being downvoted and mocked, there'd be no room for learning or change.
Back in college the force of my skeptical personality was likely so strong that even empathetic people would probably be forced to react with caution to avoid pain from my lashing out at them. Barriers go up when you're hella toxic. I'm chewing on the idea.
Why would you react to a new-to-you idea put forth by well-respected people with a good reputation, by rushing to announce that you don't understand it and disrespect people who do? Is that a good way to "hope there is some crucial factor that I don't understand yet, and that someone will explain it to me in a reply."?
When someone posts a comment about physics or math that you don't understand, do you also think "Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake." ?
"When you are surrounded by jerks, maybe you are the jerk".
Ironically, the behavior
or you exhibit -- lashing out and being upset and not having an awareness of why -- is the issue the OP in addressing.
> Why would you react to a new-to-you idea put forth by well-respected people with a good reputation, by rushing to announce that you don't understand it and disrespect people who do?
I find that the easiest way to get explanations is to be direct about what I don't understand.
In this case, I don't understand the bigger picture of the whole concept - I just feel that it's bullshit. If someone is going to explain it to me, I think it's useful for them to know where exactly I'm standing, rather than to tiptoe around with fake politeness.
I don't care much about reputation of people - if their reputation is valid, my opinion of them won't matter in the big picture - I'm just a random person on the internet. I care about ideas themselves, no matter who expressed them.
> When someone posts a comment about physics or math that you don't understand, do you also think "Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake." ?
If I feel that someone is bullshitting (e.g. posting a "proof" of Riemann hypotheses for hundredth time), I'll express how I feel.
It's the way I feel - it's not an attack, just expression of my feeling, and I think there's nothing wrong with it. If you're bothered by how I feel, that's just the way you feel, and it's okay. But I'm allowed to express it as much as you are.
Immediately shared this with my (free university-sponsored, thank goodness) therapist upon working through it. So intriguing how it helped me to visualize and understand my current state of mind.
I’ve got a lot going on right now as a grad student in the midst of finals. This was a nice reality check of how good some aspects of my life are in light of the stress I’m currently under.
This app is a big dollop of synesthesia. Good luck trying to select colors for your feelings! I thought it was a lot of fun, and I found that it left me feeling similar to having written a gratitude list. (Maybe make sure to focus on at least one feeling that has some positivity to it.) The predominant feeling for me was “tense” (currently stuck on a couch unable to put my feet on the ground and make progress on a take-home exam), but I had a positive emotion too.
>This app is a big dollop of synesthesia. Good luck trying to select colors for your feelings!
Yeah, exactly. It's way more complicated than that for me. But it did get me intrigued to work on identifying a personalized system like this for myself. The self-interrogation alone is a big step. And the site is reminiscent of some of the work I've done with my therapist.
Amazing how something so simple could result in such polarizing responses here in the comments!
The site has the apparent function of a sort of Rorschach test for individuals. Do you feel upset and bothered when asked gently to describe your emotions in an in-depth manner? Did you spend 7 minutes reflecting on your emotion and then feel like it was a waste of time? Or did the process reveal something positive about yourself you didn't realize?
At all times, HN comments serve as a mirror reflecting individuals views on a topic; but when the topic is your own emotional self the result is quite stunning.
I don't like the overly-personal, almost condescending and childish tone. Why not just write normally? I can discuss and explore my feelings without being spoken to as though I'm on the edge of a mental breakdown and one strong word would push me over. I don't need to be told "good job!" for scrolling to the right or selecting a colour.
Everyone on HN will appreciate clear, concise documentation and instructions in their day jobs. I don't see why mental health discussions should be any different. Imagine if Python docs were presented in this style.
Why do you read the tone as being condescending? (Excessive encouragement is making you angry?) The Python docs are written to be devoid of emotion, while emotions are the topic here!
It seems to be the prevalent style in online discussions of mental health. I also dislike it, it presents itself as benevolent but makes the assumption that the audience is incredibly weak-minded.
I enjoyed the experience! I find it a bit interesting how quick I am to be dismissive of this sort of tool, and yet readily acknowledge that humans drastically benefit from cueing.
Assigning names to emotions makes sense and trying to have a richer vocabulary makes sense. Having suggestions proffered up is useful to promote constructive thoughts, but is also a bit anchoring. Are those the emotions I felt, or did I only think that because those were the ones shown to me?
In the end, I am left slightly more self-reflective, which I am grateful for, but don't feel like I came away with clear, strong action items.
Now that I've overanalyzed my feelings? Tense, anxious. And started to feel psychogenic pain while I was managing okay before.
Not sure who it is for, but this kind of "reification of feelings" (as colors, shapes, monsters or anthropomorphizations) has never helped me and only made it worse. It either increases my anxiety, or turns it to hopelesness (in the way of "I'm so far gone I'm wasting time doing this because there's nothing to actually help me") or at best I can ignore it and move on.
The website looks great, and looks like a lot of work was put into it so I'm sorry I'm putting it down, but the concept itself is... in my case, a literal pain.
I quoted from the self-helpy book I happen to be reading right now, _Your Resonant Self_ by Sarah Peyton, earlier in the thread, but I'm gonna do it again here too, take it or leave it!
A lot of the book is about learning to be gentle and compassionate and supporting of yourself.
> So why don't people talk about their emotions, if it is so helpful? There can be very good reasons that people have turned off the part of their brain that tells them about their body's emotional response to the world. If a person's skull-brain has no way to respond to messages from the body-brain (for example, if the burning, bubbling, cramping, twisting sensations that come with intense emotions have never been acknowledged, or if every one of these unchanging sensations feels like a driving hunger or a craving for an addictive substance), then a person may need to learn to ignore the body-brain. In other words, if emotions are an unbearable trip to unrecoverable emotional hell, then turning off body sensations can help people manage their world. It can be a solid survival strategy to have no idea what is happening in the body. Connection with the body can be unendurable. So it is important to take this journey slowly and acknolwedge that reading about this information may seem simple and unemotional but can awaken old trauma and restimulate old pain.
> If you find this to be true for you, slow down. If we move slowly enough, we can simultaneously build a capacity for resonant, calming response at the same time that we awaken the voice of the body.
I would argue that this reaction shows that the exercise was extremely useful for you and should probably be done with the participation of a professional.
> "I'm so far gone I'm wasting time doing this because there's nothing to actually help me"
No one is too far gone and this exercise literally helped you feel your feelings. That's a good thing, even if it doesn't feel comfortable in the immediate.
> and this exercise literally helped you feel your feelings. That's a good thing
How? I gain no insight from it. When I'm feeling like shit, I don't need additional help in feeling like shit, it's never helped me "process it". When I'm feeling okay, I don't need to go through the pain as a routine needlessly as some people suggest. What kind of life is that?
I'm doing okay nowadays in part because I've managed to shove my emotions out of the way once I acknowledge they're only a signal to a real problem that I can either do something about or I can do absolutely nothing about, and once that's determined the emotion as a signal is useless and knowing that helps me set it aside and focus on what I want in life and determining a purpose. But that practice of dwelling on my emotions and reflecting on "how I felt" held me back for a long time, and that's why I had the need to comment at all. While this kind of thing may help a lot of people it's important for some to hear "yeah this might not work for you at all, might even be worse, don't waste time if it doesn't work for you, there are other ways".
I found this hit and miss, the concept is nice and original and the execution is well done.
And I suppose it made me define my emotional state in a more granular manner than I naturally do, but at the end of the day I found no actionable insights.
Defining your emotional state more granularity is an actionable insight. Just like the 3rd time a pod goes down with the same error message you're like oh yeah it's this and this and boom we're back up and running. Recognizing your emotions means you can figure out solutions and apply them again.
The website is exceptionally done, but it might be worth considering that the idea of there being a basic set of five emotions...is a very Western view of things.
There's at least some evidence[1] that our brains and bodies do not come pre-wired for certain emotions, and that instead they are dynamically wired through specific social and cultural contexts.
"Talking about out emotions as internal experiences is quite exceptional in the world. People in many cultures talk about emotions as public, social, and relational than people do in contemporary Western cultural contexts. In cultures remote from our own in time and place, emotions are often seen as acts in the social and moral world" (from [1])
[1] Between us; how cultures create emotions, by Batja Mesquita
Could you be automatically (or not automatically) assuming the comment you were replying to was suggesting things from the West were "less enlightened"? I didn't read that in any of the words, I feel like that was an assumption of yours! Do you assume that anyone pointing out that something is "Western" is saying there's something wrong with things that are Western? Why automatically assume that?
It's only ~750 words after all. Only five sentances, two original, and three more that are a quote from another work.
Can you be specific about which words in the comment, whether from the first two sentances or the quote from the book, lead you to believe the comment author thinks anything is a "wrong idea"? for the reason it is "Western"? Which sentence or sentences are drawing that clear line you say?
I am personally not seeing them. I wonder if you could be assuming that certain words imply something that I am not assuming, or if I could be assuming that certain words mean something you are not assuming. Although I'm not even sure which words that might be.
Seeing the wheel of feelings / emotions reminded me, again, that there are people who don't experience most of those. Even if they do, they have a difficulties in describing what do they feel or if they feel anything at all. It's impossible for them to name the feelings but few most general cases - happy, sad, crying, angry. There is a disorder called alexithymia that may be the reason for that. I suppose, for those people (which is around 10% of population, quoting Wikipedia[1]) the concept of mindfulness is alien and above page is beyond comprehension.
If you were to ask me when I was a teenager, I'd probably agree with that description. But at least in my case, I just had god-awful awareness of my own emotions. So I thought I was like spock and that they didn't exist, while in reality I was happy and mad and frustrated and envious and all sorts of things most days. For some reason it didn't really click for me that what I felt was feelings.
Well maybe picking a random colour means it's not imposter syndrome because you really don't know how to do this ....
Just joking! Sorry couldn't resist the silly response.
I actually found the whole exercise quite nice and picking colours felt basically random to me because I don't associate my emotions with colour. But I'm a guy so I was raised to only feel angry and nothing
I would guess a lot of people don't associate feelings with colors, or at least associate them on a one-to-one basis. For me there is lots of texture and shape involved. But I found the basic self-interrogation great for self-awareness and it inspired me to realize I can be a little more systematic about it, just in a different way than the site creator.
Yeah, I stopped at that point because I don't believe in emotions being colored and body-located, and the experiential disconnected with "Isn't that FASCINATING?" made me anxious, frustrated, and cynic.
When I got to this point I reacted immediatelly thinking that it was pointless. And then ... it wasn't pointless, I actually felt more at ease after I found the "right colour" for the feelings I picked. No idea how that works.
So usually, e.g. in order to scroll down and read more comments here, you mouse over to the scroll bar on the side, click it, and drag it to where you want? Is that because the movement's (longer but) slighter/less awkward than the bend as you scroll a scroll wheel? Just curious.
Well, the first option is always to use cursor up/down and/or page up/down for scrolling. When that doesn't do the job then, yes, I use the scroll bar.
It's because I've been using Logitech Trackballs for maybe 20 years now, starting with a Marble FX and then later switching over to the Trackman Marble when they no longer made the Marble FX. At some point, I just bought five of it, in case one breaks and they stop making that one too, but none ever did break.
I just like the precision-feeling that a trackball gives me that a mouse doesn't.
Scroll bars have been getting smaller and smaller over the years and over these last couple of years I've started to really get into trouble with more and more UIs deciding to turn them off completely. Of course the people who decide to turn off scroll bars also don't give a hoot about the keyboard, which really infuriates me, when it leaves me with no option at all to scroll.
At some point I added a ShuttleXPress Jog wheel to my "rig" on the left-hand side of my keyboard and I'm having its driver simulate a scroll wheel. But I use it extremely infrequently. (...so I was totally lying when I said I had no way at all to scroll).
Oh, thanks for the hint. ...yes that does work. It said "scroll", so I tried cursor up/down as well as page up/down. Didn't even know horizontal scrolling with cursor left/right was a thing.
Semi gratuitous comment, but it has had such an important impact on my life that I share it at every tangent: don't even bother trying to fix your emotional problems until you fix your sleep problems. It is an almost utterly hopeless endeavor to have psychological health of any kind with chronic poor sleep. (And even though they're intertwined, it makes a world of difference to prioritizing what you do when you treat it as causal)
There’s a “done” and an “X” button, but there were only about 3 pixels of each visible to click in landscape mode. The aspect ratio seems to have a big effect here
Nice page. Cultural quirk: in Finland if you ask someone how they are doing they might quite literally start speaking to you about their life. In some cultures how are doing is part of a standard quick introductory small talk. My brain always freezes because I am about to actually share what’s up but then I realize this person might not really want to know.
You start in the middle of the wheel, where the terms are more broad, and work out to the middle level, then the outer level. The intent is to help you narrow down the feeling from general -> specific by moving outwards through the rings.
To be fair, this wheel is a little different than others I've seen. If you search for "emotion wheel", you'll find a variety of others that may be easier to parse.
This was interesting and really well done. But now I'm wishing for something that would help me track each day's set of emotions (BeReal but for emotional introspection?)
It's nicely done, but I don't really see the use in it, but I'm also someone who's not in touch with my emotions that well anyway, but I am also one who hasn't benefited much from therapy and all of my mental problems have only been solved to an extend by medication, never by talking about my problems.
Hmmmm, it makes sense to me that someone (the designer) more familiar with such a soft science would be less inclined to be sensitive to privacy functionality.
I'd love to start a conversation regarding a lightweight JavaScript artifact that takes ranges of hex colors and moves them to ranges you (and other folks with a similar disability) can interpret. I work with Tampermonkey for all of my web-changing JavaScript, and setting something up would just be hacking together some basic color manipulation without having to leave a JavaScript editor and the command line. (Working with the spectrum stuff would be tough, so I won't be able to produce anything quickly.)
Disclaimer: I'm currently caffeinated and procrastinating studying so will likely be less enthusiastic (but still enthusiastic!) going forward.
My emotions correspond just as much or more to very abstract shapes and textures as much as color, and often the color is in combinations/gradients. Everyone will have a personal spin on how they "see" their feelings.
But the basic concept is great and the site is really well done.
The positive replies in this thread have the biggest "bot army" vibe I think I've ever seen on HN. I could only give the cutesy, scroll-to-activate, Flash-like UX about 10 seconds until I gave up on the endeavor. Maybe it really is just me.
Yeah, I don't have synaesthesia, and I don't attribute different emotions to different parts of my body. If you do, good on you and I hope you find this web page very useful, but you're weird.
Feeling an emotion across the body (chest, temples, mouth of the stomach, etc) is a very common thing for an awful lot of people. So common that you can find it in literature since antiquity, across cultures, as something that does barely require explanation. And even if it weren't, I would suggest against labelling people as weird based on the way they feel.
I'm not sure if you're joking, or if you haven't viewed/read the link :-) It actually encourages you to unpack "good" into a number of more specific descriptions.
Why is it that mathematicians go out into the world trying to show their own method to others, most of which are not in need of math?
Can replace mathematicians with whatever, it still works. It's just basic social human nature and the conversation it stirs leads to good things that might not happen if remained unsaid.
Your comment is grey but I actually thought -- even if inflammatory -- it articulates something real.
I have noticed this kind of thing. I've done therapy on and off (sometimes reactively, like after my Dad died; sometimes a little more pro-actively, like when I had a brutal case of writer's block during my dissertation prospectus). Never anything I would rate as very serious or urgent. I would say the therapy was not un-useful, in the sense that I didn't mind taking time out of my day to talk to someone. But I also basically felt like the eventual remediation mostly just stemmed from the acute phase passing or steps I took outside therapy. The thing that got me over my writer's block was mostly writing. The thing that helped me deal with my Dad dying was mostly more time passing and my life moving on.
Meanwhile, I have noticed that a lot of people in my life with higher distress loads, and particularly people like the author of this piece who report suffering from fairly serious mental illness, invest a lot of resources into self-help. I think that's a good instinct, to say "I have a problem and this is a tool that will help fix it", analogous to seeking medical care for a physical ailment. But my experience is that the vast majority of those people seem to make little apparent progress via self-help, and instead typically continue to report being extremely distressed (though, punctuated with confessionals about how much better things are). For most people levels of distress in life seem to me to be primarily associated with lifelong, or early socialized dispositions; or with major material facts of life (i.e. single/married, broke/affluent, healthy/sick, undergoing a major life change/being severely stuck/doing fine) rather than the particular steps they take to manage or mitigate it. That doesn't mean therapy doesn't work, because maybe the counterfactual is they would have gotten much worse absent therapy.
A few friends from when I was a teenager, people who really struggled with severely gnarly upbringings, abuse, broken homes, early life drug dependency, etc. even went into becoming therapists or social workers. And the strange thing is, it externally seems to me like they're about as troubled as they were 20+ years ago, modulo having a little more money.
I guess I would distinguish a lot of these cases from people who are acutely suicidal, people who are actively seeking drug rehabilitation, etc. There seems to be at least some evidence for intervention in those cases. But I am talking about the kind of cases I think you're talking about.
So to your broader point, despite again the fact that it's expressed a bit stridently, I think there's something there: the evangelism about self-help's benefits often seems to outstrip self-help's apparent benefits. There's probably some element where part of therapy is basically tricking your brain, so the apparent sentiment of someone who is clearly having a hard time beaming about how much better they're doing might be part of the plan anyway. But externally it can feel jarring to hear "I'm really turning a corner!!!" from someone who's been struggling for years and continues to struggle.
Most of what therapy offers you, in my experience, is tools for dealing with life. There really isn't a manual that ships with the human experience, so you either have to invent the wheel on your own every time you find yourself not very happy, or you can talk to a friend, or maybe a priest, or a therapist, all will give advice. (not always the best advice, but really just rubber duck debugging goes a long way sometimes)
When it comes down to it, I'd rather have tools and not need them than need them and not have them.
Because they are tools. If you discovered a new tool that worked great for you, would you not want to tell others so they can realize the same benefit?
In our society we don't value communication and feelings enough, and most important of all, we are not really taught how to understand them, manage them, cope with them. In this sense, everyone can learn something from some kind of "therapy". In fact, precisely the people who may not need therapy, as you say, are not exposed to certain useful concepts.
It's a bit like saying: I went to the dentist and he told me to do this in order to improve the way I brush my teeth. Why am I telling you this even if you don't need to go to a dentist? Because prevention is for everyone.
Posting because this response chain is at risk of devolving into hostility. Take a deep breath both of you and move on.
(Please be sensitive with responses. It would be a shame if HN’s automated NLP moved this cute app off the front page because the comments became inflammatory.)
Why are people so fucking excited about therapy? I was recently at a party where someone announced to the whole group they were depressed and had just started therapy. Everyone was clapping like they won the lottery. Utterly bizarre and upsetting.
"Hey everyone, you all thought I was fine but I've actually been deeply unhappy and struggling! I'm now going to pay a stranger with a dubious educational background $300/hr as part of a long and arduous process that sometimes takes years and has mixed results. Isn't that great?"
If she had announced she was starting chemo people would be weeping. Instead she announced she has another chronic, difficult, expensive, and occasionally fatal health issue and everyone is super jazzed about it??? I'm amazed more people don't have strong negative reactions to therapy
They are excited that someone who needs treatment has decided to get it; not that she needs treatment in the first place. Recovery from mental health problems is extremely difficult, but it's more difficult when you don't seek any treatment or take any steps to feel better. It also reminds someone who is feeling sad and alone that she has friends who deeply care about her and her emotions.
You'll see the same reaction when someone says "I've decided to quit drinking/smoking/gambling/etc" even if they aren't seeking outside help. The friends are happy and excited to see a friend improving their life, not excited or happy that their friend has an addiction in the first place.
The reaction you saw in the cancer situation would be the same if everyone knew the friend had cancer but refused to get treatment for it then announced they were finally seeking medical treatment.
Communicating the emotions of the room over the Internet is hard. Don't tell me how to interpret what I saw and felt. And it absolutely felt like this person was treating her mental illness as an exclusive club membership instead of a tragedy.
Excuse me? Reread the post your commenting on, I said absolutely nothing about the person seeking therapy, I was solely was talking about other's reactions to the person.
In the US at least, there are typically routes to affordable therapy. Sliding scales, university-sponsorship, employer-sponsorship, and government-sponsorship for severe mental illness.
Using myself as an (admittedly very specific, not universal) example: my employer is paying my tuition, and the university has a free program. Most therapists in the 200,000-person city in which I grew up have a sliding scale that goes down to $60.00 per hour, and that's only if you're paying entirely out of pocket.
> I'm sorry that you've found yourself with such an unrealistic idea of therapy.
I love coming back to this site. It's absolutely incredible how many different ways people can find to say "Fuck you!" The Internet is endlessly creative.
There's a lot of weird cultural baggage around therapy, esp in the US, but that doesn't mean it is not actually useful to people. Might be useful to you someday, it'd be foolish to let people over-empathising at a party put you off the whole thing
Ignoring your personal attack, I think there is a difference in how people see therapy based on where they are from. The US seems to do a lot of therapy-is-good propaganda in the last 20 years. In Europe, this propaganda hasn't arrived fully yet, although we feel it already.
@imdsm, please read my other comment on your parent before responding to this. I personally had a nice morning because of this pleasant app. I wish for others to have a similarly nice day, and an antagonistic response from you would risk HN's NLP automatically removing it from the front page.
The spirit of kindness is in the guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." [1] I didn't ask people to censor themselves, just to be nice. I've also acknowledged that I'm no mediator, moderator, or arbiter. I just had a great time with the app and feel compelled to help others like me get access to it. Am I doing something that is prohibited in the guidelines?
"Flame-War Detector" discusses the NLP a bit. [2] Also, it's implied by the second answer in the FAQ. [3]
I'm not speaking of the guidelines, I'm speaking of the quality of the discussion. It reads like spam, in my opinion, to post the same off-topic response to every mildly argumentative comment on this post in order to preserve the post's ranking, especially since some of those responses come across as passive aggressive.
And it is somewhat paradoxical to enforce toxic, seemingly insincere positivity in a post about mental health.
Thank you for the Github links, that's an interesting ranking mechanism.
Definitely not insincere (I have no basis on which to judge toxicity). As a result of your communication, I've stopped spamming said comments.
It's just a well-done and very helpful app. It's current position at the top of the front page shows that I'm not alone in this sentiment. Again, I only wanted for others in need of the boost to their day to get access to the link. As I mentioned (in another comment where someone else agrees with you that my positivity is unhelpful), the app isn't needed by everyone.
It's not rocket science to understand that a recent/timestamp-young post on the front page is more sensitive to algorithmic downranking. I just did what I could to defend a positive sentiment in the comment section for long enough that the link could establish itself. It's all in the spirit of promoting well-being among the users of HN. I appreciate your feedback (though I'm a little bit confused as to why you view my actions in a negative light). Does the success of my endeavor to establish the post on the front page of HN not show that my motivation aligns with the attitude around here? (Perhaps it has nothing to do with me, I acknowledge that (but doubt it.))
Your welcome for the GitHub links. That whole repo fascinates me.
>It's current position at the top of the front page shows that I'm not alone in this sentiment.
To a more cynical person it also suggests that one group of posters is very highly motivated to push this topic. And may even be doing so in an organized effort, rather than as individuals posting their genuine opinions.
>It's all in the spirit of promoting well-being among the users of HN.
"Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Saviour?"
No. I believe every profession needs to do some PR for their services such that everyone wanting to work in that profession actually gets to find a job. So the more therapists there are, the more "propaganda" you need such that they actually can find customers.
And listening to casual conversations in US soaps, it is rather obvious from a bystander perspective that therapy-is-something-you-want is an agenda that is being pushed since at least 20 years.
Ay! @lynx23 at risk of annoying you with another request to keep with the positive tone of the post... Please entertain this honest question with a reasonable response. I'm no mediator, arbiter, or moderator. I'm just enjoying this app a lot and don't want other folks to reduce themselves to negativity.
Is your question sarcastic? I leave it up to you to guess what kind of abuse of public media might have triggered the distain for Ads/Propaganda/PR in the year 2020. Its obvious enough anyways.
Because most people posting positively about it sound like they are in a cult, very emotional language, insistent use of certain terminology, etc. It also seems to be clustered together with other currently "fashionable" opinions, and if you speak out against them you are mass-downvoted within seconds of posting your comment.
comfypotato's comments in particular read like something out of Demolition Man. Be well citizen, and have joy-joy feelings!
You're not wrong. It's a cost-benefits analysis conclusion for me. For example: taking my own life was in the cards before medication and therapy. The current status quo is much better; not just for the reason in the previous sentence. I now work through the problems in my life in the order in which they cause more problems, and it benefits me in lots of little ways.
It's relevant to the discussion that I think the notion that everyone needs therapy and medication is absurd. I continue to see a therapist as a barrier put into place to make sure I don't move in a negative direction regarding the more serious personal issues (and take appropriate/healthy actions when a significant problem arises).
Most therapy is CBT based, which you can figure out how to do in an afternoon. After that, therapy is basically just expensive rent-a-friend.
Internal Family Systems is a better therapy technique, IMHO, however it requires a therapist with special training and takes more time for a patient to figure out.
Rent-a-friend, but where the friend won't spare your feelings or flatter you or tell you white lies to make you feel better. Or get sick of listening to you whine
It really helped me deal with a difficult time in my life. YMMV I guess
They likely mean anyone that seeks guidance. I don't think it's meant to add to the conversation.
As for me, I proudly seek guidance, and have, for almost my entire life. In fact, today is a day when I'll be seeking more than usual, as life happens.
What on earth is this? I saw another spam post like this just yesterday.
> Disclaimer: This website is not associated with the TigerIsHome
"TigerIsHome" looks like a gambling site, but these guys are not trying to capture login details even though it looks a lot like a phishing site, with auto-generated text. What's the deal?
Currently working on getting more funding to continue my education; wish me luck! Obviously it would be ideal if this wasn't an issue.
As I've said in other parts on this HN post, please be sensitive with verbiage to avoid removing the app from the front page. Inflammatory comments risk triggering automated downgrading of the post based on NLP. The general sentiment here is positive, and it would be nice if others can have the opportunity to try the app.
I don't think my comment was inflammatory in any way, I was just observing a fact. English is not my first language, and my English teacher was a pretty grumpy Frenchman. If you expect me to express myself in whatever politically correct language that may be currently trending in the US I' don't think it's going to happen. Take it easy, and have a nice day.
Yo be cool. Don’t let HN’s automated NLP move this app off the front page. It’s too cute to kill. (I see your point; I’m just trying to let others have the same nice day that I had because of this app.)
Now what? Do that every day? It feels patronizing and seems like just a way to distract myself. Might as well spend my time playing Factorio, it'll distract me as much.
I hope there is some crucial factor that I don't understand yet, and that someone will explain it to me in a reply. Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake.
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Due to the negative tone of the above comment, I feel I should point out that it is a criticism of (or attempt to understand better) the concept, not the website itself. The website was very smooth and easy to work through, the author must have put a lot of effort into making it. Kudos, and if it helps people, that's a good thing regardless of my opinion and understanding (or lack thereof).