incognitomaorach
No bio...
User ID: 1274
As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true.
It's basically the inverse of "misery loves company" - both are self-reinforcing loops where your internal state shapes who you spend time with and what you pay attention to, which then reinforces the original state.
I was just rereading DFW's E Pluribus Unum where he talks about the same mechanism with loneliness: lonely people watch TV (or some other isolating hobby) for connection → less real-world interaction → more isolated → more TV. The medium becomes a kind of attractor state that keeps pulling you back.
Same principle whether it's gratitude journaling pulling you toward noticing good things, or doom-scrolling pulling you toward catastrophe. Once you're in the loop, the feedback mechanism does the rest. Knowing about the loop doesn't necessarily free you from it, you can see the curtain and still get caught in the performance. The hard part, like you say, is trying to forget or pretend not to do the curtain checking practice. I have some friends who swear by psychedelic usage as lifting them out of depressive states etc. but ultimately I think if you're pretty well adjusted or don't have some kind of PTSD or OCD, psychedelic use (even one off!) can make it really hard to break out of the "it's all a farce, look at us it's just monkeys [playing status games/performing characters/etc.]" mindset. Like yeah that's kinda true, just try not to think about it and you'll be much happier.
incognitomaorach
19d ago
Anecdata but my views have changed substantially (civ nat/soc dem to "quite a bit further right") via online discourse, osmosis, and frankly I think my views coming into contact with reality. A large amount of my IRL contacts have also moved further to the right on social issues specifically, mostly driven my immigration, or at least online discourse and media that is shaped by immigration. How much of this is driven my argumentation vs. just looking at reality is difficult to parse, but what I would say is once certain dominoes fall, one becomes much more receptive to argumentation around other points and policies. The nature of tribalism means that it's extremely hard to remain iconoclastic and the step from "I'm on the left except for the extreme culture war stuff" to "I'm on the right" is an order of magnitude smaller than the step from "I'm on the left" to "I'm on the right".
I mean famously the Iranians aren't Arabs. An under appreciated aspect of the whole dynamic is precisely the struggle between the Persian/Shia side and the Arab/Sunni side. Iran has been remarkably resilient to civil conflict in comparison to the rest of the region.
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