Tuesday, 12 March 2024
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The last entry was actually for chapter 8. The ninth chapter, which I've read now, was mainly about applying the things we've learned in the previous chapters with our daily lives. I'm not going to talk much about the contents of this chapter, more so what it inspired me to think about.

Key words I want to get around: Sensory sensitivity, emotional attachment, deconstruction, social synchrony.

I believe my sensory processing is more sensitive than average. At some occasions, I've had to leave social settings due to sound level, overriding my fear of standing out. For myself, I find it difficult to shout. I'm prone to be nauseated by strong smells, especially perfumes, where others seemingly don't seem to be affected. I find clothing that is tight uncomfortable, never wearing belts, or anything touching my skin, like a watch. I think it may also apply with my vision for several reasons, but I'm getting bored of this, basically I think it's all my senses as I was pondering whether it was only some. This was physical / tangible senses.

I also think it applies to intangible senses, our affective feeling and the emotions we construct. When I was a kid, one of my objectives was to stop myself from crying. I would get upset by the slightest thing. This wasn't ideal. I think that's one of the reasons I had a lot of trouble with some teachers. To promote appropriate behaviour, their methods may have been tuned to kids with more usual sensitivity. It didn't help that I did everything I could to not become a problem or seem incompetent. This proved to be quite a challenge in the subjects I had difficulty in, mainly danish, and can you really blame me for that one, haha. Reprimanded for not doing my homework, yet too afraid to ask for help. If teachers gave instructions, I'd many times not fully understand it, franticly look around to figure out what we were suppose to be doing. I fortunately had no major issues with my peers, as I've said, I had a hostile approach, and had my ways, like talking to their parents, hehe. I think most tried to be friendly. One thing I was getting at with this, in the book they talked about reasoning things such a chronic pain to incorrect things in our affective niche, and emotional granularity can be helpful to improve reasoning. In my case, the most impactful thing was figuring out I didn't fit in my environment, and making an escape plan. Most of my childhood I had chronic pain in knees, shoulders, neck, and whatnot. When I left school, it magically all disappeared, feeling 10 years younger. Now that's the real bio hack for living longer. Sometimes whatever you do to try and alleviate your suffering doesn't matter if you have some fundamental thing in your life causing trouble. Obviously my situation is a bit different, and why I also realise my issues and how I dealt with them may not be applicable for most. It would also have been a different situation if I knew I had ADHD and whatever else that could be useful. But if one can, I do believe it's better to become self reliant. Everyone is winging life, most people are busy figuring out life themselves, and I find myself more fortunate than most in the end.

Moving on from school stuff, I've started to have ideas about what makes one good at managing people or any sort of organisation thingy. I think a lot of people, at least what I read, think it's a bad thing if leaders are cold, don't care about people's feelings. I actually think it's good if a person is not emotionally affected but has emotional understanding. I have come to this conclusion from my own personal experience as a person that has somehow got to experience this somewhat on both sides, being insensitive vs. sensitive to others feelings. Running Minecraft servers, I've gotten to try manage volunteers, of all ages and continents, from the most innocent to the most disturbed (levels I still have difficulty understanding), hundreds over the years. Because of my ADHD, I quickly forgot about instances of conflict, and through learning to deal with finite attention, I had become very meticulous of how I spent that attention to reach my goal. The quote "Work smarter not harder" is very true when it comes to business (the quote requires more nuance, it depends on context, intentions, depth of work). Anyway, I can't possibly even begin to tell you what I've witnessed from my adventures running mc servers. If there's one thing to take away from it, if you're a parent, keep notice of what your kids are doing for fuck sake. You wouldn't believe the lengths of manipulation some people pull for their disturbed desires). Where I was going with this, is that running mc servers has a low barrier of entry. I can't count how many people from my servers think we're incompetent dealing with moderation, copies our server, then a couple months later have a mental breakdown from the abuse they receive. People have absolutely no idea how difficult moderation of people online is. (I think there's solutions but it requires systemic changes). I think you're starting to see what I'm getting at there. If you're a person that have emotions attached to what you do and is affected by people's feelings, all your processing is going to be spent on that if you're in an environment where you have hundreds of people coming from all sides with their issues. Instead of spending time on an issue that can improve the experience of hundreds of thousands, you get bogged down one person's story that you feel empathy for and want to help. Empathy has its limits, and the more people that depend on you, the less you can rely on it.

In a previous writing, I wrote I'd really want to have known more about how stimulant medication would change me. Because when I started taking it, slowly, very sneaky, I would become completely inept of running mc servers. The stimulants did this a few ways. Completely changed what I cared about in life, intensified my moral guilt, I no longer brushed off conflicts as easy, and slowly destroyed everything I had spent the last 10 years building because I thought I could turn it into something that aligned with who I had become after the medication. So like uh, hey dude, are you currently in a super chaotic environment, where a lot of people will be impacted if you change, then maybe you should consider getting more help or handing it over to someone all together before starting medication. Oh, and as you inevitably fuck everything up, your ability to feel guilt and sadness will be more sustained now.(This may come across as resentment or such but thankfully I'm in a state where it's more just humorous to me but I still feel value writing about it to better understand) The thing about this is that I first really realised this a year into my medication where I had already done most of the damage, I didn't know how many unhealthy coping strategies I had incorporated in my life that suddenly became irrelevant or worked against me with my medication.

Going back to the leader thingy and empathy, the real problem is what the incentive or goal is. Before stimulants, my main concern was how to make money with the least amount of effort. I don't think I cared much about morals, as the reason for not doing a quick cash grab was because it was just bad business long term. I behaved well because it would make more money long term. I slowly saw myself, step by step, move my moral line, to grow and not lose in a fierce competition where you quickly fade to obscurity if you're not fully committed to what it takes to stay ahead. I had a lot of conflict in my head, ashamed and feeling guilty but because of my ADHD those feelings never really sustained themselves. The next minute you're distracted by a problem needing immediate attention. This brings me to something very interesting I noticed, how I was different from most others regarding emotional attachment. I don't get attached emotionally to anything really. I judge a member in my family as harsh as I would judge a stranger. Even more so as I had a value of judging everyone fairly, so I set higher standards to those closest to me to avoid potential bias and nepotism. What shocked me was how I saw people defend me because they were emotionally invested in my server. I had issues in my mind about things I had done I did not feel were right. Then to see people not judge me for my character but their emotional attachment to me felt a bit disturbing. As long as they like me they don't care if I do something bad? As I became closer to someone, they'd suddenly ignore my bad behaviour. I also noticed this in great detail with how different groups formed, and being a mediator in many situations, had access to information on another level, and saw how people would judge people based on their grouping. This was bizarre to me, I'd only look the other way if I was sure it'd make me more money, usually not because long term it becomes a bigger liability. That's why I think I became lonely a lot of the time. I would not form an emotional bond with anyone I interacted with. And those closer to me, I would hold much more accountable, to irrational levels. I ended up hurting a lot of people that I cut out in an instant if felt they're character was bad. I wouldn't even get angry, just calmly explain how I felt, and they'd be treated as a complete stranger again. After taking stimulants, I lost all interest in making money but my whole way of running things had been setup for that. I started feeling terribly guilt, I didn't want to involve anyone anymore, and I completely ignored it all, focusing on projects for myself with not thought of making money or even getting customers. It made no sense but this is all I knew so I thought I could somehow make it work. Obviously it didn't and eventually I made the decision to call it quits for good. I didn't even want to sell what remained, I was opposed to it all, I don't believe this is the right way for how we should do things, that every way people spend their time must be monetised somehow. I'm not saying this as if it's all bad I just didn't want to be involved because I found it conflicting to have to choose about cresting value for people and how can I exploit to make more money for less value. Yuck. I don't want to be a part of it even if it means I'll have less stuff, stuff that I don't even care about anyway.