I'm glad I'm not the only one that realized this. Not that I actively go around trying to find other people though.
Even bad geocities pages were unique and interesting. I haven't come across anything that's like that in so long. It seems like an endless cycle of content aggregators and the usual news website. There's really no reason to actually explore or any easy way to do it. Might just be me though.
Even myspace allowed you to edit the CSS and pretty much do whatever you wanted with your personal page. Now all we have is Facebook and the actual information isn't important at all. I rarely even bother visiting people's pages nor have I updated mine in so long. It just doesn't matter for the most part.
Sometimes I'll start something and then a day later I'll realize that I only just started something and try again, the cycle continues until I beat myself up over not getting anything done and it just gets miserable sometimes. The worst is with things that I don't want to do but I need to do because it becomes like this constant fleeting thought where I know I should do something but I'm doing this other thing so I don't get stressed about doing the thing that I don't want to do and not doing it makes me even worse because I know I need to do it.
That's the best way I can explain it.
Oh yeah, being interested in one thing one day and completely hating it the next day makes it hard to really plan for any long term goals when you're not sure what you'll even want to do tomorrow, in a few hours, next week, next month.
It's like your head is disconnected from your body and you're watching a bored teenager live your life for you. Watching him annoy the people you enjoy being around because you can't seem to get him to do anything that causes the slightest amount of stress. If you're too stressed thats when angsty teenager drowning in his own emotions comes in and flails at everyone around him and you can't even get yourself to say what you want to say because everything that comes out of your mouth sounds like you're blaming someone else for something when you're just trying to be like hey, I need you to calm me down I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
I feel worse for the people around me sometimes than I do for myself because I still have a hard time admitting I have ADHD and not that I'm just lazy and don't want to do anything. That's the true nightmare.
>Oh yeah, being interested in one thing one day and completely hating it the next day makes it hard to really plan for any long term goals when you're not sure what you'll even want to do tomorrow, in a few hours, next week, next month.
The older I get the more this taxes me. Not because I have more responsibility, but because the aggregate of my failures grows larger with each passing year. I can only imagine how someone in my position who also suffers from chronic depression must feel.
>It's like your head is disconnected from your body and you're watching a bored teenager live your life for you.
Exactly this. Said better than I ever could.
>I feel worse for the people around me sometimes than I do for myself because I still have a hard time admitting I have ADHD and not that I'm just lazy and don't want to do anything. That's the true nightmare.
Even when you come to terms with it this is the hardest part. Even if you confide in them it doesn't help because rare is the person that believes it's real or can even empathize enough to properly determine if they do or not.
I thought I'd be mad at those I confided in that didn't believe in me but I'm not. If anything I feel worse for them because before they just thought I didn't care enough or was lazy but after they basically have a confirmation that you're so lazy or selfish that you got a doctor to sign off on a free pass. Which is funny because a free pass is the last thing you need. Even when you explain it they rarely seem to understand that you need to be held more accountable than a normal person.
When you're attempting to be social and someone brings the attention to how weird/awkward you are and then pauses like they expect you to respond to it when you're just trying to float around in the background.
I felt that way too, they always felt like a quiet retreat from anything you may be experiencing in life really. It was always so calm and peaceful in there. Never anything offensive to the senses going on. Finding that place in the back corner where there wasn't any foot traffic and getting lost in a book was possibly one of the best things I remember about childhood. It was also one of the few things you can do without needing any money.
Knowing all the different information that could be hidden inside these walls of books that I was surrounded by that might be interesting to me was also something special. You can get that with the internet but there's really no visual, material feeling you get actually seeing the amount of things you can learn about.
I kinda get the feeling a lot of the content on semi-large websites is curated to bring in more views, playing on their main demographic's idea of what they find interesting instead of what the author is actually interested in. I'd rather listen to someone talk about something that they love than something they think I should love. I feel like that all got lost in the rush to bring in a profit and websites that haven't updated to that style get pushed back because they don't artificially raise interest in what they have to say.
I keep thinking about deleting my facebook but a few days ago I went back a few years to figure out what I needed to do to drag myself out of a horrible depression I've put myself in the past few years and I found the exact thing I needed and all I could think was, I could never delete this if it was this important to me. I feel chained to the website in a way, I've had it for 6 years and quite a bit of important social interactions are hidden in between things that don't matter that I might never find again and completely forget that part of my life.
Is there any way I can separate myself from the website without losing these things that I might need later in life at some point? I'm really wanting to just delete it but the history makes it important to me.
My first concert was a band called The Chariot in some cramped bar and when the audience started moving it was like everyone was in sync because you couldn't move without pushing someone and it was one of the best experiences of my life.
TLDR; I've done what you've done on a massive scale.
Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure signal.
I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself occupied when I'm bored.
It means passively absorbing information can make you dumb because you're not demanding brain power (lack of using a muscle atrophies). Compare scrolling on Facebook to watching Television -- completely passive.
It means that they are adapted to a much higher stimulus level and lose interest if they have seen something beforehand. Also that they are a conceited brat who is convinced that they are the center of the universe. Or at least that's how I read their comment.
To the contrary, seems he built an anechoic chamber. The only signals he perceives is what he wants, cleanly. He has decided what he doesn't want, knows that most signals out there are just variants on the same such content, and blocks it all.
I'm approaching half a century old. Comes a point where you realize you have heard it all, and are not interested in anything "new" because it isn't. I'm this -><- close to shutting it all off and going seriously minimalistic. The tipping point would be a news service which presents only actual need-to-know news, and a stream of new music.
Address, enumerate, and centralize your core axioms. Build from there. Stop letting others dump $#!^ in your head.
The purpose of the anechoic chamber is not to keep out sounds from the outside, but to allow you to differentiate the direct sound you're making from the environmental reflections.
Since it is impossible not to live in some variant of "chamber", always has been, and always will be, this is an accusation without teeth. Which is probably a good thing, since it's also hypocritical, but fortunately, it can't bite you back; it's toothless.
The interesting question is whether you have built a good or a bad one, and what exactly "good" and "bad" even mean in this context. But there is no "not in a chamber" option.
The problem is, it's becoming necessary to live in some kind of chamber in order to stay sane. Staring into the infinite void of indiscernible and contradictory truth forever is more than the brain can handle. More than mine anyway.
The challenge is to maintain the right mix of echoes in your chamber.
It's the nature of information at this point in history that you cannot possibly consume it all[1]. Therefore, you have to have some selection criteria, which will obviously be biased. If you want to call that an "echo chamber", well I don't know what to say to that.
Hours of browsing similar wikipedia articles to find out something but nothing describing exactly the issue only to come across an unrelated comment on hacker news unexpectedly that helps a ton.
I'm 21 now trying to plan out my life and this is one of the major things for me. What do I want to do in life that is important to me and can I accomplish this within the timeframe I have. I don't have a second chance so I don't want to spend time doing something that I'll lose interest in, or end up being stagnant in some job that I can barely stand. I'd rather do all that worrying now then when it could mean finishing something on time. At least now I can plan accordingly (do this before I'm x years old) to how much time I've wasted, instead of wasting time and not accomplishing a part of it before I need to.
Also trying to figure out how "great" I am, or what I am "great" at. So I'm not disappointed at myself . I've already gone through that once on several levels when I went from being an old teenager to a young adult. One time is enough, and I bet it's so much worse when you're at the point where you can't accomplish the goal because you're not good enough (or even just questioning if its feasible, that has to drop you farther than where you should be and end up doing worse because of it.)
Or I may be just wasting time now and I should just jump in. I don't know, maybe I'll figure that out. I don't need much in life, just to feel like I've done the best that I can at whatever I end up choosing. Not even in an idealistic way really, I want to give back what people have given to me (knowledge, ideas, materialistic things if any) so at most I don't leave the world knowing that I did less than nothing. If I leave doing more than I have taken then I can be happy in the fact that I've made the world a little bit better. Not a lot but it wasn't a waste being alive.
I can totally relate to the instinct to plan things, and "do it right" the first time. Life is short; your 20s are shorter; don't waste them!
At the 'wise old' age of 26, though, after changing paths twice (PhD dropout->job 1->current job) and swallowing many earlier words, I've started to accept that we just can't know everything in advance, and it's OK to be wrong and "waste" time. And furthermore that it's not really a waste, because it teaches you.
Journey rather than destination, and all that.
I guess what I'm saying is, yes, be introspective, know yourself, do things for the 'right' reasons (because you want to do them and are passionate, not because others expect you to do so) BUT give yourself permission to change your mind, and to try different things! If your standard is "live life perfectly the first time", you're bound to have regrets. If your standard is "let's see what happens" then you'll be fine :-)
"Let's see what happens" is how I love to live my life but sometimes it's just not possible given how affected I am by external stimulus because of my introversion and ADD. So I have to plan out some things but I'm not looking for the perfect life. I've learned from past experiences that wanting something to be perfect is always the wrong way to look at something because no matter how hard you try you will never achieve it.
"There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. "
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2) By definition, what "you" are uniquely good at cannot be represented by logic, mathematics or reason. Otherwise, "you" could be duplicated, cloned, automated. The unique properties of you exist at the boundary of possibility, in the space historically occupied by philosophy/magic/religion, now supplemented by scientific research and metaphysics. A good starting point is understanding the history of the number zero. See also Heinz von Foerster on the subject of ethics and free will, http://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html
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"Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.
Why?
Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer." In some cases it may go fast, in others it may take a long, long time, but ultimately we will arrive, after a sequence of compelling logical steps, at an irrefutable answer: a definite Yes, or a definite No.
But we are under no compulsion, not even under that of logic, when we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions.
This is the good news, American journalists would say. Now comes the bad news.
With this freedom of choice we are now responsible for whatever we choose! For some this freedom of choice is a gift from heaven. For others such responsibility is an unbearable burden: How can one escape it? How can one avoid it? How can one pass it on to somebody else?"
"This guidance probably should have been Chapter 1 of our Politics 101 series. It’s foundational. It’s a HUGE problem for many professionals, particularly young – and dare we say it, naïve – professionals. So many young people say, “I don’t ‘play politics.’” The more savvy folks around them think, that’s good, because this isn’t a ‘game’ you can ‘play.’ "
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4) The biographical stories in Plutarch's Lives of "Noble Grecians and Romans" were preserved for several centuries by people
who believed those lives were memorable, back when books were non-trivial to produce. These lessons cross platforms, time and space.
I've only read the first link so far, I've had a bit to do today but I appreciate all these links. Already learned a ton so far and this is almost exactly the sort of material I was looking for. Just wanted to say thanks before this falls into obscurity and/or you forget about it so you know your time was not wasted.
Even bad geocities pages were unique and interesting. I haven't come across anything that's like that in so long. It seems like an endless cycle of content aggregators and the usual news website. There's really no reason to actually explore or any easy way to do it. Might just be me though.
Even myspace allowed you to edit the CSS and pretty much do whatever you wanted with your personal page. Now all we have is Facebook and the actual information isn't important at all. I rarely even bother visiting people's pages nor have I updated mine in so long. It just doesn't matter for the most part.