Being Rational and Being Productive: Similar Core Skills?

The trick is to notice and reflect on negative emotions.

It also helps to notice and reflect on opportunities to have positive emotions. You weren't just indifferent about going to the doctor, you were eager- this is a vision upgrade! It's a cybernetic enhancement!

Now I realize that I was quite literally not fully in control of myself. I was just pretending I was, and disappointing myself as my illusions repeatedly failed to match up to reality.

I really like how you worded this.

Our rational mind was only to be used in specific situations like constructing tools and coming up with excuses for why something we had done wasn't a violation of tribal social norms.

Not sure whether it's an improvement to mention it, but I find the "coming up with reasons why others should have sex with you" motive far more compelling than the "talk your way out of trouble" motive. It's more directly tied to reproduction, and people are a lot better at seduction than they are at lying.

To me this seems like common sense, but the number of people I have met who resist these kinds of mental excercises is surprising. Once you start to value your current state of mind, you have sacrificed every chance to become smarter.

Anyway, I just took a break from some excessively dull assignments to alter my mental state online, and the first two articles I saw were yours and this . Its like the internet is telling me to to get back to work. :p

In a book called "The Happiness Hypothesis", Jonathan Haidt described the unconscious mind as an elephant and the conscious mind as an elephant rider or driver. I wonder if a similar metaphor is useful here. His book certainly spends some time talking about how we might control our emotions to our benefit, though I don't know that it's more useful in that regard than most other pop-psych-with-a-side-of-CBT offerings.

I don't take it as a given that the problems of survival and reproduction are solved, though their context has certainly changed. I've not yet met anyone who could live forever if they so chose, or anyone who can reproduce without the help (with or without permission) of another person.

It is very likely you did not need glasses. But now that your eyes are used to them you probably need them. What was happening was your eyes adjusted to your way of life. If you would have reacted better to the signal your eyes were giving you, you would have started to focus more on things in the distance and then switch to things closer by, retraining your eyes. My eyes are not accommodating very well either, but one eye is in far mode and the other in near more, so I can see reasonably well at all distances. It is no surprise that for both eyes the optimal distance is the distance to a computer screen. A matter of adjustment. I need to go out more.

Your problem seems to be not with your eyes but with yielding to social pressure, even when that pressure is in the wrong direction. It is almost impossible to resist social pressure except by removing yourself from bad company. Since you're a student you probably spend a lot of time in an extremely bad social environment, academia. It has a medieval guild like hierarchical structure, where only those who have a title have the option of lowering or rising someone else's status. But the titles themselves mostly don't reflect the owner's capacities. They are the result of a process of elimination and backstabbing that leaves only the most narrow minded and socially inadequate, so that those then grab the positions of power. It is a shame this culture keeps on deranging our youth, makes it a prerequisite to do almost anything. I have a friend who thinks he has Asperger's syndrome, but in reality he is one of the very few I know of in academia who has a normally functioning social awareness. The bad environment has made him doubt his own mental disposition, though. This is how bad it gets.

If you'd follow my advice, remove yourself from unhealthy environments, environments that restrict your creativity by limiting your options to those that serve the status quo, however corrupt it is, you will suffer in other ways. Society has a way to exclude people and humiliate them by forcing them into useless activity, if people don't agree with the prevailing mentality. But what are the victories of the rulers and status seekers worth if they handicap the competition this way?

Whether you will continue to self-deceive in order to fit in and acquire status, or whether you will give that all up and try to attain clarity and vision, it is your choice. Both paths can be very hard.