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Long story short, my doc and me tried methylphenidate despite my bipolar disorder. I can‘t remember ever having had such an inner calm and structured motivation. I seem to be in some weird niche of the ADHD space. Let‘s see how this proceeds, I am fairly optimistic that I am able to perform better according to my self-expectations now.
But consider: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y
„We found that participants with higher intelligence were only quicker when responding to simple questions, while they took more time to solve hard questions.“
I was writing a lengthy answer about how I struggled with similar questions before actually becoming a father and how they all became relativized, but then it seemed a better idea to just give a little piece of advice: If you have a partner that seems adequate to you, go for it, you‘re probably already overqualified. Your words already speak of the love you will able to lavish on a child, and that is the most important thing to give. The rest is, as always, a matter of adaptation of strategy and tactics to circumstances that are beyond our control.
This is what I needed to hear. Thank you.
Edit: I‘m not sure anymore. It gives me aches to even think about what might be worth preserving and what possibly isn‘t anymore.
Warning: potentially hazardous line of thought.
It‘s too late now for my father, but I have thought about consequences for the rest of my family that is willing to take the chance. My plan is now, in the case of onset of any type of dementia, to opt in for assisted suicide before too much damage will have occured. Careful planning should allow for near-optimal preservation, to the extent possible when and if this rather radical step becomes necessary. What could I possibly lose? Some years of cognitive and physical decline where any joy would be overshadowed by the losses.
And yes, the possibility you mentioned indeed provides at least a little comfort.
If I am still around then, I‘d be happy to lend you a hand turning over stones, no matter how long it takes.
Lyrics that came to my mind (from Bruderschaft - Forever):
I will walk this ground forever and stand guard against your name. I will give all I can offer, I will shoulder all the blame. I am sentry to you now, all your hopes and all your dreams. I will hold you to the light, that’s what forever means.
I‘ve just read „Think Again“ from Adam Grant. If vaccine whisperers succeed in convincing lots of anti-vaxxers to eventually protect their children, their approach may generalize. Even more impressive is the case of Daryl Davis, an Afro-American musician, talking hundreds of KKK members out of their white supremacist worldview.
I am very afraid that the best even a superintelligent AI can come up with would be uncanny puppet versions of the people we cherished or rather completely new people with just some similiarities, more akin to clone siblings than to the original individuals. What I actually want is what was left over of his connectome, and that is, for all I know, gone forever. Unless some AI can extract it from thermodynamical noise - which does not seem all that likely to me.
I could not really make sense of your comment, though I had actually done what you proposed a couple of years ago, until I had read Lucius Bushnaq‘s comment. Did that imply what you were trying to tell me or is there another aspect to what you call an intuitive understanding?
I cannot see how your last sentence holds. My subjective experience of time was, up to now, everything from the usual feeling of continuous time and total disarray during psychosis up to a feeling of complete timeless eternity during transcendental meditation. Instead if knowing how time feels like - I have had my share - I would like to understand how consciousness relates to time in the light of physics. Subjective experience can be deceiving in infinitely many ways, but there must be (at least I hope so) some objective underlying physical foundation for it. At least my inclination towards realism tells me that.
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting. Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though - I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at work, working on self-actualization, keeping a good standing with friends and acquaintances and pushing forward some projects of my own. When I am at normal energy levels, which are considerably higher than the ones I have right now, I seem to perform on my personal pareto frontier. Whenever I try to expand activity on one or two of said aspects, I fall short on the others, pushing even harder then leads to stress and regrets that in turn slow me down further on the totality of my efforts, until the point where it becomes problematic for my health. Whenever this happens, I also start to spend too much time dealing with and worrying about stuff that is beyond my control, such as politics and so on, which leads to a vicious cycle that often triggers depression. Once I have found my way out of it, the cycle repeats. For a couple of months, I hold my balance, than I try to push my limits and things start to fall apart again.
It could easily be the case that I am expecting too much from myself and maybe there is no way to become better at achieving my goals than completing my side projects and not replacing them with new ones after that.
Thinking about all you have said and trying to make sense of why it resonates so strongly, I have come to an intermediate conclusion that I will have to think about for some time: Perhaps it is a good idea for me to refrain from learning about the topics that I am most drawn to now, and rather go back to both theoretical and applied psychology. There is not that much to take away from quantum computing when it comes to dealing with other people. Or oneself.
Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into practice.
I know how much energy and time I have to spend in order to reach the goals I set for myself. I know how to place sufficient boundaries on myself to make use of my freedom (/power). I know how to blend into my social surroundings while staying just authentic enough to be respected and trusted. I know how to let go of intellectual OCD and have fun with the cards I am dealt in playful interaction. And yet, my implementation of this knowledge in daily life feels poor. Maybe it is a luxury problem - objectively I am doing fairly well, I guess. But my success stems from a local optimum of adaptation that I semmingly cannot leave without developing serious mental health problems. Paradoxically, I feel stuck while reaching one important life goal after the other.
Maybe I should go see a therapist and work on my equanimity.
This conversation increasingly develops characteristics of group therapy, but so be it.
Regarding values: Yes, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding along with the experience and creation of meaning are among what I perceive as my core values. My understanding of power has a big intersection with positive freedom and because of that, I seek more power and influence mostly as means to act upon my values. So far, so good.
Now that I have thought enough about the last few weeks and my thoughts and actions, I think I have figured out what actually bothers me. My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation, leading to internal conflicts about the goals to aim at over the next years. I carry responsibility for a small family and want to live up to it, that goes along with my plans to advance my career at bit further. At the same time, I feel like I have not been able to become the person that I would like to be and that I was not able to realize my potential as an individual. Now, I have to put more energy into my most important and valued relationships than into myself as a distinct individual. The solution is easy: I just must not be an egocentric idiot and care more for my loved ones instead.
Another source of conflict is my increasing inability to endure the superficiality of the average social interaction. I moved to a small village in order to keep away my child from big city madness as long as possible. Though I consider myself well-integrated (I meet and sometimes hang out with neighbours), I feel deeply estranged from most people around me. Conservation is shallow, biased, uninformed and uninspiring if it is not about the topic of cars, which I am not very interested in. My sources of deep talk consist in three people, one of which happens to be my wife, so I probably should not consider myself unlucky. Nevertheless, my longing for social belonging has paradox effects which I cannot fully escape by isolating myself without harming my family‘s social life. This relates to the over-objectiveness and over-rationality you mentioned.
So, now I‘ll stop with the personal perspective.
What is your concrete advice on becoming rationally irrational to better fit into society?
Please go ahead, maybe it helps. I‘d just prefer not to give an answer before I‘ve figured out some stuff about myself.
This was highly unexpected, mirroring my own experiences in a somehow unpleasant way and is indeed hazardous for me right now as I‘ve become a bit mentally unstable over the last weeks. Please give me some time to think this through and adjust.
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago. Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering. Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
Well, maybe my underlying motivation for this question was the wish for some shortcut to overcome what I perceive as personal deficiencies. Throughout my life, I‘ve hardly had to work as hard as most people around me to complete mental tasks, and that has led me to live a rather decent life by now. And I‘m still making progress in terms of achievements that secure my material situation.
But being completely honest, I feel lazy and having fallen behind what I could be. The things I value most are intelligence, knowledge and understanding, and I just know a small fraction of the things I could know if I had acquired more discipline (this feeling increases in the presence of highly knowledgeable people as here on LW). My strategy so far has been to externalize motivation by creating social obligations that force me to reach my most ambitious goals. This approach has its limits.
Thank you, this has clarified the issue a lot for me regarding the time aspect of my problem, but the identity part still remains very elusive.
Thinking about the responses, I have to come to the conclusion that this is a rather bad idea. The positive symptoms which I remember very intensely just don‘t make up for the decline in critical reflection of what one is actually doing, thinking and feeling. I had suppressed that to some extent, but it is clearly a major part of what I went through. Thanks for pointing out this aspect. Personally, I will probably try to work on healthy habits, routines and stay on my medication (what I would have done anyway).
I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies. In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well. It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.
I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods of cognitive/mental enhancement, none of them fully delivering the particular mixture of symptoms that hypomania did (for me):
- Nootropics, to the extent that I‘ve noticed an effect, came with unwanted side-effects.
- Physical exercise obviously does the trick, but only goes so far raising and stabilizing mood and clearing up thinking.
- Meditation also regulates emotions and increases self-reflection, but I could not notice any motivational gains.
- Achieving flow states usually is very tricky as one has to adjust the difficulty of the task to one‘s competence all the time, something that is not achieved while taking care of routine business or hard problems.
Following your proposal, I would have to try something like perfectly dosing modafinil and nicotine while steadily keeping in a state of flow, which I had to consciously reactivate everytime after perfectly timed short workouts and meditation sessions. I doubt that even this would lead to the desired outcome. What may sound even less convincing to you, but actually is my point: mild hypomania felt „natural“. I‘m in danger here to glorify this episode, but cannot see how the first few weeks of it were unhealthy in any way - I was simply able to do more mental work in a day than I could normally do, while being happier than I usually was. If that is sustainable in any way is exactly one of the questions I would like to have answered by further research.
Instead of tweaking numerous variables for some individual with unpredictable outcome, why not examine the condition in the population, find out more about its mechanisms and make it accessible in a controlled fashion as a full package?
Despite a little tear on the ego, it has some advantages not to be the smartest in the room. Having read here on LW a couple of years ago and now bit by bit picking up some of the stuff that happened back then and in the meantime, the dominant feeling for me isn‘t envy of the capability of others, but relief that there are enough minds in the world entertaining thoughts that at least partially reflect my own shallow ones on topics that I deem important, but have no one to talk about.
Unless it involves some mathematics that I am not accustomed to, it feels as if I can follow and understand the majority of thoughts shared on this platform. That provides me with enough encouragment to delve deeper into the topics I am interested in, maybe even enough to work more actively on myself. In any case, it is more than I could hope for hanging out with the guys in the village, where most talk is about cars and gossip.
Yet, when asking myself what I possibly could contribute, the only things that I can come up with are sharing highly subjective experiences of my mind falling apart during manic psychoses, stitching myself together in the aftermath, and making a decent living job-wise and in terms of family life in spite of receiving very pessimistic prognoses for my future when I was in the process of rehabilitation.
I wish I could give more, but I had been spending much of my time playing video games and hanging out with people for senseless fun during my youth. Now, regardless of the degrees I‘ve received, I feel much less educated and capable than I could be.
No one is responsible for his genetic predispositions or his upbringing, but one is responsible for how one acts relating to the values one holds. I fell short on focused self-actualization, so maybe I‘m now the dumbest among the smart.
Now, what is the advantage that I have been talking about? I can probably learn from most of you in a mostly passive consuming style, whithout being obliged (by my morals) to contribute more than this mostly anecdotical comment.
Regarding the issue of hard-coded algorithms determining one‘s cognitive abilities: I‘m not sure about the malleability of deep cognitive processes in general, but I find myself to have undergone significant changes in meta-cognitive abilities as a result of recovery from psychosis. It has the character of some pre-conscious feeling about different trains of subconscious processes, involving both emotions and thoughts. Sometimes it extends to over-reflection that loses hold on some concrete issue and becomes circular, sometimes it helps to steer thinking and general behaviour into a desired direction. I can not remember having said impressions before falling ill and recovering. Thinking about these abilities gives me the impression that highly automated and reinforced sub-conscious routines might not be easily changeable to the more effective or efficient by themselves, but they might be integrated into some higher-order routines, changing their eventual output. These could be more and more automated themselves, thereby achieving an increase in fluid intelligence.