(no subject)

[lhexa]

Another reposted comment, this time a response to this entry by Krinn.

I don't think I can offer anything better than my own experiences, but hopefully you will find some use in them. Please pardon me if I presume more background information than you actually have.

If [some people are] nice as long as things are going well, but under even the slightest stress they turn into hideous people, well, they're not nice.

This matter has actually caused me some worry in the past, because in some ways (particularly financially) I simply have not faced hardship, and in some situations (bouts of insanity) I know that I am a worse person. However, those periods of insanity may be useful in that they show that I do have an ethical center that remains unchanged during extreme emotions or uncontrolled delusions -- put briefly, when insane I am neither dangerous nor mean, even if my ability to interact with others in a reasonable fashion disappears. My hope is that dealing with such states is the same as dealing with all other moods (learning to accommodate, counterbalance and use them), and the difference lies in how very far removed the moods are from my normal set.

I've also been through long enough and severe enough periods of depression to know that my standards of reacting to others survive those periods, but also that my ability to go out of my way to help others disappears. So if I want to have a positive impact on the world around me, rather than simply dealing with the moral quandaries that happen to fall into my lap, I have an obligation to maintain myself emotionally.

Unluckily, I have never experienced severe financial hardship, and may never know whether I would be able to withstand that. The closest I can come is to keep in mind Thoreau's exhortation, "Cultivate poverty like a delicate herb." But doing so proves nothing.

I know what the right thing to do is, and I consistently fail to do it.

That's a fairly big problem for me, as well, but one where I have made steady (if slow) progress since realizing it some six years ago. That struggle is far from over, naturally. As far as I can tell from working on myself, methods for dealing with apathy can all be described as methods of self-control and self-knowledge, and there are benefits and disadvantages to each.

In a method of self-control, one doesn't worry about what causes the internal resistance to action; instead, one layers other tendencies atop it, which counteract that resistance. One example: establishing new habits for oneself. Another: structuring one's life, say by organizing it around a schedule or by organizing it around other people. The advantages of these methods are that they are relatively fast (you could establish a new habit in a few months), and that they can be very effective. The downside is that each method of self-control comes at some fixed, recurring cost -- the block of time lost each day to a habit, the effort in maintaining a schedule, or the inability to act without the company of friends, say.

In a matter of self-knowledge, counteracting apathy takes second place to understanding it, with the expectation that said understanding will someday allow you to overcome it. Here you can't name discrete methods as easily as in self-control, but some examples are questioning oneself regularly, being open to unusual experiences and thoughts, and being engaged critically by others. The advantage: a gain made through knowledge does not require a recurrent cost. The disadvantage: self-knowledge takes a very long time. I'd roughly say that what can be accomplished by self-knowledge in a decade can be accomplished by self-control in half a year.

It may be obvious that I heavily prefer the latter, though I hope I have not put too much bias into my words. Most of my attempts to instate new, better habits fall apart quickly, and I find the idea of structuring my time to be repellent. On the other hand, nowadays whenever I am doing something mindlessly I instinctively ask myself, "What am I doing?", which often allows me to break the habit and do something better. I've learned how to focus on long-term goals and meet them well, but I still don't know how to effectively react to short-term needs that arise and can be resolved quickly. While very much committed to my path, I can't recommend it without qualifications.

I think most people can mix methods of those two types, but devoting oneself fully to one or the other would probably preclude its counterpart. In knowing yourself you question yourself and undermine your motives in controlling yourself, and in controlling yourself you complicate yourself.