I think you’re saying that you know the “other types of hedonism” don’t work. And when they stop working then you go back to actualism.
I think this is really just a matter of looking a few steps ahead. Do you play chess? It’s like if you move your queen and she gets captured the next turn - you didn’t look one move ahead. So you learn not to do that. But now you make a better move instead but then you find a series of forced moves happens where you lose the queen anyway. This happened cause you didn’t look say 4 moves ahead.
But eventually you learn to recognize the patterns and you stop making the moves that hang the queen in 4 moves. They used to initially look good (oo look I threaten his king or I can take the knight) but then you see it doesn’t work (darn I lost the queen again). So you just do a different move instead because the other way doesn’t work.
I think actualism is literally the same. You just see the pattern , know where it goes , so you do something else instead .
One might say its “deeply ingrained” to make the bad move that hangs the queen in 4 moves. It may very well be - but if you want to stop hanging the queen you have to stop making those moves haha.
Nice! This way of looking at it really clicks for me because this is exactly what I do when I am grappling. It’s pattern recognition which gets extremely nuanced to the point where I am always looking to be a few steps ahead of the opponent. The years of training are to get one to a point where this is automatic and then some pretty cool things happen. I’ve always seen a lot of parallels with my grappling and actualism weirdly enough haha.
Hehe nice. I’ve come to conclude it’s the same with any skill anyone builds. There are parallels because the general framework of problem solving and understanding is the same whether it’s chess, cooking, programming, drumming, grappling, making coffee, rock climbing or actualism. It’s just how experience works! Anything that one can get better at works the same way. And it’s always exponential (compare advanced to beginner in all these), although some skills are much “shallower” (like there’s only so much to learn before you basically know it all).
Yes but also I go back to actualism when that current time awareness kicks in, so it is not exclusively only when hedonism is not working.
I didn’t learn to play chess until an adult, the same friend who introduced me to AF and programming also tried to teach me this. I always struggled with this type of thinking ahead. People are always surprised I am terrible at chess. I am good at thinking laterally, creatively and outside the box but I have always struggled with this sort of future projection type thinking.
Yes, I have moments of lucidity and awareness and spot that pattern. However, much of my habits have formed on a sort of auto pilot mode and there is a constant tension between awareness via HAIETMOBA and these automatic habits. Though there is some measurable improvements regarding this, if I was to measure how many times I slip into this mode of operation it is still definitely less than say 2017 before I started getting better from my last depression/anxiety relapse.
I think I have never been very good at this type of pattern recognition. A personal deficit maybe that I need to work and improve. But as I said there has definitely been improvement.
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