Readit NewsWe've created these unhealthy gardens where young people feel safe, removing any reason for them to engage in the real world. They don't thrive in these places, they slowly withdraw.
Missing your ex and lying around depressed in bed is less unhealthy than getting into the car and sitting outside their house.
Do you think it is healthy behavior to go to a parking lot at 0900 every day and do nothing because you mentally cannot face the idea of not going to an office?
Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
Not to demean your experience, but for me (5+ years now of daily grind for one purpose) that statement is very VERY real.
My thinking is - it's just another one of the struggles of doing real meaningful change - there's recurring, long and arduous timespans where no observable/exciting results manifest and one has to trudge forward.
If you know how to ease THAT part, please share (I'm begging you lol).
Your work may have coherence and purpose, but if it doesn’t have significance then it isn’t the source of meaning you thought it was.
I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.
Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.
That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.
The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.
You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?
I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.
It’s like saying we shouldn’t call immigrants “aliens” because that conjures images of space. Where do you think the term comes from?
If you didn't know the word "duck", you could still see the duck, hunt the duck, use the ducks feather's for your bedding and eat the duck's meat. You would know it could fly and swim without having to know what either of those actions were called.
The LLM "sees" a thing, identifies it as a "duck", and then depends on a single modal LLM to tell it anything about ducks.
You have said that 'feeling safe' is 'unhealthy' because it's not 'real'. But constantly feeling and being unsafe, even if it is warranted by circumstance, is worse in every way.
We, as a society, do not support the agency to children to escape horrific circumstances. These online communities are a stop-gap against this active failure.
Ideally, they wouldn't need to escape at all, but that's not the conversation we're having.
The online communities in question do more damage than good. They encourage isolation and spread social contagion.
We should do more as a society, absolutely! But these places are not “stop gaps” because they’re NOT helping.