choice

i thought a bit about changing what you want and concluded it probably is not actually that difficult: 

• i lived with people who cared about doing personal projects for two months in truchas, and ended up caring about side projects, despite never having done any before; i still care about this today
• at mit last year i was surrounded by people who cared about getting tech internships, and i unfortunately ended up caring strongly about finding internships for a few months. this wasn’t a kind of caring that died out on its own either; it continued until i was forcibly pulled out of it by the sparc community while helping run sparc last summer. i developed a similar care for double majoring at around the same time, and didn’t figure out how to let go of that until living in truchas
• at almost every summer program attended by me or one of my friends, whether it was about math or piano or basketball, being surrounded by people interested in the program made each person more motivated to do the thing the program was centered on
• this is also why the complaint that universities brainwash young people into becoming liberal is mostly accurate on a functional level. what the conservatives get wrong about this is how it’s done — they often think institutional elites are feeding a specific agenda of liberal facts and opinions to students, when in my opinion what we’re really learning is more along the lines of new things to care about than new knowledge or stances

the implication here being that if you want to care more about something you can just continuously surround yourself with people who care about the thing and this will probably work most of the time, which is reassuring and completely expected, but also surprising and terrifying because it means you need to regularly ask yourself what your current circles are telling you to care about

and you could attribute this to me not having a strong sense of self or direction, but i don’t really think that’s the case, and there are beliefs i’m more strongly tethered to. i’ve more or less always cared about introspection and trying to understand other people and not being wrong and not being mean; i’m not sure if any environment has been able to change that, or if any environment ever will. so i guess you could say my core values are relatively stable, but everything else is fairly fluid with respect to setting

none of this is new; the concepts of echo chambers and groupthink have been around for a long time. regardless, this is interesting for me because it’s difficult to directly control what i want, but much easier to control setting: i can stay home and tell myself every day that i care about the environment and want to eat less meat, and i can educate myself on animal cruelty and the like, but it will take a while to truly internalize these facts and until i do so every meal will still be a struggle against temptation. or i could just commit once to living with avid vegetarians for a few months, and even if they were okay with me cooking meat in the same house as them i’m confident that by the end of those few months i’d be a vegetarian too

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i’m becoming more cognisant of other areas in which this kind of upstream action is relevant. sometimes i’ll enter periods where i start talking to or texting a friend much more than i’m used to, and i can accurately make a forecast like if we keep up this level of communication for another few weeks i’m probably going to end up having a crush on them. and it’s much harder to remove yourself from someone after you start liking them so now i have a choice between distancing myself from them while it’s easy, or letting myself continue anyway and seeing what happens. a similar pattern occurs for friends and entertainment streams in place of crushes

which isn’t much of a revelation, in that obviously you have a greater chance of liking someone if you spend more time with them, but recognizing these things as they happen to you is much more difficult than identifying them in hindsight. i think it’s really cool that i can sometimes notice when i’m about to encounter something that will alter my behavior significantly and then act accordingly in the present, since this is a type of awareness i literally didn’t have for the first nineteen years of my life. most of the time i’ll end up not taking any action anyway and just let everything play out normally because i believe in only using intervention sparingly, but even in those scenarios it’s nice to feel like i actually understand what is happening to me

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most of my friends who care strongly about physical fitness or sociability or personal happiness are significantly more fit or popular or happy than me. of course you’d expect to typically do better in any metric after prioritizing it, so this isn’t surprising. but what it means is that there has always been a clear avenue to potentially becoming much happier: surround myself with people who care about being happy, internalize and import that care into my own life, and just let that run its course. this generally isn’t an issue because i’m usually very upbeat anyway, but when i do descend into depressive thought spirals i wonder: if this roadmap exists and i genuinely believe it’ll work (which i do), why haven’t i taken it yet?

one of my roommates suggested that there are conversions which are much easier to do in one direction than the other, like, they think it’s inherently easier to stop caring about productivity than to start, because productivity is so difficult. this makes a lot of sense for things that are genuinely very addicting for your mind eg. chocolate or social media, but in general i don’t think it actually aligns with my experiences, eg. caring about side projects is fairly similar to caring about productivity but i was able to make the transition fairly seamlessly, and at this point it feels like a lot would need to happen for me to let go of thinking about projects

if you believe what i said about the extent to which environment impacts belief, then maybe a clearer explanation is this: my brain (in the absence of mental health conditions) doesn’t actually default towards unproductivity, and the real reason letting go of productivity is easier than caring about it is that it is much easier to enter communities where productivity isn’t a shared value than communities where it is. this is true because the set of people who truly care about being productive isn’t that large, and because communities formed by people from that set probably have a more selective filter for entry

i suppose this means that one reason for caring about a thing which isn’t personal happiness is that you can convert to caring about happiness literally anytime (since people who want to be happy are everywhere), whereas if you care deeply about the future of agriculture or something then after switching to caring about happiness for a few years you might literally be unable to re-enter futuristic-agriculture-focused communities. but this is also a pretty dumb argument — taken to the logical extreme, it implies you should always find the most exclusive communities accessible to you and stay in those to maintain maximal optionality, which is obviously a stupid way to make decisions

so i’m not really sure how to justify what i care about. i’ve primarily been feeling sad and lonely lately, and people have suggested i should find friends who are more invested in my well-being or try seeing a therapist or live with people who know me well, and they are all good suggestions that i appreciate the value of, but for now i am not following any of them. and like i said i don’t know if there is a sound rationale for this, other than that i simply don’t feel ready yet and want some more time to figure out what i really want. for now i am satisfied with the knowledge that i can choose any of these options or make the appropriate environmental changes whenever i need to, and i trust that these choices can alter my life in meaningful ways, once i am ready for them