this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Everett True Comics
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A place to appreciate the twentieth century comic character Everett True of "The Outbursts of Everett True." Feel free to check out the sticky.
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I generally agree with what you're saying, the one part where we differ is when earlier you said:
which makes it sound pretty easy. To use your example, people do get emotionally invested in watching sports games and doing so can have several healthy effects (e.g. socialization). To get those healthy effects while remaining unattached through right thinking takes conscious work.
that's like saying drawing or playing the violin is hard.
if you've never done then before, drawing or playing the violin is hard, but after you practice for a while, in any capacity, a lot of the movements become natural or second nature and practicing becomes more comfortable.
and you are making progress the whole time
I don't know if I'd say the common sportsfan attachments are healthy by themselves, socialization certainly is, and i think it's okay to emotionally invest in anything, even sports, if you're aware you're doing it.
it's when you're allowing yourself to be affected and to automatically interact with the world based on an affected state that's the problem.
reaching without awareness based on attachment/expectations is sort of like someone who's never driven a car letting a self-driving vehicle take you out for a spin.
the car will mostly go along with the traffic around you, but you have no way of steering or pushing the brakes yourself,are not actually in control of your destination, and if you get into any real trouble you won't know what to do, can't turn on the hazards and might end up causing an accident.
back to reality, might end up getting in a fight over a basketball game that has absolutely nothing to do with you other than your human tendency to attach meaning to a pattern, real or imagined.
emotions aren't an enemy or wrong; they are powerful and should be understood and regulated so that you can spend your time living rather than being internally tossed around in the sea of your bodies' autonomic reactions and buried under the weight of repetitive assumption.
mistaking habitual passion for conscious action.
Right, the language we were using was "a lot of work." As you say, "after you practice for a while" drawing or violin playing become second nature. But that practicing is a lot of work.
Similarly, meditation and CBT techniques to control attachment are remarkably simple, but you have to practice them regularly which is a lot of work.
i missed where you said practicing awareness or meditation or cbt is "a lot of work" earlier; i was still responding to the original topic and your comments above.
i said "...avoiding attachment, which does sound like a lot of work, but I don’t think it is."
and you said you differed because it isn't easy to avoid having natural emotional reactions, which is a different topic than acting on manufactured attachment.
Although having natural emotional reactions is common and healthy, it is different from acting out on manufactured emotions driven from expectations.
as you say, practices like cbt "are remarkably simple".
simple things are not always easy(lifting weights), but the original topic of avoiding acting on manufactured attachment and its derivative "avoiding attachments based on expectation" are frank, momentary acknowledgments that are simple and easy, but may be unfamiliar.
chopping down a tree by hand is simple and "a lot of work" each time. Avoiding acting on manufactured attachment is simple and easy.
being aware of your emotions doesn't mean not having emotions at all, which is where you seem caught up, it means paying attention to where your reactions are coming from.
are your emotions the result of external input that personally affects you, or from expectations of what you've internally decided the external world should be like?
if you are unsure, you can safely err on the side of avoiding an outburst.
also, if not lashing out seems like it should be "a lot of work" and thinking about not lashing out as a hard-won achievement helps one to not lash out, that's fine too, although I'd be wary of the feedback loop of imagining not doing something being a lot of work.
Use your expectations to your advantage.