Notes on normality and insanity
Before I started dating my first boyfriend, there were lots of outside-view, externally verifiable, socially sanctioned reasons not to date him. When we met, he was 21 and experienced while I was 17 and had never dated anyone; my friends all thought he was bad; he had anger issues; he had a history of stalking and physically abusing exes. I had inside-view reasons why this was okay (it was only once, and he felt reeeeeally bad about it …) and so I dated him anyway.
The actual relationship worked out much better than you’d expect. We dated for less than two months before he broke up with me, and it was basically just fine. (He said some hurtful things to me on occasion, and cheated on me, but I wouldn’t characterize the relationship as abusive.)
The bad part wasn’t the relationship. The bad part was, after it was all over, I had no idea why I had done it. March 2014!me couldn’t identify with November 2013!me at all, and I still can’t.
The feeling of meaning in my life comes from caring about my past and future experiences, and continuing to exist, and the shape of my life as a whole. To the extent that I value these things, it’s because I experience some amount of continuity of identity. So the idea of ever having been November 2013!me, or of being her again, is scary! It’s scary in the exact same way as being dead!
So like, I understand that society is wrong about a lot of things. We should be able to improve on it, and we almost have to improve on it if we want to do anything good ever.
What I don’t understand is, without externally verifiable confirmation that the things you’re doing are reasonable, how do you know that you’re not just insane?
I started this post by talking about relationships, but I think this actually applies to pretty much everything in my life. Everything I do, unless it’s something my family and all my friends and a panel of normal people would agree is reasonable, I worry that it’s fundamentally bad in some mind-altering way that makes it impossible for me to see its badness. I do this with guys I like, companies I work at, books I read, charities I donate to, events I attend, ideas I believe–you get it. Which isn’t to say I don’t do weird or socially disapproved-of things–I do, in literally all those categories!–but they are really, deeply, scary.
Having written this, part of me is thinking, “Okay, cool, you’ve identified the problem. Things don’t have some fundamental property of badness–ideas can be wrong, and charities can be ineffective, and relationships can be unhealthy, but that’s okay. Maximizing EV means risking that you’ll make mistakes and those things will happen sometimes. What you need to do is get your current self and November 2013 self in a room to talk. Have them feel their feelings and package them up and send them back and forth. Get them to empathize with each other and truly understand each other, and maybe you can forge an identity that’s strong enough to withstand mistakes and changing your mind about stuff.”
and another part of me is like “… dude that sounds insane”