feelings are for doing stuff?

on detachment, overanalysis, etc

the past month has been the best month of 2025! i unironically believe this is due to the stroke scare detailed in my previous post. life feels like it has higher stakes, and whenever anything seems too low-stakes i either quit or intentionally dial up the temperature

one (very coarse) metric i use to determine if i’m spending time in good ways is to ask myself if succeeding at the thing i’m spending time on would feel life-changing along some dimension i care about? and if the answer is no, success wouldn’t feel that different, the options are either 1) stop spending time on that thing 2) be more ambitious / reimagine the scope of the thing / find the best possible version of it. like, this dance class feels like it’s no longer leading to changes in my physical awareness → i need to be in a higher-intensity environment or my social interactions feel too frictionless right now → i need to hang out with people in less chill ways (working on stuff together, digging into and resolving conflicts, etc)

there are currently four ongoing endeavors that all feel potentially life-changing if they go well (they roughly fall into these categories: research, art, social, health). it feels great to have concrete goals that i actually care about! unfortunately this was not true for most of the last six months

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i’ve been thinking about the importance of deeply wanting things. to this day it’s the only condition i’ve found which consistently leads to growth? new environments and friends are great too, but i’ve been in situations where i had both of those and didn’t change much because i didn’t want anything. crushes are really useful because they can provide clear signalling about desires that most people otherwise wouldn’t realize they had

i spent too much time in college trying to be detached / zen / stoic before concluding it was simply not the right approach to life if you care about growth. desires come with a lot of potentially destructive feelings - anxiety, disappointment, grief, and so on - and i think many people (eg. me 3 years ago) don’t have the tools to properly deal with those feelings so they turn to detachment to avoid pain? but you could also simply keep your desires and develop better emotional tools

more generally i think Feelings Are For Doing Stuff, by which i mean that feelings point you towards actions you should take to change your life. unfortunately it’s easy to lose sight of the “taking action” part and instead focus on Experiencing Better Feelings in a way that doesn’t actually acknowledge the changes you could’ve made. many strategies for avoiding pain fall under this category for me - like, the pain might’ve been telling you something extremely useful and subtle but instead of figuring out what that was you just disengaged from it

i feel similarly about many actions that try to manufacture positive emotion out of nothing? the most obvious example is drugs like heroin. some other examples include using “authentic relating events” to feel connection without having a solid basis for it, playing games solely to experience excitement, thinking very hard about your feelings until you’ve convinced yourself that you’re happy. this is basically goodhart’s law for emotional state - feelings are helpful indicators of reality, but only until you start optimizing them to the exclusion of everything else

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most of my friends know that i’m a big proponent of the enneagram personality test. like many personality tests, it’s useful as a classification tool when applied properly. however, what really elevates enneagrams is that it provides explanations of each type’s fears / weaknesses / growth directions which i’ve found to be extremely accurate in practice

for instance, i’m type 4, which is described as: self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. they are emotionally honest, creative, and personal, but can also be moody and self-conscious… typically have problems with melancholy, self-indulgence, and self-pity… can look at their motives, contradictions, and emotional conflicts without denying or whitewashing them… willing to reveal highly personal things because they are determined to understand the truth of their experience… makes it easier for them to process painful experiences that might overwhelm other types

and my core problem is correctly identified as: do not pay so much attention to your feelings; they are not a true source of support… one of the most important mistakes Fours make is to equate themselves with their feelings. the fallacy is that to understand themselves they must understand their feelings, particularly their negative ones, before acting

over the last few years i became much more emotionally aware. unlocking new parts of my mind felt so satisfying that i assumed exploring my inner world must be the most important thing in life? but at some point that exploration began to feel oddly stagnant and i realized oh, it’s time to get back to doing stuff