This year so far summarized: a slow dive into unfamiliar waters; shortness of breath, return to land, readying for another dive.
Conversation
I can't really recognize too much of my old motivational structure anymore, but there's a heaviness to old habits that's difficult to shed.
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Almost all progress made is defined more by what disappears than by what appears again.
Once you're working with a certain amount of baggage, progress looks like regression. You need to make room for things, because otherwise they just won't fit at all.
Replying to
In a sense, the difference between degeneration and exaltation is mostly in how we choose to label it.
An addict disintegrating their life and someone making a new identity that suits them better look much the same, in terms of how they treat their old goals and priorities.
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Value judgements shape how you see this, but you'll notice that friends & family often don't like *any* kind of change.
I tend to think this is fair enough: you are destroying something old to make room for something new. People have attachments to that old thing.
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The SV-style life optimization very quickly hits a point of diminishing returns: you can't improve additively, forever, unconditionally.
Often the worst parts of someone's identity are conditional to their better sides. Things are not inherently detached from each other.
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You can improve certain things, because certain things are almost exclusively useful/moral/ethical or the inverse of those, but many things can't be improved at all: you can alter the polarities, nothing more.
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Art illustrates this perhaps better than any other area:
Great artists use negative space, constantly. What is hidden can be as important as what is shown.