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.
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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.
Replying to
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.