dullbananas

Different things in your mind can care about different sets of things. An important example is your fear being disconnected from your inner state and your long term success. Harmony of these things is how to be free.

Bae: before anyone else

Baebos: before anyone else but our Savior

I should not have tried to directly resist feelings, but another thing I did which is good is lightly trying to make a tiny positive feeling become huge, which can do things like shifting focus and indirectly resisting exclusive attention. The only thing I can think of at the moment where I should advise resistance is if you feel negatively about someone being with someone else.

Proper use of control over feelings will be in the Pansystellar Architecture for sure.

Edit: also gotta stay away from lust

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I recently started a document called "what I like". It's mostly things from observations, imagination, and values.

Each section, and a small sample of the items for each one:

• Mandatory: wants to have children and raise them Catholic
• Likely necessary: can comfort our children, doesn't complain about people in a way that needs to not happen in my relationship
• Love languages: she doesn't rely too much on giving me gifts
• Traits or actions that have made me feel something or have interested me after I noticed them: confident passionate speaking in presentations and debates, shows laughter or excitement in response to something I do or make, often has big smile, silently waving to me, welcoming towards me, staying in pew to pray when others aren't, being curious about me
• Other signs of good match for me in particular (mostly imagination of what complementarity would look like): seeks my thoughts, explains things in my mind that I can't explain, inspires me to pursue something, our humor fits together and we enjoy each other's humor
• Things that should be acted on in a big and complementary way: imagination, curiosity, excellencism
• Things we should be able to enjoy together: creativity
• Misc.

Now I separately write about some people with a few other specific observations. For example, in the document about the girl I've likely been most obsessed with in terms of personality (I was prematurely committed to someone else and/or in denial until it was too late), I included how she laughed when I said this joke about her project "Pretty Places by _, more like Porta Potties by _" (honestly I included this one so she knows this is about her if she sees this post) and memories of her speaking with perfect confidence (that time in religion class when she said something about keeping legs closed might be my favorite). I could have avoided regret by quickly paying more attention to my vague feeling about her (partly with what this post is about) and trying more to have fun.

Thinking and writing about this stuff will probably help with having a more certain and accurately scaled perception, resisting the confirmation bias caused by the appeal of the idea that my search for someone good enough for me is easy or already finished.

To be clear, this is not the entire process of figuring out what to look for. These lists are mostly unfiltered, except I don't feel like writing about most of my physical attraction mostly because that would be boring. The whole thing should not be used as a checklist, and it should keep on evolving. It is an additional input to intuition.

My search for my future wife might benefit from also writing about platonic friends.

This kind of activity will likely be part of the Pansystellar Architecture.

I often felt attracted to her from September 2023 to March 2024. I had a crush on her at least 2 times. We sat at the same table in a class from January 24 to March 5.

On February 5, with a simple mindset against regret and a growing repulsion towards postponing brave actions, when she went to her desk, I noticed some strength and ability in me, I quickly took advantage of it, and I successfully said "hi, [girl 2]". In response, she said "hi". Then the perceived difficulty of doing this seemed a little funny to me. Earlier that day, during lunch, I went to confession for the first time in about 9 months, which was a somewhat nervewracking experience that might have given me strength.

I have a note that was last edited on February 13. It's mostly about when I wanted to read a short story I made to the people at my table in the class (just my crush and 3 other girls) but did not do it. Here's some of what I told myself in it (edited a lot):

• I didn't do it because I forgot how good and euphoric it would be for me.
• I did sabotage.
• I did pull out the story, so I'm halfway there. I will do the whole thing next time, including the second half which will be more peaceful than self-induced regret and stolen fun. (I actually did not do it)
• Isolating myself from those people is a bad action with bad consequences for me.
• I should see those people as friends.
• With repulsion, I can become unable to choose sabatoge.

On February 27, I had the idea of saying "[girl 2], I like your hair". I then considered the possibility of this becoming a reality. Considering this possibility required me to be a little crazy because I still had a lot of social anxiety. I decided that I wanted to do it the next day. The next day, I randomly woke up 60-90 minutes earlier than usual (after having a dream where I reunited with my rabbit who was dead in real life, which suggests that I had deep optimism in my mind) and had thoughts that helped me find strength, including but not limited to:

• This is exercise. Discomfort when doing this has the same meaning and acceptability as when weightlifting.
• God intends it. He's suspiciously filling my mind with preparation. (I'm not completely sure about this, but it's very likely)
• I have a history of overestimating regret and not actually feeling much of it after doing something, like the one time I said hi at the wrong moment and felt almost no regret. But I have kinda regretted not doing some things.
• I heard the compliment over and over again in my head, which is the only reason it sometimes sounds weird to me.
• Doing this is ordinary.

I made an effort to remember these things. I successfully did the thing. It probably got rid of at least half of my social anxiety. The girl was silent, then she whispered a bunch of things into another girl's ear. I really noticed the secrecy. She was likely talking about my interactions. I vaguely remember that I might have very faintly heard what I said, but it was almost silent. They laughed. I was a little entertained, not embarrassed. My biggest regret in this situation is not saying something about the whispering for fun.

There's a least one time where during first period, which was mostly just time available for doing things like homwork, I sat and did nothing, with the intention of conserving energy so I can be brave enough to do one of the interactions with this girl later in the day. I don't know how much difference it made. It might have worked through the placebo effect.

The firecracker in this meme reminds me of my interactions with this girl: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/0DvRrdJpxQ

Key ideas:

• Be very skeptical of (and hopefully identify) the thing in your head that tells you to wait, and think of waiting as a risky action.
• Be very skeptical of the division between fantasy and what you are capable of in real life.
• Be very skeptical of the feeling that a planned action is weird.
• Try to prevent yourself from forgetting at the last minute why you should not doubt your decision to do something.
• Regret of not doing something is the result of your own choice.
• Do not avoid discomfort. If it happens, it's a signal of growth, not danger.
• Action is usually less risky than lack of action.

x: How unique the thing in me is

y: How uniquely well the thing in the other person fits the thing in me (this is probably more strongly sensed emotionally)

Examples:

• The existence of my attraction to smart girls: x is low, y is how smart
• My sense of humor: x is high, y depends on how well our humor fits together and how much the other person enjoys my humor

If there's nothing with both high x and high y for a person, then you need to continue focusing on exploration if you're looking for a good match (definitely when looking for future spouse, and maybe some cases of being unsatisfied with platonic friends)

Things with low x can be nice to have. It seems like emotion alone is what can be used for figuring out how they should affect decisions, but I would be interested in something better than emotion alone for this if the resulting process is improved for some people. I think emotion can't be completely removed from this.

I'm thinking out loud a lot with this one

To look for complementarity, seek interactions as if they are discoveries of new land. A good goal when there's a group of people (such as the girls at your school) is the "exploration goal": to learn about everyone and discover the highest level of complementarity possible.

If you have the long term goal of finding and dating a person that would be good to marry if that person exists in the group, then focusing on that is much worse in every way than focusing on the exploration goal, especially in complexity.

Edit: should have said "keep on discovering a higher level of complementarity" instead of "learn about everyone and discover the highest level of complementarity possible"

1. Things about the person that are legitimately unique and special to you
2. Things that affect how much you know or infer about the person, such as how much you interact with or think about the person

Being aware of the second factor could help you try to know more people and reduce the chance of hallucinated differentness or specialness of people.

I did not think about this at all before today.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24360964

I started having a crush on her in the 2021-2022 school year. In August 2023, she sat next to me in math class. I began to be interested in the whole person, not just her body. Then my belief that I don't want relationships, marriage, and parenthood slowly went away, for reasons that might be out of scope for this project.

I kept on wanting to say "Hi, [girl 1]" next time she approaches the desk at the beginning of class, but I never did that. Each time she came, I gave up. I vaguely remember having a fear of how people would think of the motive or something like that. I prioritized comfort and others' perception of me too much. This will likely be represented as a heavy filter that I got rid of and is intentionally excluded in the Pansystellar Architecture.

Edit: There's stuff I forgot to mention.

• I felt a lot of regret and frustration after each time I chose to be silent. I felt so distant from happiness. This should be treated the same as any other danger. And it should be the one that's fled from. I have another experience that I would pick over this one despite the other experience being more nauseating and unfamiliar. I will describe that experience later.
• Weeks later, we unexpectedly had to change seats, and the girl was now at a different table. I felt so much regret, and I saw the problem of being slow. The way I see opportunities began to change.