> I’m no closer to anything resembling inner peace. I find I’ve grown to despise large swaths of the only thing I’ve ever been able to earn reliable income from. I tire of walking a path that has seemingly shifted beneath my feet to point toward a destination I no longer recognize. I’m embarrassed by the jerk my Younger Self used to be, and simultaneously ashamed of the energy I lost as I matured. I don’t really want to do most of what I have to do, while feeling a deep unsated need to achieve something that I have neither the stamina nor the freedom to pursue. At some point I’m going to reach down deep into the well of ambition to discover there ain’t nothing there to pull out anymore. And then?
What advice does one give when confronted with this?
The path didn't shift beneath your feet. You finally learned how to see in the dark, and realized you'd been walking in circles around a grave you dug for someone who was never real to begin with. What you're really mourning is the death of who you thought you had to be, and what feels like emptiness is actually the first honest space you've ever had to discover what you might want to become.
Evidently that's known to psychoanalysis as the "idealized image". That's another way to refer to what I'd call "the sum of one's conditioning", i.e. the interplay of automatic reactions to outside stimuli that usually takes up so much of your waking hours, that begin to habitually mistake it for yourself. Moreover that's how everyone else does it, innit?
Calling it "idealized image" downplays the mechanistic and implies the inauthentic - these judgments differ, see below. Nonetheless the resulting state of mind is the same: you're stuck somewhere being someone you don't truly know how to be - and it's been so taxing for so long that you've started to forget why exactly you're there in the first place.
It's a relatable sentiment. Funny how this surfaced today, after a few other materials inducing delusion of reference on HN frontpage. (I don't remember anyone ever saying how personalized HN's recommender is, but if there's places on the Net where it pays for the recommender to be subtle, here's one.)
As this sort of habituation is commonplace, it seems like not long after the stage where different authors introduced varying ontologies of the same alienatory phenomenon, the 20th century psychology community might've suffered something of a schism on the matter of whether it's right for the state of dedicating 100%+ of one's life energies to the "idealized image" to be considered "normal".
As a result, the currents in psychological/philosophical/humanistic inquiry most able to produce "technical" insights, i.e. ones which can be genuinely and reliably useful to an introspective person without necessitating the services of a care facilitator, remain underdeveloped and walled off. (You're in for a ride if you look into those, it's no coincidence you find em piecemeal in the oeuvre of a certain sort of literary carny barker.)
Anyway, some of them say that as you find ways to let go of conditioned reactive patterns, that results in something like more headspace freed up for your actual volition. Let's see how that one goes then. What I can add is that unconditioning oneself is done by experiencing unhabitual stimuli. If you're even a moderately routine-based sort of person you can drill yourself into a sort of "RNG watchdog" habit. At a random minute of every hour begin to breate manually, and proceed from there.
What advice does one give when confronted with this?