At the beginning of this article and my first thought was how much my back hurts sitting in an office chair all day. But it’s not just all day, I have had a few weeks of relative laziness, opting to placate my brain at the expense of my body. I’ve been home (UK) one month today, but was previously sleeping rough (in a warmer climate, having energy as soon as I woke up, in many bizarre ways “healthier” than my stasis here in a somewhat dingy council house). I was initially glad to be home, having the mental space to stop worrying about guarding my possessions, wondering where to get food (although I was only typically destitute for a few days at a time).
The suffering I would directly attribute to sleeping outside per-se was surprisingly minimal, or at least, in many ways what you wouldn’t expect—stuff like the stiffness of benches, feet-moisture-versus-cold-management, baggage-weight-utility-tradeoffs (having a tent is nice, but is heavy; likewise sleeping cloth is cumbersome). Prior to this I had slept outside maybe a dozen times, about one week contiguously, and I had undertaken a week-long fast (separately) - all experiences which, at the times, were hard, but became easier, while also as expected eroding something indescribable but maybe alike to “will”.
What suffering seems to train is an ability to ignore the valence of some part of your system, for example extreme cold or hunger. But when these things are smoothed over larger periods of time, I am unsure how to disentangle or enumerate the physical-pain of attachment to e.g. comfort or calories (two very different things to be fair) versus the psychological-pain of being powerless to dispel or ameliorate some unwanted sensation. The exertion of will required to perform this masking of experience is more extraordinary to me, while also phenomenologically inaccessible in the detail it was before, and there is a kind of despondence that accrues from this, which may just be the atrophy of learned habits and personality under unstable conditions. I return to homefulness even less sure how to manage altruistic trades.
I definitely appreciate the wisdom of things like GiveDirectly now because the subjective desperation of having nothing made me terrible with money, as well as the temporary empathy boost making me more generous. Newfound respect for those who do give, I think I basically accord with your end message there. Suffering is not poetic. At best you may have some philosophical or cosmic structure to impose on it, with which you are able to manage it, as if a sport or meditation.
I may be over-generalising / projecting this from inside of a traumatic experience, but I now basically understand schizophrenia as one result of an erstwhile domesticated personality confronted with the abyss of suffering stretching into the remainder of its life—to be more like a baby than anything agentic. This seems far more catastrophic than any physical pain. Negotiating the boundaries of my altruism amidst potentially unlimited demands on it led to some fracturing of my sense of self, and more than suffering it may take some time recalibrating interpersonal trust. Partly why I’m so fervently YIMBY as opposed to classic EA causes—food at least can be divided arbitrarily while preserving some vague pretense of capitalist autonomy, but shelter is discrete and entangled with protection of your self and extended property.
At the beginning of this article and my first thought was how much my back hurts sitting in an office chair all day. But it’s not just all day, I have had a few weeks of relative laziness, opting to placate my brain at the expense of my body. I’ve been home (UK) one month today, but was previously sleeping rough (in a warmer climate, having energy as soon as I woke up, in many bizarre ways “healthier” than my stasis here in a somewhat dingy council house). I was initially glad to be home, having the mental space to stop worrying about guarding my possessions, wondering where to get food (although I was only typically destitute for a few days at a time).
The suffering I would directly attribute to sleeping outside per-se was surprisingly minimal, or at least, in many ways what you wouldn’t expect—stuff like the stiffness of benches, feet-moisture-versus-cold-management, baggage-weight-utility-tradeoffs (having a tent is nice, but is heavy; likewise sleeping cloth is cumbersome). Prior to this I had slept outside maybe a dozen times, about one week contiguously, and I had undertaken a week-long fast (separately) - all experiences which, at the times, were hard, but became easier, while also as expected eroding something indescribable but maybe alike to “will”.
What suffering seems to train is an ability to ignore the valence of some part of your system, for example extreme cold or hunger. But when these things are smoothed over larger periods of time, I am unsure how to disentangle or enumerate the physical-pain of attachment to e.g. comfort or calories (two very different things to be fair) versus the psychological-pain of being powerless to dispel or ameliorate some unwanted sensation. The exertion of will required to perform this masking of experience is more extraordinary to me, while also phenomenologically inaccessible in the detail it was before, and there is a kind of despondence that accrues from this, which may just be the atrophy of learned habits and personality under unstable conditions. I return to homefulness even less sure how to manage altruistic trades.
I definitely appreciate the wisdom of things like GiveDirectly now because the subjective desperation of having nothing made me terrible with money, as well as the temporary empathy boost making me more generous. Newfound respect for those who do give, I think I basically accord with your end message there. Suffering is not poetic. At best you may have some philosophical or cosmic structure to impose on it, with which you are able to manage it, as if a sport or meditation.
I may be over-generalising / projecting this from inside of a traumatic experience, but I now basically understand schizophrenia as one result of an erstwhile domesticated personality confronted with the abyss of suffering stretching into the remainder of its life—to be more like a baby than anything agentic. This seems far more catastrophic than any physical pain. Negotiating the boundaries of my altruism amidst potentially unlimited demands on it led to some fracturing of my sense of self, and more than suffering it may take some time recalibrating interpersonal trust. Partly why I’m so fervently YIMBY as opposed to classic EA causes—food at least can be divided arbitrarily while preserving some vague pretense of capitalist autonomy, but shelter is discrete and entangled with protection of your self and extended property.