Also "anxiety" is not something caused by the situations you're in that conscious changes in will change but rather a permanent variable, per-person and biochemical, like "depression"

epiphenomenalism except the mind is real and getting physical is the epiphenomenon

wasn’t it, like, entirely about training yourself to not feel anxiety about talking to women? Ancient third-hand knowledge informs me that they had a whole Thing about it, “your first thousand rejections don’t count”

Expecting someone with an anxiety disorder to voluntarily go through a thousand rejections is not practical, the anxiety is what makes the weight of a single rejection crushing.

People with anxiety disorders aren’t the only people who experience anxiety, though.

the point was that a whole lot of people experience anxiety about this, and shouldn’t, because the horrible consequences they’re imagining mostly aren’t going to happen and trying it a few times will show them that.

Hm. Well, I suppose the old personality had an anxiety disorder then, it was not something situations caused, it was something I had that affected my experience of situations. And now the new personality is apparently incapable of anxiety, so the concept of it as a contingent thing is forever foreign.

One thing deeply buried in the American philosophy of the last, say... 40 years or so is that one doesn't learn things, one is simply already predisposed to be good or bad at them, and this comes out equally in all possible situations, so therefore there's not much sense in attempting to change, and one can neither teach nor learn.

It's weird how often I talk to people and ask, "Have you ever had a situation where you were trying something, and getting nowhere, and you just got more and more frustrated and then someone said, 'have you tried doing it this way' and suddenly it clicked and you started getting a lot better at it" and they react as though I had asked, "Have you ever had tea with a purple unicorn on the moon?"

No, now I think about it, not just American, some significant portion of the English-speaking world has internalized this position as the obvious one for reasons I don't really understand.

You can't really ask because this "People don't change, water just finds its level" philosophy is understood as self-evident on such a deep level that people have trouble even understanding what an alternative could be, let alone articulate their reasons for believing it.

This is really verging on "have you tried not being depressed?" ::stage whisper:: "of course they haven't, lazy self-obsessed gits" territory here, and my hackles are raising.

I get frustrated because I ask, "What could I be doing differently to make friends more easily or feel less nervous about women" and people have a bear of a time answering.

There's a thing if you're autistic where people oscilate rapidly between telling you that there is no right answer, and asking why you aren't getting the right answer.

"What should I wear?"

"Oh, nobody cares, you know, just wear whatever."

Which is then followed by,

"You dress so unusually. I don't know, maybe you don't want to just be known as the guy who dresses like that all the time."

Which is then, obviously, followed by

"Well then, what should I wear?"

"Oh, there's no single right answer"

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

It's very frustrating, this rapid oscillation between "There's no correct answer to shoot for" and "Why didn't you get the correct answer?"

People almost certainly have different baseline anxieties but anxiety is lessened by familiarity and practice; some people won't be anxious about anything much; some people will start out anxious about some things and eventually become used to them with practice, and some will stay anxious about certain things even with frequent exposure.

Sports training almost certainly won't make me Michael Jordan but it can probably make me better at Basketball then I was when I started.