Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Way To Be Okay, published by Duncan Sabien on February 19, 2023 on LessWrong.

This is a post about coping with existential dread, shared here because I think a lot of people in this social bubble are struggling to do so.

(Compare and contrast with Gretta Duleba's essay Another Way To Be Okay, written in parallel and with collaboration.)

As the title implies, it is about a way to be okay. I do not intend to imply it is the only way, or even the primary or best way. But it works for me, and based on my conversations with Nate Soares I think it's not far from what he's doing, and I believe it to be healthy and not based on self-deception or cauterizing various parts of myself. I wish I had something more guaranteed to be universal, but offering one option seems better than nothing, for the people who currently seem to me to have zero options.

The post is a bit tricky to write, because in my culture this all falls straight out of the core thing that everyone is doing and there's not really a "thing" to explain. I'm sort of trying to figure out how to clearly state why I think the sky is often blue, or why I think that two plus two equals four. Please bear with me, especially if you find some parts of this to be obvious and are not sure why I said them—it's because I don't know which pieces of the puzzle you might be missing.

The structure of the post is prereqs/background/underlying assumptions, followed by the synthesis/conclusion.

I. Fabricated Options

There's an essay on this one. The main thing that is important to grok, all the way deep down in your bones, is something like "impossible options aren't possible; they never were possible; you haven't lost anything at all (or failed at anything at all) by failing to take steps that could not be taken."

I think a lot of people lose themselves in ungrounded "what if"s, both past-based and future-based, and end up causing themselves substantial pain that could have been avoided if they had been more aware of their true constraints. e.g. yes, sometimes people really are "lazy," in the sense that they had more to give, and could have given it, and not-giving-it was contra to their values, and they chose not to give it and then things were worse for them as a result.

But it's also quite frequently the case that "giving more" was a fabricated option, and the person really was effectively at their limit, and it's only because they have a fairy tale in which they somehow have more to give that they have concluded they messed up.

(Related concept: counting up vs. counting down)

An excerpt from r!Animorphs: The Reckoning:

The Andalite’s stalks drooped. maintain control. As if you believe control is a thing that is possible. You know how the [ostensibly omniscient and omnipotent] Ellimist works. You know you cannot outmaneuver it. Any attempt to predict the intended outcome, and deliberately subvert it, will fail. You should be riding this wave, not trying to swim through it.>

seem possible which never were, in fact. You act as if we were on a path, and Cassie’s appearance has dragged us off of it—temporarily, pending a deliberate return. But consider. Rachel was forewarned of Marco’s reaction—may well have been placed here specifically to guard against it. The path you imagined us to be on is not real. We were never on it. We were on this path—always, from the beginning—and simply did not know it until now. To pretend otherwise is sheer folly.>

Humans appear to have some degree of agency and self-determination, but we often have less than we convince ourselves. Recognizing the limits on your ability to choose between possible futures is crucial for not blaming yourself for things you had no control over.

(In practice, many people need the opposite lesson—many people's locus of control is almost entirely external, and they need t...