Posing yourself questions in a certain way can unlock something you sort of already knew. Make the answer obvious.

Several variations on this theme.

• Cognitive reframings
• Inner-simulator prompts
• Not generating the answer actively or with words (is this what they call "circling"?)
  • Gendlin's Focusing has helped me a crazy amount
  • Sometimes when people "meditate" they're really just picking up the mail from their subconscious; Meditation vs introspection

The nice thing is that it's easy. Even effortless. When you're lost, you don't have to push yourself to figure out your next move, you don't have to be smart or disciplined. Only aim yourself at the much easier task of doing one of the above. (I favour Focusing)

You essentially ask yourself "what's off?" and wait in silence. You do nothing. You don't control the mental narrative. One does not think up an answer, one waits for it to appear.

What links here

• #using-system-1
• Your conscious mind is useless
• 2024-03-07
• Rationality techniques
• Nonstandard ways to cope with ADHD

Try to avoid phrasing things as questions if they need not be.

For example, an offer of support could sound like an active question:

• "do you need support?"

or it could be a passive statement that requires no response:

• "let me know if you want support"

See how the latter is much more relaxing? There's no implicit request for response. That also makes it easier to respond to, ironically.

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A hypothesis: don't ask yes/no questions, especially if you're expecting the answer to go one way and the other way would surprise you.

"Can we talk?" (expecting a yes) could just as well be "I'd like to talk to you, let me know when it suits you".

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What links here

• Avoid causing harm with your inner chatter

Are you lonely?

Tweeting or posting on forums feels like connecting with the world (especially when randos actually answer), but when you don't address anyone in specific, then you're really talking to no one. You're like a radio broadcast.

And following other people's broadcasts, listening in on internet conversations, easy too. It's a sort of sweet, salty fat that fools you. You fill up an internal social quota but you haven't gotten anything out of it.

And worse, because you're sort-of satisfied, you're not driven to make a real connection with someone. How about texting that friend you haven't texted in ages? Stop participating in broadcasts, and that might soon look much more appealing.

What links here

• Tricks to write my friends more often
• How to be aware that your life sucks
• 2024-02-29
• List of my contemporaries

Have you seen the Hyperbole prompt (C-h h)? It's somewhat baroque or at least terse. I associate the style with "classic" packages such as ido—it just takes one line in the minibuffer:

Hy7.1.3>   Act   Butfile/   Cust/   Doc/   Ebut/   Find/   Gbut/   Hist   Ibut/   Kotl/   Msg/   Rolo/   Screen/   Win/

Now there's two ways you could react to seeing this.

Panic. Don't understand. Quit for now, to pick it up later (probably never).

Or—

Huh. Lots of concepts I've never seen before! What could they mean? What the hell is Ebut? Ibut? Rolo? Someone must've thought they're worth the space they take in this tight prompt – soon the secrets will be mine! C-h i d m hyperbole RET

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Once in the manual, us youth zoom past things too much. Look at the introduction. This software was first copyrighted in 1989! That predates Fallout 2. The Berlin Wall stood, and there was no Web—even Netscape Navigator lay in the future.

If not all manuals, then at least this manual should be treated like sitting down to watch a good movie. You know that contentedness when everything is ready, you have your hand in a fresh batch of popcorn—

—don't immediately go about filtering for the relevant—

—you don't know what info you need so how should you filter anyway—

—take it slow. Relax your shoulders. Enjoy the intro, the license statement, the acknowledgements. The part about dead mentors who inspired the devs. The part about dedicating KOutliner to Bob Weiner's wife Kathy.

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This way of reading an #emacs manual… You don't need to be here, learning any of this in the first place. Why not treat it as the leisure it is and enjoy every step?

If you were watching a movie and got stressed, wanted to skip ahead, the people I know would say you'd better just turn off the movie – it isn't doing for you what it's supposed to do. Same situation here. If you feel the need to skip ahead in a manual, you may as well skip away from the laptop instead.