TLP: "People, spouses keep a 'ledger' within a marriage." Can this be solved? ResidentContrarian is on the case!!
And now I am, too. Because "fools rush in where even angels fear to tread." Their battle cry? "...LEEEEEE-roooy JENNNNK-innnnns!" (Srsly, he's my spirit animal for this post.)
This post exists because I was majorly fascinated by a claim
(heretofore known as “RC”) though he extracted from the strained, distilled, essence of “The Last Psychiatrist’s” book awhile back. See, RC was bashing his brain against some theses that “The Last Psychiatrist” (heretofore referred to as “TLP” or “Alone”!) came up with about sane/loving/healthy relationships. (Or, rather, about what PREVENTS our relationships from being sane or loving or healthy! For some reason, ig “Alone” talked about that in his book a bit. Sometimes, at least.)Anyway, I had the great honor of getting to argue extensively with RC—and incidentally be contrarian1 to him—while he was agonizing over “WTF is this guy even trying to say?” Here’s some of what he came up with:
Resident Contrarian:
…this [claim of TLP’s] is but a single incarnation of a bigger problem. The zoomed-out view of the problem is that we in general are incapable of action; we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. If we have fantasies, he says, they are about this; we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance. Think “you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”.
So you take one look at that and you’re like, “That’s not about pr0n; it’s about agency.”
Agency.
A significantly more sexy topic.
Anyway, what would you do then if your agency is that buried? You’d try to organize the world—preferably on some level below your fully-conscious mind—to help you. What you would do, you’d do through misdirection.
(And I like to think I’m a bit of an authority on internal states where your agency is really super-buried. Call this knowledge the fruit of my personal dysfunctionality. Or call it the fruit of my personal suffering. Note :Those two things are not the same.)
So, that gives some context: we’re thinking about someone tempted to be stuck in passivity. (Literally half the people reading this: “I know who TLP is and what he writes about!”)
Anyway, now, ledger problem.
Resident Contrarian:
…he makes a nebulous claim about ledger-keeping in relationships; it’s unclear enough what exactly he’s trying to say that you should take my interpretation of it with a grain of salt2. His [TLP's] claim seems to be that in a relationship, if someone gives you a lot of satisfaction you feel it creates an imbalance; ditto for you giving them a lot of satisfaction.
You respond to this by depriving, mainly; there’s an imbalance, so you fix it by stopping loving your wife, not taking care of your friends or other similar efforts to hurt people in pursuit of homeostasis. This leads to bad things, but seems in TLP’s view to be inevitable. So, for instance, he says that a man can be concerned with satisfying a woman sexually if it’s a one-night-stand situation; it’s a tit-for-tat exchange. But not so if he’s the provider for that woman; the imbalance created by him giving her a home to live in prevents him from caring about her sexual well-being, in her being satisfied with him as a lover.
So the person who is one-down in the relationship is going to be on the receiving end of the depriving, I think?
Hmm. “The pursuit of homeostasis”—that’s amazing. That made me think.
Well, if that’s the problem, here are some solutions to it that I came up with.
What about making the ledger MORE VISIBLE?
What if a couple needs to have long conversations to make sure both parties understand what, e.g. the wife, is actually doing when she’s home all day.
What about semi-pro-actively telling the other person stuff you did for the kids that would otherwise go unnoticed—and teasingly saying it’s because you want “cred” from them for all your hard work? (assuming, of course, that cred from ur spouse is the only cred that counts!)
What about asking them to try your job for a change? Oh wait—Luci and Desi… Fred and Ethyl… already did this one, didn’t they? Well, maybe there are small, tiny sub-tasks you could ask for help with?
What about just becoming awesome, so there’s not an imbalance anymore?
This is for the case where e.g. the husband is really just playing WoW instead of cuddling the baby and/or wrestling the oldest boy and/or creating water-crossing
mathlogic problems with stuffed animals for the neighbor kids (He doesn’t have to pay attention to any of them; they all have iPads), when HE is home all day because his wife is working her 12-hour shift at the hospital.
Being more GIVING to your spouse.
Being awesome as a person who is pursuing good goals out in the world—and finds a way to share your vision for these goals so your spouse knows the awesome things you’re accomplishing… to share that vision unabashedly, yet with humility.
If you are, e.g. a preacher-man and she is an atheist… maybe limit your talk to some of the more mundane accomplishments of your congregation, and not constantly about the “souls that came to the Lord” two years ago since for some reason those convos never seem to impress her.
I know; the “yet with humility” is the kind of thing that makes you go, “But how?” Here’s my suggestion: Assume she doesn’t HAVE to “get” why what you do is so amazing—whatever it is. Then figure out how it actually is genuinely amazing, and re-frame it, maybe? “What, too much effort?“ Guys—we have human brains: We can re-frame anything as large as a vocation a dozen differnt ways, at LEAST—maybe 100 ways if u r a hacker who knows multiple ways to screw in a lightbulb.
Make sure that your spouse knows that you know that the investments in your bold adventures come from the WHOLE FAMILY. You both keep each-others’ sanity so you can pursue these visions. Everyone who’s beyond infancy is able to contribute. Everyone needs to pay costs, or the dreams will flounder.
I’ll be adding some of the image-generation stuff I that messed around for this post (worked really hard to bring this to y’all!) in a totally unimportant footnote3 later. It was piles of fun!!
It was a devil’s advocate thing. WHAT? That’s an expression.
Here’s where I’m gonna be a total dork and claim it’s POSSIBLE that Resident Contrarian got something out of TLP’s book that was beyond what TLP put in. Just think—if TLP was writing to sever the reader from their comfortable assumptions, and set them on a crash course straight for Reality—RC could have seen a piece of Reality that doesn’t even need to be intentionally laid out in the book. Or maybe it really was what TLP was trying to get at; it could go either way. I haven’t read the book, and I may never read more than excerpts from it, yet here I am feeling confident to ”weigh in” with my “important insights” that MIGHT be true. (It’s almost like I’m a person on the internet!)
My excuse for this on-the-surface-of-it nutso-sounding theory is… the zen koan idea from S.A.’s Book Review of the same!! (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn)
This one!!
So, I was like “I think i want a picture of a ledger, and it should have some check-marks for the pros, and some things with red ‘x’s for the cons and I’ll have /imagine
make it look like it was rendered in CorelDraw. So I ran that, and… what I got was SO bland I don’t bother posting it here.
“I know, I’ll hop on EleutherAI, and use THEIR /imagine
!”
/imagine notepad containing a bulleted list where each bullet point is led with a heart, and some have a thumbs-up after the words, some have a thumbs-down. | photo-realistic, ambient lighting, rendered in CorelDraw 3D
Ooooo-kay—it also has no desire to reward my choice of… simulated.. rendering.. software package. (Too OG, I guess!)
Then, after a little more fiddling around, I thought, “What other kinds of ledgers could I make?”
/imagine a ledger where a 7-year-old girl keeps track of her favorite things on a notepad, complete with Lisa Frank stickers, made in the style of Lisa Frank
When I’m prompting AI’s on a public Discord server, I sometimes feel like an infant or toddler doing “parallel play” around another kiddo—I’m always looking at what the other people are doing, waiting for someone will discover a new trick that I can then copy. (“mexican opal stone.” “in the style of M. C. Escher.” “a closeup of the softest fabric in the world.”)
Then, since I reason other people are looking at my prompts, I feel legitimate in injecting some element of Performance Art to it. If I try out a prompt that the AI simply cannot render, but likely make some anonymous stranger far away giggle at my idea—still a win.
Then again, there are many things that it could render, like this:
Thank you, whoever prompted it with, “Crab robot The TERMINATOR!”
Of course, I am saying that whole thing about “performance art” to excuse my next action:
/imagine a ledger where Leroy Jenkins secretary keeps track of the next exploits of crazy chaos he has planned photo-realistic rendering created in Unreal Engine
Hmm. Maybe I should try it in a different thing.
/mcmc a ledger where Leroy Jenkins secretary keeps track of the next exploits of crazy chaos he has planned photo-realistic rendering created in Unreal Engine
(“Stable Diffusion KLMC2 Animation.ipynb”… huh, was i creating an animation? or stills optmized to an animation. Hmm.)
Anyway, one thing I got was this, which makes me appreciate the way that it looks like Leeroy’s planning ledger is virtual… digital… at least the left-hand gray panel on it looks like you might see this when you’re playing WoW.
Then I go back to a small Discord server and prompt a /imagine
on an MEE6 bot and I got the glorious image you behold at the top of the page.
The End.
(Finally added on 2/19/23.)