I spent much of my childhood depressed. Not depressed in the 'constant sadness' way, but depressed in the way where one doesn't feel anything. No positives, no negatives. Just nothing. At some point, this changed (or I changed this, I guess), at which point I rapidly developed a much wider variety of emotions and a much higher capacity for feeling things. This has taken some getting used to.

For one, feelings are often fleeting, and human brains are often context-dependent. We naturally draw out certain feelings, change our mindsets, switch frames, and refocus our attention as our old values slowly erode and are replaced with new ones. We naturally control which of our feelings are expressed to begin with and which mechanisms create them. When we work with ourselves, listening to our restless inner drives rather than ignoring them, we have a lot of control. When we don't, it's easy for feelings to spiral out of control, blocking out good experiences in exchange for short-lasting, fleeting pleasures or worse, a demoralizing despondency that's difficult to escape.

At risk of over-mathifying this post, these feelings are sort of like a higher-order markovian process. I don't really understand them, and I've given up on trying to. But just as our day-to-day habits become so natural that we stop having to think about them, we also learn habitual tools for controlling these feelings. We can craft an engine, upstream of everything else, which mediates the state transitions and drives the process forward. The central challenge here, for me, is aggregating these short-term feelings into a coherent, long-term strategy. I want an engine that doesn't just work sometimes, but consistently generalizes to new contexts and ever-changing emotional states.

Whenever I adjust how this engine works in one context, however, it ends up breaking in another. In all my experimentation, I've found one gear that always makes the engine run, propelling me forward over time. This gear is appreciation. I draw out my appreciation, bringing it to the forefront of my experience, seeing the world through its lens, and seeking it where it feels most absent. It's become a natural component of how I think, and it mediates my mental state in more or less every context.

Appreciation is a slow, reflective feeling, but not one that's hard to consistently maintain. It's simple and widely-applicable, so it easily becomes habit.

It's also one of few good feelings that leads to other good feelings:

It helps you reflect on which feelings you value, and in doing so, it teaches you how to recreate them.

In drawing out positive feelings, it implicitly reduces negative ones.

It focuses your attention on the good parts of a situation in a way that negative feelings don't object to. Rather than ignoring the negative feelings, it points out to them that there are also things to be happy about.

There's a common piece of advice in the self-help literature – from academic papers to internet gurus to nyt bestsellers – of "see yourself as the type of person who does X." Then, by envisioning the result you want and removing the voice in your head saying it's not possible, you become more like that person over time. Appreciation has a similar effect. By noticing your positive feelings, you start to see them as a larger part of who you are, and you become the type of person who feels them more.

It's sort of like optimism, but more targeted. Optimism diverges from reality when things get bad, but appreciation does not. Optimism relies on a broad hope; appreciation rests on empirics. Blind optimism can ignore the parts of you that object to it, whereas appreciation consoles them.

Interestingly, this gears-level change in how I manage short-term feelings seems to have compounded into a broader shift in worldview and values.

As part of appreciation becoming a more central part of my existence, I find myself less drawn to short-term pleasures and more drawn to things like aesthetics, routines, and narratives. Like forms of art, walking, and meditating. I take solace in structures of meaning kept alive by ever-changing stories. I increasingly view my life in narrative form, with cohesive plot lines coming together to form a strong, central character and life.

I think this concept of personal narrative differentiates peoples' worldviews well. People who view their life as a narrative tend to hang on to the past and value a coherent relationship between past and future. They inherently value routine, and they value things more because of their past relationship with them. They are put off by the idea of extreme, rapid change.

The opposite of a narrative-centric worldview is a worldview that values individual moments, independent of how they relate to the past or future. Those who prefer a momentary worldview are happy to quickly change their values or accept rapid change even if it means interrupting their narrative.

I don't think either of these worldviews is inherently better; both are worth exploring. But it's interesting that this small tweak in how I manage my short-term feelings seems to have made such a big difference in my preferring one to the other. This might be my most salient example of a small change to my low-level values solidifying into something much more general, without my actively steering the process.

…….

This was my first time writing a reflective blog post; I hope it was interesting. I tried to keep it concise and sacrifice clean transitions in exchange for clarity on the things that were valuable to me. But please let me know how I can improve, how this could've been stylistically nicer to read, if there are any points you disagree with, etc. (: