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- + Since reading Ray Peat's work and drastically improving my wellbeing, something that had been declining for years, I've + been thinking more and more often about the phenomenon of learned helpless and its relevance to my life. Sometimes, + looking back to past times is useful to help reorient yourself in the present and aim towards a more desirable future. + Sometimes, a new perspective or experience might instantly obliterate previous behaviour without any sort of concerted + mental or physical grunt to eradicate it. +
++ On the flipside, I have sometimes hopelessly tried to forcefully change my behaviour, employing all the en vogue self-help tricks + to form long-term habits, only to practically immediately lose them not long afterwards. These kinds of experiences remind me of those + hypnosis advertisements that claim to have you give up smoking after just a few sessions; sometimes it's even after just one visit. There's no short + supply of stories of miracle cures or sudden, permanent breaks of addiction. Cold-turkey clean cuts that seem to arise with no obvious + effort on the part of the addict, no signs of worn willpower. +
++ When I was sixteen I spent six weeks abroad in a small town called Marburg in Hesse, Germany. Those six weeks were spent + living with a new family along with my exchange student, who had lived six weeks with me and my family just prior to my + arrival in Germany. Six weeks of school, new acquaintances, a new language (albeit one I had been "studying" in the + Australian school system) and unfamiliar cultural quirks. +
++ It was a barrage of stimulation, I came home every day from school and would collapse, totally exhausted, onto my + exchange student's bed, which was mine for the duration of the stay. It's not like I was actually expected to + learn anything or do any homework whilst I was at school here—I was basically on holidays and could really + have just treated it as such. Plenty of my own friends who had taken a similar trip certainly did. I'm not manyt of them + learnt or used much German beyond Wo ist McDonalds?. But I had been gradually becoming more fascinated with the + structure of German before arriving. Once there, especially at that age I presume, the Deutsch on the blackboard in + biology class looked more like a sophisticated puzzle game than a complete drag of a memorisation task. Each day was a + new game of deductive guesswork, and better still, I got to play with new ideas about how the language works every day + in the schoolyard with new friends I was making. New ways to describe how things are situated and move in relation to + one another, mysterious new prefixes and other linguistic building blocks, and the insane backwards word order of German + provided unlimited entertainment to see if I was up to the challenge. +
++ On top of this, I was in the grade just above mine back home in Australia. Whilst that really shouldn't have made much + difference, the amount of responsibility and independece these kids were allowed to exercise at sixteen or seventeen was + nothing short of amazing to my adolescent self. I had never seen anything like it. Some of my classmates would stand out + the front of school during lunchtime and smoke a couple of cigarettes with their own teachers, something that still to + this day I find kind of insane. It certainly would never have been acceptable back at home. Starting in the senior + school, you were allowed to just leave and go home if you didn't have class on, as long as you were back in time. And we + did. School uniforms simply weren't part of the culture either. For everyone else perhaps stressful and another target + of the cruel status games of teenagerhood, but for me it was like every day was casual dress day back home. To top it + all off, the legal drinking age in Germany is sixteen, at least for wine, beer, and other weaker drinks. +
++ These classmates of mine were running their own meetings headed by the Klassensprecher, the class representatives, and they actually seemed cool, like people I would like to hang out and befriend. They were + +