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