I had this thought/realization earlier that although I’ve made a lot of progress on learning about ML stuff, there are times where, when I am under stress, I appear to fall back on idealism thought. It’s interesting how that works, but it makes a kind of sense to me. Idealism is what I grew up with, what was instilled in me from a young age, so it’s the reflexive response, the low effort, low energy coping mechanism.

This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s a healthy coping mechanism. Part of the reason I was being conscious of it was because of turning inward and noting that the response I was having was detrimental to myself. I don’t want to go into the personal details of what it was about, but in essence, I was noticing this kind of interplay between fatalism and magical thinking of idealism. The fatalism is the negative spiral end of it. The magical thinking is the “attempt to be positive” (without diamat grounding), that kind of thinking like sheer power of will is going to overcome. The fatalism/doomer/depressed thinking is a direct response to the failure of idealism thought. When it doesn’t hold up to reality as is easily the case, it can start a negative spiral. Idealism thought builds positivity via sand castles, for lack of a better metaphor, so it easily gets swept away.

The solution is probably to make more of a conscience effort to practice diamat in day to day ways. After all, it is by practice that I internalized idealism, not just by being told about it. And I can’t unlearn idealism fully until there is something to take its place.