When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I knew it was very real for me) was the one thing I couldn't accept.
I've never regretted that decision.
What I've found is that outside of academia, the real world problems are so messy, and so complicated, that it takes all of my intelligence to work on those problems and deal with other messy soft issues, like selling my ideas to higher ups, or balancing financials against employees, are so intellectually stimulating that it literally "gets better" if you have the drive and will to find a line of work where you get to work on interesting problems.
(I've always thought the wonderful "it gets better" ads do a disservice to other disaffected members of society by not talking specifically to us, even if the message it true for more than the community they target)
As a matter of fact, it doesn't just get better, it gets awesome. I've gotten a job I never get bored of, I got the girl, I get a pretty nice paycheck, live a nice life, travel as much as I want to wherever I feel like (see the world!), and always work to write a novel of my life that I'd find interesting.
Just remember, if you are as smart as they say you are, you can figure out how to solve your own problems. Not popular at school? That's a solvable problem. No girlfriend? Solvable. Bad grades? You can solve it. Your mind is your most powerful and flexible asset, you can use it to do anything you really put your mind to, even things that don't come naturally once you solve the problem of learning how to grind on boring stuff.
I had no idea frissoning was a unique thing. How repeatable is it for you? I've felt it countless times from music or moments in film or life in general when I experience something that is particularly profound or impressive on a visceral level. It's not a daily occurrence though. I've usually attributed it to the feeling of getting a surge of adrenaline. Interesting.
I can't repeat it much. I don't go chasing after it; I let it find me. It isn't something you can conjure up over and over. You feel like you are in contact with beauty itself, and then you are forever changed. The experience is fleeting, but I remain grateful for it when it happens.
In my case I found it in some music that I found at the exact right moment in my life and it served as a sort of pivot point to open myself up to life more. It's hard to know what caused what exactly; I don't believe it necessary to boil it down to something that would appease the cynics of the world. I instead see it as something of an omen: that I'd one day be able to participate in this thing called music.
It's a long road, but I thank you for reminding me of it.
If anything, I'd describe the experience (if what I experience is the same thing) as similar to, if not the same thing as, a small shot of endorphins dumped directly into the base of your neck.
If I find a new piece of music that triggers a strong reaction, it can be very repeatable. For example, when I was 12 I had a tape of some Rachmaninoff performances with one particular section in I think the Paganini Variations, only a few seconds long, that would send me into the stratosphere.
I played it thousands of times until the tape finally broke.
It's very different than finding something beautiful or sublime.
Sadly, it'll often wear itself out if I play a piece of music too often. Sometimes I'll "save" certain pieces of music and only play them once or twice a year to experience the "flavor" of the frisson to that music.
It won't happen if I'm extremely stressed. It's actually a way I can tell I'm stressed, if music that should cause me to frisson doesn't. I've worked out some mental exercises and visualizing techniques to overcome the stress and let it happen which has been a great sort of therapy.
For me it is very repeatable, I can call it up if I'm not in a very wrong mood. Interesting to know it's got a name.
I talked to several religious people about how they know there is a god. What they described to me sounded a lot like this feeling, just a different conclusion from mine - if I interpreted them correctly. If this is true it might be quite common.
I've heard between 10-35% can experience it depending on the study (it's extraordinarily high in the population who go on to become musicians). I've personally only ever met 1 or 2 other people who claimed it.
> I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can frisson to certain works of music.
I've been labeling this feeling as an ASMR[1] (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Is it really a rare occurrence? I can pretty much do this on demand when listening to certain songs/types of music.
My understanding is that ASMR and Frisson are similar, but different experiences. As far as I can tell, I can frisson, but not ASMR.
Interestingly, reddit has both a frisson and an ASMR subreddit.
I know that frisson is highly personal. What causes me to frisson won't cause another person to frisson, and I only know a couple people personally who I believe can frisson (but nobody really talks about it, because there's simply no awareness of it).
I don't know if the same is true for ASMR. But the triggers people post in the subreddit are not representative of anything that's ever triggered a frisson in me (soft voices, clicking sounds, etc.).
But that doesn't stop people from trying to share their triggers for each phenomenon!
I knew about the ASMR subreddit, but the frisson one is new to me. They are both strange. I do get chills/euphoric sensations from certain music and certain sounds, though. It would be cool to know exactly what's going on.
>Why did I do so poorly in school despite the tests? It was probably the tests. I was told I was so smart so many times that the effect mentioned in this article seems particularly germane. I didn't work hard, so I didn't do well, but I tested high, so I thought the system was broken, not me. I was already smart, so I didn't need that fact positively reinforced, but I did need instances of hard work reinforced. I had no work ethic coming out of high school, I simply did things that interested me and dropped things that didn't.
That I think is the most essential point you've made, how did you get around that?
If I know that then I certainly wouldn't be this depressed.
The how for me usually comes through a change in attitude. One such change is knowing that learning boring things now can pay off down the line, that what you're doing pays off. Once you accept that, you'll approach the mundane shit with new vigor. For me in high school, I hated history class - you learn some remote facts, you memorize them, you spit them out in an essay on a test. Who the hell cares? We had shitty weekly assignments where you literally just made an outline of the chapter you were reading. I remember very little of the actual content. But ... years later I'm really glad that I have the skill to quickly scan and digest mundane information. This ability didn't just happen - no one is born with a text filter that magically highlights important facts in paragraphs.
Not all the mundane bullshit you have to do will be important later in your life. But you won't know beforehand what parts were good and what parts weren't. So you can sink into not caring, or you can believe that maybe 1/5 boring things will save your ass someday. Sure, you might be smarter than your teachers now, but knowing how to impress 'dumber' people is a really important skill that about 50% of smart people don't grasp.
I've been through similar things, and I should emphasize that things do get better as bane says.
Here's a comic that helped to remind me that at some point it wasn't just about learning bullshit, but that at the end of the day you can do really cool things with crap that seems boring and trivial now: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2125#c...
Get around what exactly? I don't think he is saying he got around anything - just that he dropped things he didn't like.
If I know that then I certainly wouldn't be this depressed
It probably doesn't sound useful, but there probably isn't a single simple answer to how. BUT - more usefully, there are simple answers to when. Things will get awesome in somewhere between 1 and 3 years - as soon as you find fulfilling things to do, with people who get you. This will happen. It will take longer than you would like, or seems reasonable, or be easy, but it is achievable.
I meant how did he manage to stop doing that, unless he continues to do so, yet things are awesome for him now.
I want to know how things managed to become awesome if he still continues to drop boring things, or how he managed to convince himself to work on boring things.
I didn't drop boring things. I taught myself how to do them. Take history for example, in HS I found it excruciatingly boring. Later in college I challenged myself to take it again and ace it. All that stuff I thought was boring, I learned to see it as interesting. As an evolving system. Piecing bits of history together, seeing the evolution of tax systems, or military patterns, or whatever.
Eventually, I got to the point where I could afford to travel a bit. And here's where the awesome part comes in. When I went to Athens, I could visualize Hadrian walking through his arch down to the temple of Zeus. Or in Florence, walk the exact same streets as Michelangelo and see exactly where Savonarola was burned to death.
In Rhodes I could see the approach the armies of Salah ah-Din had to make to assault the fortress of the Knights of St. John. It wasn't just a wall, or a bunch of bricks, it was a living, breathing piece of history. And knowing the history of it, I felt connected to it.
And now that I know that history can be so enlightening, I seek it out where I don't know it. In Korea I learned about King Sejong the Great and why he's great, and suddenly I find I'm interested in linguistics and invented writing systems (great site btw http://www.omniglot.com/). And I find connections between things everywhere!
It's just history, but other things in life suddenly have a vibrancy and flavor I never saw, because I never knew how to see.
Well I dropped boring things, and things turned out alright. Just make sure you aren't using that as an excuse for avoiding things that aren't as easy. I never found Math as easy as I'm sure some of the Math genius on HN find it, but I didn't drop it either, for example.
I do agree that developing a good work ethic is important.
I had to finish up high school, and simply get out in the real world. I worked odd jobs, shitty manual labor and such for a bit. When that got old (or I got tired of being outside) I found a job doing tech support. After a couple years of that I came away with two things
a) I had trouble doing tech support initially because communicating effectively with people is hard. I learned more skills related to handling people during that job than I have anywhere else, and it's the most valuable skill I've ever learned.
b) I absolutely hated doing tech support. I applied for some other, better jobs, and couldn't get them. Doing support couldn't pay my bills, and I finally found myself in a situation where I knew that the best way forward for me was to just go to school and get it over with. I took a couple remedial classes at the local community college to get over my fears from K-12, simple things like Algebra. But I took those classes also to learn how to study. If learned to grind. And I also learned that even when I thought I knew something, I learned I hadn't mastered it. If a teacher assigned 20 problems, I'd do 40, and invariably I'd find one or two I couldn't solve, or had trouble with.
I had to teach myself work ethic. Tell myself I was working hard, not that I was smart. After all, if I was so smart I wouldn't be 4 years out of High School taking Algebra classes at a Community College would I?
I generally avoided distractions, I had friends I studied with, but I didn't put a whole lot into the relationships. I eventually found people who were also interested in studying and working hard and we became a regular study group throughout most of my undergrad. That helped satiate my desire for human interaction, without becoming a drag on my time or a distraction away from school. I met my wife through that group. But we got together knowing we'd support each other through our schooling and study. So it wasn't like the relationship was a huge distraction like it can often become. (We studied extra together instead of going on dates, cheaper and more useful in the long run).
It wasn't easy. I still have work ethic issues that crop up. But I know how to spot them and work on working them out. Turns out these days, working in a more managerial position, most of the work is mindless grindwork, filling out paperwork, attending meetings, that sort of thing. But if I hand't taught myself to do it, I never would have made it.
The thing is, I knew I was smart, so I considered everything I couldn't do, even grindwork, as something I knew I could figure out. I took everything as a challenge to my intellect, and that's seen me through pretty well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I knew it was very real for me) was the one thing I couldn't accept.
I've never regretted that decision.
What I've found is that outside of academia, the real world problems are so messy, and so complicated, that it takes all of my intelligence to work on those problems and deal with other messy soft issues, like selling my ideas to higher ups, or balancing financials against employees, are so intellectually stimulating that it literally "gets better" if you have the drive and will to find a line of work where you get to work on interesting problems.
(I've always thought the wonderful "it gets better" ads do a disservice to other disaffected members of society by not talking specifically to us, even if the message it true for more than the community they target)
As a matter of fact, it doesn't just get better, it gets awesome. I've gotten a job I never get bored of, I got the girl, I get a pretty nice paycheck, live a nice life, travel as much as I want to wherever I feel like (see the world!), and always work to write a novel of my life that I'd find interesting.
Just remember, if you are as smart as they say you are, you can figure out how to solve your own problems. Not popular at school? That's a solvable problem. No girlfriend? Solvable. Bad grades? You can solve it. Your mind is your most powerful and flexible asset, you can use it to do anything you really put your mind to, even things that don't come naturally once you solve the problem of learning how to grind on boring stuff.