From a psychological perspective there are only three modes to explain chronic anxiety (in order of severity): brain lesions impacting the amygdala, a combination of damage to various other brain circuits with a similar result, or poor adversity conditioning during childhood.
For persons with actual brain damage anti-anxiety medications are necessary and in extreme conditions prevent catastrophic autonomic organ failure for organs managed by the brain. In many cases anti-anxiety medications are over prescribed to people with minor emotion coping disorders.
For some people it is because retaining the good life depends on something tentative like staying competitive or relevant, or perhaps most tentatively of all: staying interested.
Evolutionary part of the brain to always be looking for obstacles or issues with what's happening in the moment. Clearly humans who were more laissez faire, got eliminated either by nature or society.
Same here. Aerobic exercise, as a long exertion, probably activates some part of the brain that quells it.
Because anxiety is a feeling, not a thought or a belief. "Why am I anxious when I have no reason to be" is a category error, one of a type that the kind of personality type heavily overrepresented on HN is pretty prone to. I know that because I made that error for most of my life.
That probably doesn't make much sense on its own, so let me explain the example that crystallized the idea in my head.
-----
Before I got hired on to my first proper job at Triplebyte, my life was not going very well. Employers wouldn't give me the time of day, I had no idea what (if anything) I was good at, and I didn't have any direction; this era of my life involved bad enough mental health that it very very nearly killed me. It wasn't just anxiety, but anxiety was certainly a part of it. I'd spend almost every night with my head going in loops I'm sure you'll recognize: "I didn't do anything today so I'll never do anything so I'll always be miserable and it's all my fault" being the gist.
Fast-forward a bit. I was about six weeks into my new job, and everything in my life was turning around in a way that seemed almost miraculous. But I found myself in bed ruminating anyway. That voice in my head did not acknowledge any of the ways my life had improved. It didn't care that my income had gone up an order of magnitude, that I'd found a community of people I loved, that I seemed to actually be good at something. What it cared about is that I hadn't done anything else. It pulled up every example it could find where I'd done less than perfectly during that time. I'd screwed up something at work that I felt bad about. I wasn't getting out and socializing as much as I'd like to. I wasn't exercising. Look at all these ways I was screwing up that would ruin my life!
But the benefit of having such a dramatic change in circumstances is that it makes the ways in which that voice doesn't care about reality much more obvious. I remember having a clarifying moment of "wait, wait, wait, hold on, everything is WAY better than it used to be, why the hell does this voice sound exactly the same?" It became clear to me in that moment that that anxious/self-critical voice (anxiety and depression are one voice in my head) clearly wasn't coming from my circumstances, because my circumstances had changed dramatically and the voice hadn't.
-----
The reason is that the voice does not come from reality. It comes from a bit of brain hardware, and uses reality to justify itself - or at least, it does for my personality type, and probably yours, too. If you're a typical HN poster, you probably value things like logic and open-mindedness and self-discipline and rigor, so that voice - which is part of you - speaks in that voice. But those aren't what it comes from.
You're anxious first, and justify why you're anxious second, because you're the kind of person who cares about justifications. If you were the kind of person who cared a lot about the validation of others, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons everyone secretly hates you second. If you were the kind of person who cared a lot about your religious values, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons you sinned today second. If you were the kind of person who cared about your intelligence, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons you're stupid second. You'll be anxious "about" the things you care about, because you're really just anxious as an uncaused-cause.
This isn't a conscious process, so "look for" is not quite the right word. But the point here is that the anxiety exists independently of circumstances or beliefs, at least to some extent.
Because you're a human being, you will always have things that aren't secure or perfect in your life. Could be loved ones whose internal feelings about you you can never truly know, or a job you might lose tomorrow, or a grand goal you can't be certain of accomplishing, or whatever. And that means that when you're anxious first, it's always going to have some substrate to work with. That's as true for a highly successful person as it is for someone with no success at all.
For me, it went from "you'll never get a job and will just keep rotting away" to "okay sure you got a job but you're not really good at it" to "okay you got promoted a bunch but probably you just pulled the wool over everyone's eyes" to "okay you were wildly successful in that job but you can't know if you're going to be wildly successful again". When I got into better health, it went from "you're always going to be fat and ugly" to "okay you lost some weight but you're still way fatter than others" to "okay your weight is close to normal but you've got all this loose skin and you'll never look normal". It changes what it worries about, because it isn't really worried about those things: it just "knows" that those are the things connected to anxious feelings for me.
From a little less internal perspective, the way to think about this is that you've got a circuit in your brain that is supposed to tell you when to be scared. And something in that circuit is overstimulated, so that regardless of input, it's over-sending that anxiety signal to your consciousness. The why comes from a different part of your brain, which sees that signal and "assumes" that there must be a reason for it (in the same way that if a friend of yours suddenly started screaming at you, you'd assume they have a reason and didn't just spontaneously go crazy).
-----
I can't control what that voice wants to say, and I don't think you can either. Not directly, anyway. But you can train yourself to recognize that that voice is a distinct part of you, one whose voice you can learn to distinguish from "your" voice. You can interrupt the loops it tries to set up. Or when it's overwhelming, you can just go "wow, I feel really shitty today, this voice keeps yelling at me" in the same way that you'd go "damn, I wanted to go on a picnic today but it's raining".
What I've found is that as I've learned not to listen to it, and as I've tended to the most immediate and concerning stressors in my life, it's gotten easier to ignore its input. And the more I do, the more that overstimulated part of my brain seems to downregulate. What used to be daily panic-loops has trickled down to every few weeks or months, and even those loops are much less durable than they used to be. I'm in the middle of trying to found a company right now, and I am less anxious than I was about just going outside not very many years ago.
There's a companion lesson here, which is that because feelings are not beliefs, feelings also can't be "wrong". To treat anxiety as incorrect is also to make a category error, because anxiety isn't a statement about the world. It only becomes irrational when you confuse the feeling for an idea or a prediction. Anxiety is no more "wrong" than enjoying a particular food. Sure, that can have consequences (whether you enjoy french fries or salad more likely affects your physical health, for example), but those consequences are second-order effects of anxiety's interaction with the rest of you. You can't control the anxiety, but you can control what you do with its input.
What I'd suggest to you is, next time you feel this anxiety, you pause for a moment. Try to disengage the part of your brain that analyzes what you think will happen. Say to yourself "I feel anxious right now, and I can't do anything about that, but I know that that feeling is out of my control". Be aware of the feeling, but decouple it from facts by accepting its input as a thing in its own right. Listen to that voice yelling at you, but understand that it is a distinct voice from other parts of you; listen, but don't listen uncritically. Or that's what works for me, anyway. Sometimes on a really bad day I'll picture myself in an indestructable "bubble" of sorts, with that voice outside of it screaming and pounding on the walls - I can hear it pounding but it can't get in, if that makes sense.
Hopefully that helps. It's really hard to talk about this stuff because it's such an internal mental operation, not a thing I can show you or draw out easily. But I hope that gets a little bit of the mental sense of what I mean across?
Which part of me is reacting in a way that's currently maladaptive? Where did it learn that strategy? When has it been effective in my life? What is this part trying to protect me (or another part of me) from? Can I update it about how the current situation is different from the past one, and how I'm different now than I was in the past (and much better able to handle difficulties)?
It's a rather roundabout approach to mindfulness, but engaging with my own psyche this way has made huge improvements in my life.
For young people in their first job, knowledge workers passionate about the subject, lifestyle founders, and others... work is seen as play. It's part of who they are and what they do.
Those who need to work (a lot of us) are those who don't have someone paying their bills and don't have an easy/fun/passive way of getting money, like a lifestyle business, fun job, fame, or inheritance.
So is work necessary? Probably not. But hobbies, creativity, production, and innovation will probably always exist because it's what people do naturally. I think there's a system in which everyone is having a better time overall, where we wouldn't call it work. But we're not there yet - we're still in a post-feudal system and will continue to see leftovers of that for some time which affects a lot of people and makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.
Anyway: how will humanity evolve? (peace & love everywhere, or the usual wars keep happening forever). Will humans ever achieve interstellar travel? Will our far-future descendants be machines/robots/something else? Will we manage to fabricate biological life from dead/raw materials? (personal guess: yes). Will we encounter aliens? (or perhaps more likely: artefacts left by aliens). Will science manage to find a "theory of everything"? How will Earth be doing 1000, 10k or 100k+ years from now?
All in all: the big science / humanity / life / nature-of-our-universe questions.
IMO this is a solved question. There's thousands of years of research on this and the dataset isn't getting better.
It's useful to figure this out as soon as possible, not just for afterlife stuff, but so you don't put the wrong success metrics in place.
As the book Thinking in Systems puts it, rules are set by self-organizing systems. The systems are organized around goals. Paradigms (your religion-level knowledge) will determine the goals that are chosen. And the ability to pick the right paradigms is the most powerful thing of all.
But until you figure out the different paradigms, your goals will be set by all these paradigms that you don't understand and can't control.
Answered the question on the paradigms on the sibling comment. How you find it is much easier - education and books. Nearly every major paradigm was written and extensively defended in a book.
Many still are just from the society we were born in - we are raised to get good grades, find a good job, make decent money. But books are the way to find your paradigms otherwise.
Good question. It's too long to list, sort of like naming every biological creature within 10 meters. But we can name the important ones. The stronger ones (politics, religion) tend to challenge others and lead to flame wars so I won't list them directly.
I think knowledge of the past is invaluable. They're solutions to problems and should be preserved. Some may not be useful now (e.g. tribalism, barter) but may be useful in future situations or in forging new ones.
Religion is a solid, immutable paradigm that can't be amended. It's remarkably fragile - the whole nature of religion is it must take priority over worldly hunger and riches. The ones that survive are interesting.
Similar things like charters matter too. But people challenge charters. Challenge gun law and women's suffrage long enough and it may be amended.
Economically, I believe productivity brings wealth and that it's not a solid amount you sit on. Too little wealth brings wars and starvation. Too much brings corruption. Britain did pretty well and Mali should have done better. A moderate amount is good.
Democracy works great. I think communism's failure was because Stalin etc went unchecked and the banning of entrepreneurship, but the way in which communism entered power made it incompatible with democracy.
Capitalism is flawed, it spawned communism, and will continue to spawn many other paradigms. Reaganomics isn't the problem, Reagan was just playing to a system that poorly regulates itself.
I think anarchy is the most efficient system with high trust but scales the worst. Tribalism and despotism works well too - it's no coincidence wars are won by despots. But it's not for all times, and it gets removed with weak communities and weak leaders. I'm not proposing we use these old systems either.
I think natural selection is an outdated methodology. It works but it's way too slow and we wouldn't have navel oranges if we left things to nature. The most powerful invention nature gave us is heirarchy and self-organization.
Humans are limited, by definition. Good question. It's too long to list, sort of like naming every biological creature within 10 meters. But we can name the important ones. The stronger ones (politics, religion) tend to challenge others and lead to flame wars so I won't list them directly.
I think knowledge of the past is invaluable. They're solutions to problems and should be preserved. Some may not be useful now (e.g. tribalism, barter) but may be useful in future situations or in forging new ones.
Religion is a solid, immutable paradigm that can't be amended. It's remarkably fragile - the whole nature of religion is it must take priority over worldly hunger and riches. The ones that survive are interesting.
Similar things like charters matter too. But people challenge charters. Challenge gun law and women's suffrage long enough and it may be amended.
Economically, I believe productivity brings wealth and that it's not a solid amount you sit on. Too little wealth brings wars and starvation. Too much brings corruption. Britain did pretty well and Mali should have done better. A moderate amount is good.
Democracy works great. I think communism's failure was because Stalin etc went unchecked and the banning of entrepreneurship, but the way in which communism entered power made it incompatible with democracy.
Capitalism is flawed, it spawned communism, and will continue to spawn many other paradigms. Reaganomics isn't the problem, Reagan was just playing to a system that poorly regulates itself.
I think anarchy is the most efficient system with high trust but scales the worst. Tribalism and despotism works well too - it's no coincidence wars are won by despots. But it's not for all times, and it gets removed with weak communities and weak leaders. I'm not proposing we use these old systems either.
I think natural selection is an outdated methodology. It works but it's way too slow and we wouldn't have navel oranges if we left things to nature. The most powerful invention nature gave us is heirarchy and self-organization.
I think the meaning of life is defined by one's death. The etymology of human is "burial". Non-burial is dehumanizing, the worst life is defined by having nobody at your funeral. This isn't a universal paradigm, but it's brought up in A Christmas Carol.
These are just the visible paradigms. There are many more that I take for granted but am not aware of. For example, the idea of property ownership or the concept of time. What if my goal was to increase wealth for others than for myself?
How can humanity burn less fossil fuels?
How can we spread democracy to include more people?
Exactly.
And how can we preserve democracy in the age of unbridled capitalism and AI, causing deepfakes and company propaganda to undermine public discourse
What do I actually want right now, and what actionable steps can I take to move toward manifesting that reality?
Why, when I'm objectively well off and have a good life, do I still have a high degree of anxiety?
From a psychological perspective there are only three modes to explain chronic anxiety (in order of severity): brain lesions impacting the amygdala, a combination of damage to various other brain circuits with a similar result, or poor adversity conditioning during childhood.
For persons with actual brain damage anti-anxiety medications are necessary and in extreme conditions prevent catastrophic autonomic organ failure for organs managed by the brain. In many cases anti-anxiety medications are over prescribed to people with minor emotion coping disorders.
Do you think these brain lesions show up in an MRI?
For some people it is because retaining the good life depends on something tentative like staying competitive or relevant, or perhaps most tentatively of all: staying interested.
Evolutionary part of the brain to always be looking for obstacles or issues with what's happening in the moment. Clearly humans who were more laissez faire, got eliminated either by nature or society.
Same here. Aerobic exercise, as a long exertion, probably activates some part of the brain that quells it.
John 14:6
Because anxiety is a feeling, not a thought or a belief. "Why am I anxious when I have no reason to be" is a category error, one of a type that the kind of personality type heavily overrepresented on HN is pretty prone to. I know that because I made that error for most of my life.
That probably doesn't make much sense on its own, so let me explain the example that crystallized the idea in my head.
-----
Before I got hired on to my first proper job at Triplebyte, my life was not going very well. Employers wouldn't give me the time of day, I had no idea what (if anything) I was good at, and I didn't have any direction; this era of my life involved bad enough mental health that it very very nearly killed me. It wasn't just anxiety, but anxiety was certainly a part of it. I'd spend almost every night with my head going in loops I'm sure you'll recognize: "I didn't do anything today so I'll never do anything so I'll always be miserable and it's all my fault" being the gist.
Fast-forward a bit. I was about six weeks into my new job, and everything in my life was turning around in a way that seemed almost miraculous. But I found myself in bed ruminating anyway. That voice in my head did not acknowledge any of the ways my life had improved. It didn't care that my income had gone up an order of magnitude, that I'd found a community of people I loved, that I seemed to actually be good at something. What it cared about is that I hadn't done anything else. It pulled up every example it could find where I'd done less than perfectly during that time. I'd screwed up something at work that I felt bad about. I wasn't getting out and socializing as much as I'd like to. I wasn't exercising. Look at all these ways I was screwing up that would ruin my life!
But the benefit of having such a dramatic change in circumstances is that it makes the ways in which that voice doesn't care about reality much more obvious. I remember having a clarifying moment of "wait, wait, wait, hold on, everything is WAY better than it used to be, why the hell does this voice sound exactly the same?" It became clear to me in that moment that that anxious/self-critical voice (anxiety and depression are one voice in my head) clearly wasn't coming from my circumstances, because my circumstances had changed dramatically and the voice hadn't.
-----
The reason is that the voice does not come from reality. It comes from a bit of brain hardware, and uses reality to justify itself - or at least, it does for my personality type, and probably yours, too. If you're a typical HN poster, you probably value things like logic and open-mindedness and self-discipline and rigor, so that voice - which is part of you - speaks in that voice. But those aren't what it comes from.
You're anxious first, and justify why you're anxious second, because you're the kind of person who cares about justifications. If you were the kind of person who cared a lot about the validation of others, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons everyone secretly hates you second. If you were the kind of person who cared a lot about your religious values, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons you sinned today second. If you were the kind of person who cared about your intelligence, you'd be anxious first and look for reasons you're stupid second. You'll be anxious "about" the things you care about, because you're really just anxious as an uncaused-cause.
This isn't a conscious process, so "look for" is not quite the right word. But the point here is that the anxiety exists independently of circumstances or beliefs, at least to some extent.
Because you're a human being, you will always have things that aren't secure or perfect in your life. Could be loved ones whose internal feelings about you you can never truly know, or a job you might lose tomorrow, or a grand goal you can't be certain of accomplishing, or whatever. And that means that when you're anxious first, it's always going to have some substrate to work with. That's as true for a highly successful person as it is for someone with no success at all.
For me, it went from "you'll never get a job and will just keep rotting away" to "okay sure you got a job but you're not really good at it" to "okay you got promoted a bunch but probably you just pulled the wool over everyone's eyes" to "okay you were wildly successful in that job but you can't know if you're going to be wildly successful again". When I got into better health, it went from "you're always going to be fat and ugly" to "okay you lost some weight but you're still way fatter than others" to "okay your weight is close to normal but you've got all this loose skin and you'll never look normal". It changes what it worries about, because it isn't really worried about those things: it just "knows" that those are the things connected to anxious feelings for me.
From a little less internal perspective, the way to think about this is that you've got a circuit in your brain that is supposed to tell you when to be scared. And something in that circuit is overstimulated, so that regardless of input, it's over-sending that anxiety signal to your consciousness. The why comes from a different part of your brain, which sees that signal and "assumes" that there must be a reason for it (in the same way that if a friend of yours suddenly started screaming at you, you'd assume they have a reason and didn't just spontaneously go crazy).
-----
I can't control what that voice wants to say, and I don't think you can either. Not directly, anyway. But you can train yourself to recognize that that voice is a distinct part of you, one whose voice you can learn to distinguish from "your" voice. You can interrupt the loops it tries to set up. Or when it's overwhelming, you can just go "wow, I feel really shitty today, this voice keeps yelling at me" in the same way that you'd go "damn, I wanted to go on a picnic today but it's raining".
What I've found is that as I've learned not to listen to it, and as I've tended to the most immediate and concerning stressors in my life, it's gotten easier to ignore its input. And the more I do, the more that overstimulated part of my brain seems to downregulate. What used to be daily panic-loops has trickled down to every few weeks or months, and even those loops are much less durable than they used to be. I'm in the middle of trying to found a company right now, and I am less anxious than I was about just going outside not very many years ago.
There's a companion lesson here, which is that because feelings are not beliefs, feelings also can't be "wrong". To treat anxiety as incorrect is also to make a category error, because anxiety isn't a statement about the world. It only becomes irrational when you confuse the feeling for an idea or a prediction. Anxiety is no more "wrong" than enjoying a particular food. Sure, that can have consequences (whether you enjoy french fries or salad more likely affects your physical health, for example), but those consequences are second-order effects of anxiety's interaction with the rest of you. You can't control the anxiety, but you can control what you do with its input.
What I'd suggest to you is, next time you feel this anxiety, you pause for a moment. Try to disengage the part of your brain that analyzes what you think will happen. Say to yourself "I feel anxious right now, and I can't do anything about that, but I know that that feeling is out of my control". Be aware of the feeling, but decouple it from facts by accepting its input as a thing in its own right. Listen to that voice yelling at you, but understand that it is a distinct voice from other parts of you; listen, but don't listen uncritically. Or that's what works for me, anyway. Sometimes on a really bad day I'll picture myself in an indestructable "bubble" of sorts, with that voice outside of it screaming and pounding on the walls - I can hear it pounding but it can't get in, if that makes sense.
Hopefully that helps. It's really hard to talk about this stuff because it's such an internal mental operation, not a thing I can show you or draw out easily. But I hope that gets a little bit of the mental sense of what I mean across?
Thank you for sharing this.
[dead]
Which part of me is reacting in a way that's currently maladaptive? Where did it learn that strategy? When has it been effective in my life? What is this part trying to protect me (or another part of me) from? Can I update it about how the current situation is different from the past one, and how I'm different now than I was in the past (and much better able to handle difficulties)?
It's a rather roundabout approach to mindfulness, but engaging with my own psyche this way has made huge improvements in my life.
I wonder what I can learn today that will benefit everyone?
Additional questions for self inquiry in 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership...
>https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23275060
How the hell can I push the world towards capabilities based security?
Is the BitGrid a good idea, or just another Turing Machine?
What do I do with my remaining free time?
Why do people need to work? Is this a necessary condition for human society to exist?
For young people in their first job, knowledge workers passionate about the subject, lifestyle founders, and others... work is seen as play. It's part of who they are and what they do.
Those who need to work (a lot of us) are those who don't have someone paying their bills and don't have an easy/fun/passive way of getting money, like a lifestyle business, fun job, fame, or inheritance.
So is work necessary? Probably not. But hobbies, creativity, production, and innovation will probably always exist because it's what people do naturally. I think there's a system in which everyone is having a better time overall, where we wouldn't call it work. But we're not there yet - we're still in a post-feudal system and will continue to see leftovers of that for some time which affects a lot of people and makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.
Interesting, how do you define "work" in your thoughts?
How do you see strict Socialism where everybody contributes as much as the can and get whatever they need (my improvised interpretation).
" What is real? How do you define 'real'? " Morpheus, The Matrix
You think this is HN you are reading?
Anyway: how will humanity evolve? (peace & love everywhere, or the usual wars keep happening forever). Will humans ever achieve interstellar travel? Will our far-future descendants be machines/robots/something else? Will we manage to fabricate biological life from dead/raw materials? (personal guess: yes). Will we encounter aliens? (or perhaps more likely: artefacts left by aliens). Will science manage to find a "theory of everything"? How will Earth be doing 1000, 10k or 100k+ years from now?
All in all: the big science / humanity / life / nature-of-our-universe questions.
Do I know kung-fu?
How can I be financially secure? How can I communicate/live with someone who lacks the capacity for empathy?
Which of the religions are most correct about god. Should I trust it. What is my role in the world.
Recently saw an interview on this book, looks interesting: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-evolution-of-religions/978...
IMO this is a solved question. There's thousands of years of research on this and the dataset isn't getting better.
It's useful to figure this out as soon as possible, not just for afterlife stuff, but so you don't put the wrong success metrics in place.
As the book Thinking in Systems puts it, rules are set by self-organizing systems. The systems are organized around goals. Paradigms (your religion-level knowledge) will determine the goals that are chosen. And the ability to pick the right paradigms is the most powerful thing of all.
But until you figure out the different paradigms, your goals will be set by all these paradigms that you don't understand and can't control.
I am curious about your paradigm and how you find it.
Answered the question on the paradigms on the sibling comment. How you find it is much easier - education and books. Nearly every major paradigm was written and extensively defended in a book.
Many still are just from the society we were born in - we are raised to get good grades, find a good job, make decent money. But books are the way to find your paradigms otherwise.
I guess I am just more confused.
It’s just a bot or crazy person, don’t worry about it:)
So which of the religions is the truest one?
What's your list of paradigms?
Good question. It's too long to list, sort of like naming every biological creature within 10 meters. But we can name the important ones. The stronger ones (politics, religion) tend to challenge others and lead to flame wars so I won't list them directly.
I think knowledge of the past is invaluable. They're solutions to problems and should be preserved. Some may not be useful now (e.g. tribalism, barter) but may be useful in future situations or in forging new ones.
Religion is a solid, immutable paradigm that can't be amended. It's remarkably fragile - the whole nature of religion is it must take priority over worldly hunger and riches. The ones that survive are interesting.
Similar things like charters matter too. But people challenge charters. Challenge gun law and women's suffrage long enough and it may be amended.
Economically, I believe productivity brings wealth and that it's not a solid amount you sit on. Too little wealth brings wars and starvation. Too much brings corruption. Britain did pretty well and Mali should have done better. A moderate amount is good.
Democracy works great. I think communism's failure was because Stalin etc went unchecked and the banning of entrepreneurship, but the way in which communism entered power made it incompatible with democracy.
Capitalism is flawed, it spawned communism, and will continue to spawn many other paradigms. Reaganomics isn't the problem, Reagan was just playing to a system that poorly regulates itself.
I think anarchy is the most efficient system with high trust but scales the worst. Tribalism and despotism works well too - it's no coincidence wars are won by despots. But it's not for all times, and it gets removed with weak communities and weak leaders. I'm not proposing we use these old systems either.
I think natural selection is an outdated methodology. It works but it's way too slow and we wouldn't have navel oranges if we left things to nature. The most powerful invention nature gave us is heirarchy and self-organization.
Humans are limited, by definition. Good question. It's too long to list, sort of like naming every biological creature within 10 meters. But we can name the important ones. The stronger ones (politics, religion) tend to challenge others and lead to flame wars so I won't list them directly.
I think knowledge of the past is invaluable. They're solutions to problems and should be preserved. Some may not be useful now (e.g. tribalism, barter) but may be useful in future situations or in forging new ones.
Religion is a solid, immutable paradigm that can't be amended. It's remarkably fragile - the whole nature of religion is it must take priority over worldly hunger and riches. The ones that survive are interesting.
Similar things like charters matter too. But people challenge charters. Challenge gun law and women's suffrage long enough and it may be amended.
Economically, I believe productivity brings wealth and that it's not a solid amount you sit on. Too little wealth brings wars and starvation. Too much brings corruption. Britain did pretty well and Mali should have done better. A moderate amount is good.
Democracy works great. I think communism's failure was because Stalin etc went unchecked and the banning of entrepreneurship, but the way in which communism entered power made it incompatible with democracy.
Capitalism is flawed, it spawned communism, and will continue to spawn many other paradigms. Reaganomics isn't the problem, Reagan was just playing to a system that poorly regulates itself.
I think anarchy is the most efficient system with high trust but scales the worst. Tribalism and despotism works well too - it's no coincidence wars are won by despots. But it's not for all times, and it gets removed with weak communities and weak leaders. I'm not proposing we use these old systems either.
I think natural selection is an outdated methodology. It works but it's way too slow and we wouldn't have navel oranges if we left things to nature. The most powerful invention nature gave us is heirarchy and self-organization.
I think the meaning of life is defined by one's death. The etymology of human is "burial". Non-burial is dehumanizing, the worst life is defined by having nobody at your funeral. This isn't a universal paradigm, but it's brought up in A Christmas Carol.
These are just the visible paradigms. There are many more that I take for granted but am not aware of. For example, the idea of property ownership or the concept of time. What if my goal was to increase wealth for others than for myself?
Why am I working on this problem?
"What the fuck am I even doing with my life?"
Echoing slater:
"What the fuck am I even doing with my life? I wasted so much potentials"
-> "Maybe I don't have much potentials"
What is the point of living? It is a combination of depression, boredom and helplessness I suppose
Now that I no longer need to work, what should I do with my life?
"What the fuck are they even doing with their lives?"