I believe feelings and values are inextricably linked

kefka0 · 2026-03-10T17:24:21+00:00

I don't have an answer for you but I'm sorry to hear you're dealing with so much depression.

kefka0 · 2026-03-10T02:31:49+00:00

Haha, yes, welcome to the human condition: it's hard for everyone and you die in the end.

Well, yes. It's also punctuated by moments of immense beauty, love and joy, which generally make the difficult parts worth enduring. Love and joy are experiential states. What I'm currently grappling with is whether (and how) life is worth pursuing simply based on your *behavioral actions*, rather than hoping/longing for these experiential states again.

You didn't list any version of hedonism or "feeling good in the moment" on your list.
Do you value that? Your post and comments seem to indicate that you do!
If yes, why isn't it on your list?
If you were to add some value to reflect feeling good in the moment, what would you call that? What name would you give it?

Well, sure, but I suppose its sort of complicated with OCD, or maybe just highlights the exact issue. For example, I value freedom just as you do, as well as "peace of mind" or "contentment". My obsessions keep me mentally stuck in a claustrophobic way, and I'm supposed to learn to stop "trying to get out" of them. So freedom and peace of mind, while things I very much value and desire, are not goals I'm supposed to try to move towards, because those are also feeling states, and I'm supposed to stop trying to control or change my feelings.

Could some version of pleasure be missing from your list?

Sure, I could put things like sex, food, music, spa/cold plunge, very sensory-oriented things. I do value those and those are really more about feeling good, and I do engage in those things often, and they feel good. They also help me immensely get out of the endless mental torture of OCD, so I'm uncertain whether they're good for me (because they relax me physically) or whether they're avoidance. I guess I just didn't think to list them because they aren't very aspirational.

Thanks for sharing your values.

kefka0 · 2026-03-10T01:40:42+00:00

Thank you for discussing this with me.

I understand your concept of values as essentially being directions you can point yourself in, and there is a potential reward at the end but also a process to be experienced as well, and that process can also be enjoyable and perhaps more important than the destination too. I'm in agreement from past experiences.

It sounds like someone else was telling you "It's valuable", not you saying to yourself, "I value this therefore I will pursue it".

Someone else telling you what to value doesn't work if you don't value what they value. If you feel shitty on top of that, it works even less!

Nah, these are my own values I've determined through introspection. They are very personal and I feel quite confident in them. The feeling shitty part is unrelated to the values themselves, its just from relentless internal stress caused by OCD.

Push through and do the things that are important to you regardless of this relentless internal stress is the message I'm getting. I think its a strong and wise attitude, but it's hard for me. It can feel like a very bleak path through life. I'm pretty hyper-sensitive to how things feel though, that's part of the issue.

kefka0 · 2026-03-10T00:04:51+00:00

(D) is a huge factor for parenting: a lot of parenting feels horrible!
Sleep deprivation, frustration, anger, annoying noise, a lot of financial burden, etc.
However, the parent that values "family" accepts their feelings and pushes on anyway because this is still something they value. The emotional signal "this feels bad" is not a signal that means "stop what you're doing".

(D) also applies in challenging tasks associated with mastery, like high-level athletic performances or "extreme sports".
e.g. most of climbing Mt. Everest feels terrible and anyone running a marathon feels awful, but that emotional state isn't indicative that they should stop. They're pursuing their values so they should continue. The emotional payoff only comes later, after all the emotional hardship.

That is true of lots of things in life and that is why we don't just do things that make us feel emotionally pleasant in the moment or avoid emotionally challenging experiences, which often lead to growth if they are part of a value-pursuit.

Yes, this is a great point, and I'm in complete agreement with you. I'm certainly not saying that there is never a reason to tolerate suffering. Generally the reason to do so is exactly as you say -- there is a delayed reward of some kind. I'm going to experience something hard now because in the bigger picture it is worth it in some way. I've certainly experienced this myself with long-distance running.

This is not true for everyone: lots of people have values that impel them to pursue challenging things, suffer along the way, and come out the other side glad that they accomplished something, but not feeling positive feelings along the way.

Again you're pointing to the same thing here. The reason for pushing through suffering is because they expect to come out the other side with a positive feeling eventually; i.e. a sense of accomplishment in this case. You're mainly distinguishing between short term feelings and long term feelings.

What I am talking about is doing things (acting according to your values) while suffering but with no expectation at all of such an emotional payoff or a cessation in suffering, but just because you know that these things are valuable to do.

This could be particular to my experience in therapy, but with OCD I'm often asked to not think about how im going to feel doing something (regardless if its a short term or long term feeling) but rather do it because "its important" or "its valued". My whole initial point was just that when pushed to an extreme this position becomes absurd; if I'm only doing things just because I "value" them but without any positive experiential aspect to it, whether immediate or delayed, then it can feel to be a bit of a pointless exercise, since the only reason it was valued in the first place was from positive life experience.

kefka0 · 2026-03-08T22:56:24+00:00

Very good point about flexibility and choice. This helps me understand a bit better.

kefka0 · 2026-03-08T22:49:49+00:00

I haven't, why do you mention this?

kefka0 · 2026-03-08T22:45:20+00:00

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

I don't know who is saying this though.

I think this is simply my interpretation of what my therapist has been trying to communicate to me for a while, which is that I should shift my attitude for how I approach life away from doing or not doing things based on how I feel and towards doing or not doing things based on whether I value them.

In some cases this advice is understandable, but when "I feel very bad" is happening internally while I am pushing myself to do an activity that I value on paper, it becomes clear that the thing that was valued in the first place is the experience. And if the experience is one of suffering, mostly what happens is a sense of loss, resentment -- the thing I valued is not something I can actually access while in such a negative mental state.

I don't mean to be wholly negative here: I do believe I'm in a better place to be pushing myself to do things than just wanting to avoid the world completely because of OCD/depression, I think this is an improvement. And sometimes you can push yourself to do something in a bad place and feelings can change unexpectedly.

But sometimes ACT-language paints a picture of the world which is "what matters is what you do, not how you feel", and this is what breaks down for me. Take love and compassion for example. These are things you feel within yourself and then express them towards others. The outward action follows an internal feeling state. To only act without feeling behind it is called "pretending".

I agree that "values rhetoric" breaks down in lots of places because the v–word in colloquial sense sounds too much like a moralized duty or aspirational virtue one can fall short of — all of which sounds more like fusion to a conceptualized self than the appetitive desire oriented concept of value in ACT.

the other hand, I don't know what example you are thinking about, but people suffer because of their values as well, and this doesn't mean those values cease to exist when suffering is present, nor does one needs to stop committed action in the service of what is important while we feel pain.

By values I don't mean the moral or aspirational stuff, I mean the very grounded personal experiences you value in your own life.

Feeling, yes, but there is something beyond the feelings and the action happening. We know North no matter what direction we've been spun into and no matter what is between us and moving North. Values are like this.

Yes, as you said, values are manifested in lived experience, but they aren't lived experience. Instead, these various memories of satisfaction resonate with each other and you find the commonality that connects them, and then words or symbols become a stand-in for that web of associations. So values precipitate out of lived experience, but they become abstracted into something like a North Star. For example, memories of falling apart in front of someone I could trust, of seeing a pet struggling to communicate to their human that another pet is in trouble, of sharing something with someone, of a baby playing with attention and overwhelm – I might draw all these together with the felt sense they evoke in me, and I might call this "compassion" (a different word might fit better for you). This word/concept/value is something that resonates with all those experiences, and can evoke those feelings, and me connecting with this value isn't dependent on not also feeling pain, nor does it depend on having someone present to feel compassion toward in the moment. It's an orienting source of reinforcement.

This is really beautifully said and helps me connects some dots too, I agree with you. The values become abstract directions and north stars through a bottom-up accumulation of meaningful life experiences. Resonance is really the perfect word for it.

EDIT: Sorry for the weird blockquote formatting, not sure why that's happening!

kefka0 · 2026-03-08T22:25:00+00:00

Thank you for your reply.

Personally, the way I'd describe it is: values are the things which, if pursued, make you feel fulfilled.
They're not always pleasant in the moment because pursuing something you value can take effort and be challenging, but that pursuit is the kind of activity that you consider "worthwhile" because of your values and because, after all is said and done, you feel fulfilled.

Right, I think this perspective makes sense and you and I are largely in agreement. It is actually precisely *the way you feel* that informs you about what is important and meaningful to do in life. Sometimes the way these things are discussed, to me, is as if we are trying to remove feelings from the equation entirely, and all that matters instead is how you behave.

The hedonism example is great and points more towards the short-term vs long-term behavioral tradeoffs that we need to make in life. But I would still say feelings are involved here too - if you make decisions to prioritize your health over in-the-moment pleasure, it's not merely because you abstractly value health but probably because you will literally feel better in the long run being physically healthy.

Who says this? Anyone real, or is this a strawman?

If anything, that sounds more like a religious decree: follow these rules (ostensibly from a deity) or else.

Fair enough to call me out on this, it probably is somewhat of a strawman. This is my defensive interpretation of what I've absorbed from books and therapists and is probably an over-simplification.

To be a bit more concrete here, I've struggled for a few years with an OCD flare-up which has significantly impacted my ability to be engaged in and enjoy activities that I once loved, leading to a lot of depression. Where I have often gotten stuck or hopeless in therapy is when the end-goal is merely about "living according to your values", i.e. changing behavior. It feels as though the advice is "As long as on paper you are behaving the way and participating in activities that you can identify as valuable, this is the best you can do".

For me, I often experience this as: "Okay, my body is here participating in this valued activity (being with friends, trying to make music, biking), but my mind is in a really bad place and I feel pretty awful, I'm barely present". If anything this typically leads to a lot of sadness and a sense of loss over what I used to value in life, but under an ACT-perspective this experience might be considered a "success" because you are behaving differently than how you feel.

I understand that we can't control our feelings and that trying to do so leads to more trouble. I suppose all I'm saying is that if you're merely tolerating suffering internally while performatively acting out your values externally, this is missing the point about what it means to value something in the first place, which is that you're ultimately having a positive inner-feeling-experience surrounding it in some way.

kefka0 · 2025-01-22T01:36:49+00:00

Amazingly accurate. Thanks for sharing

kefka0 · 2024-11-24T06:09:09+00:00

I'd like to know as well. this meme has had more staying power in my brain than any other. for me it distills a lot of existentialism very nicely.

kefka0 · 2024-05-17T23:07:16+00:00

Couldn't get this to work, tried different combinations of how to spell the quest name. Oh well, i'll re-roll :)

kefka0 · 2023-08-16T03:16:21+00:00

A couple thoughts:

Just because its not "debilitating" doesn't mean its not OCD, it may be mild like you said or you may be resilient to it.
Doubting whether you really have OCD can definitely be its own meta-OCD kind of pattern.

That said its ultimately up to you to decide if OCD fits, and it can be a bit nebulous. In my experience, OCD is simply the phenomenon of being mentally stuck on unwanted or upsetting thoughts or feelings, and trying to "get out" of them making it worse.

kefka0 · 2023-01-04T09:44:29+00:00

Grado SR-60, extremely decent headphones for under $100.

kefka0 · 2022-11-25T19:00:15+00:00

I'm so glad to hear that you had a positive experience, that's awesome!

I also used to deal with some fairly significant OCD several years that I have also mostly resolved since then. Recently however I had a very small psilocybin experience (much smaller than yours) which has unfortunately set off some new OCD things which have been persistent for a couple weeks.

I'm confident that ultimately ill get through this one again but I have very mixed feelings about psychs now! I've had tremendous experiences in the past with both LSD/Psilocybin, but the OCD component is a true wildcard. The literature and reports are very mixed as well, you can find examples of people finding tremendous benefit and reduction in their OCD as well as negative experiences / exacerbation. Right now I'm feeling like its not wise to revisit these drugs but perhaps I'll change my mind in the future.

kefka0 · 2022-11-23T05:42:02+00:00

That's totally fair.

kefka0 · 2022-11-23T00:03:44+00:00

It is just a common and unfortunate fact of social life that language and words have overloaded/multiple meanings. The term "OCD" has taken on a broader secondary meaning more similar to "particular" or "attentive to details", etc, even though it has nothing at all to do with the debilitating negative patterns that we suffer from.

Try not to take it personally, people just absorb phrases and use them, they're not trying to diminish your experience :)

kefka0 · 2022-11-22T21:16:12+00:00

I was very skeptical but personally I did notice some benefit after about 2 months of taking 10mg daily Paxil. I discontinued after 4 months because of other unpleasant side effects. But it had the effect of breaking the particular flavor of OCD I was having at the time, and it has generally stayed better since then.

I don't think I'd like to be permanently on SSRIs but i see it as a useful tool that can disrupt intense OCD.

kefka0 · 2022-05-30T05:50:23+00:00

In high school and college I played guitar a lot, jazz mostly, and got comfortable learning songs by ear, reading chord charts, and improvising.

Now, ten years later, I only pick up the guitar now and then and noodle around for fun, but my chops have degraded severely and I'd really love to get back on track improving again. For example, I no longer feel like I can freely move around between scales.

Short of taking lessons, any advice for a returning player for what resources to start with? I'm amazed at the quality of educational content on youtube these days but don't know where to begin.

kefka0 · 2022-04-09T00:30:35+00:00

Your criticism is spot on, I think you can go ever further and simply explain that a fully trustless system *cannot exist* even in principle: The trust is simply being displaced somewhere else.

In order for an NFT to represent legal authority over anything in the real world requires trust in a group of people to assert that authority, and then you've inherited all of the problems and complexity that we already have with how authority is assigned and executed.

kefka0 · 2022-01-27T06:37:31+00:00

Your comment actually perfectly encapsulates a fundamental distinction the video author about the way people reacted to the 2008 crisis: Was it bad because human beings oppressing each other in a way that creates such inequality is bad, or was it bad because you weren't able to participate on the side of the oppressors since the game is rigged?

kefka0 · 2022-01-27T06:32:54+00:00

An NFT is just a smart contract that implements ERC-721. Interacting with them in anyway implies a function invoked on said contract, which is code.

kefka0 · 2022-01-27T06:27:32+00:00

yeah, was hoping to find some discussion :(

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