What you're referring to is the WYSIATI principle. There's a tendency for us to hyper focus on a few select areas without being able to process or recognize the existence of a broader sets of information that is beyond the immediate horizon. I appreciate the sentiment and the recommendation to relax, but I'm well aware of the cognitive bias and I've spent the last 7 years cultivating habits to minimize it.
So in other words you have no inclination to try to relax, and feel as if you know best in how to handle the situation you've found yourself trapped in?
If that's true, why are you asking questions like this? Are you just looking for yes-men or are you looking for a contrast from others that'd stand to work as a prompt or talking point?
If you already feel like you know enough, why are you asking people who you'd find to be beneath you, as confirmation that your answer must be superior?
Beyond relaxing, taking a step back and looking into tbe broader subject theme helps you make headway. Like, for example, instead of hyper focusing on mirror neurons as an explanation for empathy or on empathy being a sliding scale, stepping back and looking into qualia, philosophy, religion, neuroscience as a whole, the origin of consciousness, linguistics, other people's thoughts, yourself, for answers, would probably let you think outside the box.
As I responded with towards BT, even if it's not Mirror Neurons specifically it still serves as a shorthand reference towards such automatic mimicry.
Surely you've seen emotional contagion happen right, regardless of which path you've seen it from or what filter you process it through? I ask because there are people on this forum who've either said it's not real or that it's like watching aliens communicate.
Same applies to this discussion, to some extent. Instead of hyperfocusing on the word smart, or how I've expressed myself, how what I said made you feel, or how I must be saying what I'm saying because of some deeprooted issues, you could make more headway by seriously considering that I am right, entertaining that thought, and placing it in the context of everything you know.
All I'm doing here is throwing my two cents at you to give you the opportunity to carry what was said, and what would saying you're right in this case do other than further the path you've already found yourself on that you find frustrating? When someone corners themselves the only way out is seeking newer answers, even if those answers at first glance might look worse.
It's kind of like feeling too hyper to watch a really good movie, only to find yourself able to watch and enjoy it after five or ten minutes of it have passed, or like dipping a toe into the hot tub and resisting the urge to see the heat as threatening.
If there's other paths you could take, and potential root causes for what has you act that way, what good does telling you to keep up something that frustrates you if it doesn't promise to go anywhere new? Which one of us is the one with the problem in this specific scenario, and if it's you, why should it be me doing all your research for you rather than throwing forward the appearances as I see them as a comparison? I'm not being paid to help you or anything, I'm just talking how I see it.
I likely won't have the answers, and even if I did people tend to resent that it did not come from themselves. All I have the ability to really do here is engage in conversation and, potentially, be a reference that comes up later in life. Even simply seeing where another is coming from can combine with their perspective into an answer they didn't intend to give that otherwise ends up working for that person.
It's like meeting a drug dealer who, after enough talking to him or her, ends up semi-inspirational about the idea of being "Self-Made". You don't then have to start dealing drugs to be self-made, but coming from them it had the room to translate into other areas more generally, maybe in combination with something the listener already knew but didn't have all the puzzle pieces for.
Taking the journey with an open mind is the only real advice I have, as what works for me is liable to not be your answer just like the hypothetical drug dealer, or from talking to other religious people outside of your own path still otherwise having sound advice.
You're unable to, because it conflicts with what you see in your immediate horizon, so as a proponent of Occam's razor, you reject it. But Occam's razor only tells us what to expect, and you expect to see what you have already seen. Only a fool follows that monk when it comes to exploring new frontiers, because then there's nothing to explore.
Next to nothing is new, simply new for the individual. As such a monk could help expand someone's horizons if they were not already a monk to begin with.
Even just sitting in a temple in silence can be a new experience if you've never been and done it before, just as much as one's first few times at a spa or taking a cooking class or something.
The aspiration of peace must be pursued and then cultivated, and plenty of people have different brands of shorthand towards otherwise similar answers. What one calls "A Retreat" or "A Spirit Journey" I might call a vacation, but that doesn't stop the underlying things going on in spite of calling it different things and seeing it in different ways (beyond our perceptions of it at least).
That's a part of what I mean by nonlinear thinking. It takes energy, except when you're in the "zone".
What are you getting out of spending that additional energy though, other than frustration that the answers continue to elude you?
What steps have you taken to try to calm down the fixations when they occur? From what I've seen from your behaviors they tend to build up until you claim you are acting unlike yourself and retreat from the scenario entirely.
