In Buddhism, excessive "need" language is identified with excessive clinging to some aspect of life that behaves contrary to your cravings or your understanding. (Upadana = clinging, tanha = craving, together with its positive and negative forms bhava-tanha and vibhava-tanha, "things must be so," "things must not be so.") The usual cure prescribed is to cure the ignorance that causes these illusions of reality, and/or detach from the clinging that causes your ignorance to inspire suffering (dukkha).

REBT is inspired by a number of philosophies: Stoicism, Buddhism, among others. If this more analytical approach to self-help appeals to you any, I might encourage you to check it out.

Cue the usual propaganda: "Oh but that's just real life," "it's the nature of our industry," "I'll agree things aren't perfect, but {nothing must change}," "I understand, but the true problem lies with {mistake we'll gladly keep making}," "it's bad, but at least we're not {killing babies}."

It's become almost automatic to associate pondering with perfectionism, and perfectionism with flaw.

I get the impression (again, mostly my own experiences, projected onto you) from your intense "the problem has to be me" convictions that you're simultaneously dealing with a lot of self-loathing, and that this self-loathing fills a void of answers to existential questions that no other source in your life can. In other words, your depression has become a maladaptive coping strategy. And if that's so, then it's not a long shot until your maladaptive coping strategies evolve from, "the problem is me" into "the solution would be/will be/should be/is my own death."

I derive these warnings from these whiffs of absolute, impossible-to-change miseries you mention: "my mind is exploding, I'm not aware of what I'm doing anymore"; "tomorrow it'll be something else I screwed up"; "I'm the only one with these problems."

So, if you have a dark voice inside your head that promises change or absolution only in return for your own physical or emotional injury (perhaps dressed up as "discipline"), be forewarned: This voice is a cognitive illusion. It does not care about you. It will hold your head underwater until you drown, and still be unhappy.

On another note: I would agree with others that you would be a strong candidate for an autism assessment. Like you say with ADD, autism would not a root cause of anything, but it might help you understand your situation more intuitively if it is involved.

... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.

> In some circumstances the only way to tell the difference between the two is what drugs work: if antidepressants help, it's Major Depression; if mood stabilizers help, it's Bipolar Depression.

This is ridiculous. There is zero mention in the DSM-5 or ICD-11 of "if these drugs work, it's this, otherwise it's this." I would question a psychiatrist dispositively making a diagnosis on such grounds.

Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself, or at least figure out 90% of it, consulting a suggestive sentence or two in the proof in order to get at that last 10%.

Maybe this observation of mine is not so unrelated after all. I don't regret many of the times that I've thrown up my hands at the rococo explanations or solutions given to me by LLMs and simply did my own work. The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.

Would have also been a fair point if Babbage had channeled his inner techbro and insisted it would directly replace human calculators; simple machines like Babbage's will chug along blindly on obviously erroneous data, but humans for all their sloppiness can often backtrack on errors.

What makes you think this is fundamentally different from cross-examining ELIZA? There is no guarantee that the LLM will help you converge on anything. Indeed actually calling out an LLM on BS tends to eventually produce an "I don't know and can't help you further" answer (as it should).

- Regulation like this is dangerous because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are limited;

- Regulation like this is hollow because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are unlimited.

"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.

> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?

Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.

Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.

> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.

And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.

I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.

You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."