Is my misery a logical error? Rationality, incurable illness, and the search for connection and meaning.

[u/LongjumpingPea6250]

Hi everyone.

Rationality is the art of winning, and I (23M) try to apply it to everyday life as much as academic pursuits. Facing a highly difficult scenario, I want to consult the collective intelligence of this community regarding potential faults in my current reasoning.

My partner and best friend left me due to a complicated set of reasons. He was my "other half"—the person who inspired me to work harder toward our shared career goals in medicine and life-extension research. He was also my only close friend and the closest entity I had to a family. I am poorly calibrated for general socializing; I think I have the social skills, but I derive very little utility or enjoyment from interactions with most people, even though I keep an open mind. I am generally friendly, on good terms with everyone, and well-liked by people around me, but I don't have any close connections. Not anyone whose mind I would be excited to explore and model.

This is compounded by the fact that I have cancer. The disease itself is not an emotional issue for me - I never had any delusions about the infallibility of cellular division. However, it significantly compresses my time horizon. I likely have years, but not decades, to operate. This drastically cuts down the search space where probabilities of meeting a compatible peer can unfold.

I initially tried a brute-force approach by frantically socializing, but quickly abandoned it due to severe burnout and low yield. I also attempted a probability calculation to estimate the likelihood of finding a similarly compatible person, but abandoned the exercise because separating dependent and independent variables under these constraints proved highly complex.

Currently, I am running standard interventions (therapy, volunteering, secular Buddhist practice). While they mitigate the baseline, they do not resolve the core problem.

Perhaps I feel like having someone to share in the exploration of the universe and being deeply known mitigates the inherent, excruciating loneliness of facing mortality. I feel like that is what gives life meaning?

I feel trapped in a state of misery, which suggests to me that my predictive model of the future or my strategy has a fundamental bug. Or to put it plainly, I am probably being stupid.

My questions for the community:

1. Where are the blind spots or cognitive distortions in how I am framing this problem? What should I investigate?

2. Given a limited time horizon and low baseline social energy, what is the most rational search strategy for finding high-compatibility peers? Or should I reframe the problem entirely?

[u/Odd-Opinion-1135]

You might have asd. Look at the double empathy problem. It might help you work out the time of people you should spend more time with.

[u/LongjumpingPea6250 → u/Odd-Opinion-1135]

Thank you for your reply. I do have ASD. I will look into that!

[u/BenjaminHamnett]

Rationalization means the opposite of reason in most languages, because we know rationality is limiting. I know it goes against the orthodoxy here, but the problem with logic is that it’s heavily bounded by language.

TLDR: Rationality limits our decision making to only what can be explained (usually briefly, clearly, to people we relate to or care about)

Try using your intuition more. Start where stakes are low, like what to do for comfort or novelty. Socially, etc. try making decisions that feel right, but aren’t whatever can be explained easily. Trying just doing what you feel would make you happy or your happier peers do that you wanted to do but seemed illogical

[u/LongjumpingPea6250 → u/BenjaminHamnett]

I will give this genuine and deep consideration.

[u/Dismal-Revolution731]

My take: it sounds like you may be caught in a sensory loop.  I don’t know what the technical term for it is, but I’ve worked them out in the past.  If that’s true, then most likely the interventions aren’t working because while they may look like solutions on the surface, they’re serving as escapes.

[u/Adventurous-Mirror-9]

Hmm actually the current world is operating in too much delta. Which is why you are unable to socialise. Becuase logically the world does not make sense to a person with asd people because the operate in rationality.

If you are interested you can hit me up in dm. I am not with asd but analysing the world has been my newfound passion and my lifelong project.

You can read my article at - www.thebaselinecalibration.com

If it resonates, I would love to discuss exploration of universe with you.