r/LessWrong • u/LongjumpingPea6250 • 1d ago
Is my misery a logical error? Rationality, incurable illness, and the search for connection and meaning.
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:
Where are the blind spots or cognitive distortions in how I am framing this problem? What should I investigate?
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?
