> Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.

Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice.

But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?

And if you do encounter that invalidates those beliefs and makes it obvious that they are wrong - can you still hold them? Definitionally I would say once you know that they're false they are no longer your beliefs.

Suppose I believe that humanity is facing incredible social, economic, technological, and environmental threats and yet our governments and societies cannot even agree that these are threats and when they do their reactions are half-hearted; that I believe the economic system we in has provided lots of powerful people and lots of ordinary people with a vested interest in protecting the most destructive parts of our status quo; and that I think most of these problems are incredibly time sensitive and if we can't address them in the next half-century then we will see cascading failures in the environment and human civilization that cause incredible amounts of death and hardship.

This all sounds very bleak, so you have to imagine that seeing peoples' comments about how pessimism is bad for your mental state, how we should be optimistic about the future because theoretically all our problems are solvable, and how we've solved problems in the past so we'll definitely solve these ones too just bounces off of that. It often feels like people are talking around the major structural problems that are not on trajectory to being solved by focusing on little bits of tech that seem like maybe they'd help in a way or extrapolating lines out from the last that can't obviously be extrapolated.

> The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?

These beliefs, from your example, are something I arrived at through reason. They are always subject to change.

I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.

I do share your concerns, your beliefs, as you described them. There are many, many different perspectives at play there, which is one reason why it is such a difficult problem to solve, from a grand-scheme-of-things perspective. We are only human, after all.

> I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.

You don't choose your beliefs. You choose your actions. You don't choose to believe generosity is good; you choose to follow a code of generosity. Conversely you don't choose to believe that your own interests and self-preservation are paramount; you choose to follow a code that reflects that belief. It is not a could-have-gone-either-way single choice you make in a single moment. If you try to follow a code that is deeply discordant with your actual beliefs you will struggle with it forever. Which is why "choose optimism", which seems to be the dominant opinion in TFA and this thread, is such garbage advice. Frankly I think a much better avenue of advice to give is telling people who are deeply afraid about the future of the world how to productively cope with it instead of telling them to pantomime a belief that everything's gonna turn out swell.

In my life I've made the conscious choice not to worry too much about the existential problems that I believe will utterly destroy civilization as we know it. I did this because I need to function in society - make friends, pay the bills, marry the husband, buy the house and so on. But this is not optimism; it's not even productive pessimism; it's a selfish decision to ignore the bleak future and focus on living my own happy life and insulating myself from the worst of what's to come.

> You don't choose your beliefs.

That's a completely unsupported statement presented as fact; therefore I'll dismiss it with just as much effort.

I've actually spent quite a bit of writing in this thread explaining why I'm convinced of this.