Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and Depression

Life since childhood can seem to have diminishing returns as we take on responsibility. It’s not just that we childishly still want our crusts to be cut off our sandwiches, it’s not a matter of not wanting to put in the work, it’s a mix between everything being work, and not all that work seeming worth it. It becomes harder and hard to get excited about things the better we understand what they actually cost, and the less novel and meaningful the reward becomes. Not to mention that as a child we had no concept of the impossible, and we were fine excitedly putting in the effort for long periods of time without seeing or even looking for evidence that it would happen. We go so many years being oblivious of dreams that won’t come true, whether it is parents getting back together, a girl or guy liking you back, or just that your letter from Hogwarts will come in the mail. These expectations build up for so long unchecked to the point where they seem to become part of us, such an integral part that when the reality hits that they won’t happen, it’s shatters our concept of ourselves and life.

                There is a saying that time is money, and that money is power. This might seem like a stretch, but in subconsciously we make those assumptions, which is why the longer we expected or wished for something, the more we feel it should happen. This is not just because more time allows more justifications to build up for our right to something, it is time and energy are our innate resources, and if they have to effect to materialize our dreams, then what could?

Serious, what do we have to offer life in exchange for our dreams coming true?

Where can we turn for our dreams to come true? On one side you have Buddha telling us to just stop desiring because that is suffering, and Christ telling us that we must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, and on the other side we are offered mental techniques or medications to help us not care about our dreams and aspirations. Even if our desires are really ours or just the product of circumstance, and that giving them up would be a step towards real desire, it still hurts to have them stifled. It hurts that it seems everywhere we turn we are told to give up our dreams, and that realization gets dumped on us just as we really start thinking about things seriously. At some point, we abandon our dreams for something that seems more likely to be possible.

                Whereas before we dreamed of meaningful connection and to have a positive impact on the world, we sub-consciously settle for merely getting attention and making any kind of impact. We don’t settle completely, we use the other less meaningful goals to build up momentum for the bigger ones we actually want to do, but sometimes we get discouraged whether any amount of momentum will be enough. Also, at some point, our actual dreams and aspirations have taken so long and seemingly made so little progress that we start to lose sight of even what they were to start with. The goal we were trying to succeed at simplifies to just wanting success.

Success as a child was a given, it didn’t matter what you drew or finger-painted, it was a complete success, refrigerator worthy, only superseded not in importance but by the allotted space and magnets, as the mountain of almost identical-looking masterpieces that built up.

At some point we become aware of other people’s artistic creations, whether that is an older sibling or a class mate, and our “success” seems to pale in comparison. I didn’t do much with art because in fourth grade I just didn’t think I would ever be as good as Johnny P or Blake Z. I went on a search for what I was good at, as if there were some latent natural ability that would wake up merely by identifying what it was. I didn’t even consider that maybe Blake and Johnny and spend much more time drawing than I had, and waited for something that gave me the feeling of success that drawing no longer provided. I still see intrinsic beauty and value in it, but find it more than coincidence that I ended up doing something that no one else at my school did, motocross. That’s the easiest way to avoid the trouble of comparison, to exclude the possibility of it by isolation.

Today, in an ever more connected world, it is very difficult to isolate yourself from the trouble of comparison. I could spend all day watching people do things on dirt bikes I am positive I would never try, and things I would try but lack the resources. Sigmund Freud suggested that the main, or of the main driving forces in life was libidinal, or sexual. It does seem to be that way, being that all of the other driving factors, money, power, or fame could be considered the means to sex, because there aren’t that many A-sexual or abstinent rich, famous or powerful people. By why would we want sex so much? And how could that desire be pushed so far in our sub-conscious?

I think what we want is validation. It comes back to the same reason we liked our painting pinned on the fridge. We are all exploring life, and because so much of that exploration process is filled with people telling us we are doing it wrong, that we want validation we are doing it right, and sex is the highest and most intimate form of validation. People they love us most, or that we are the most important to them, but actions are louder than words, and exclusive rights to sex with someone sub-consciously is also exclusive validation that we are the best to that person.

We go from feeling good about how many and how bright of colors we used, to feeling dumb when someone points out that trees are brown not red. We hear it so repetitively that we start to believe they are real, that this or that is annoying, gross, messy, lame, pathetic, odd, creepy, icky, noisy or rude. Not only are we taught that those things are real, but that they trump any other positive quality we believe something has.  This puts our focus on identifying and avoiding those first, rather than Identifying and pursuing positive qualities first. How often have we not pursued something because we were scared others would think it was lame, and then later wish we had? Isn’t that a lose-lose situation?

There is so much in life we are anxious about doing and depressed about not doing. This means it feels like we are stuck with a choice whether we would rather suffer the anxiety or depression of each of our actions.

This lose-lose situation is not just in our heads, or just a by-product of comparison, we live in a physical world of logic, and because we are conscious, we also live in a world of meaning and value. Most decisions are not merely between what is logical or more logical, or what is meaningful or more meaningful, but trying to optimize both. When we come down to two options, one is usually at least slightly more logical, but the other is at least slightly more meaningful. How does this play our in the trouble of comparison?

Imagine that you are in the Olympics, and there are two judges, one judging you for speed skating, and the other for ice dancing, what would you do? If you tried to do both, then there would be no way to win at either. We might try to optimize our total score by getting a 5/10 for speed and a 5/10 for dancing, but feel bad when we see that someone else got a perfect 10/10 for speed, and another got a 10/10 for dancing. The question, is whether our overall score is adding the two scores together, or multiplying them. Because if we are trying to maximize the area of square, the most surface area would come from each side being five, making the area 25, while scoring 10 and 0 would lead to a surface area of zero. Why does this matter?

What we are trying to achieve determines what we do and what we expect to get out of it. All frustration can be boiled down to that we were expecting something different to happen. Yes, that seems obvious, but there is in implication that is useful. I am not going to say that we should just get rid of expectations in order to avoid frustration, but that we should make sure that our expectations are not lose-lose situations. The biggest lose-lose situation in life we can put ourselves in is that an action can contain perfect logic and meaning, and taking perfect to mean that an action’s value and logic be universally undeniable. How does this play out in ordinary life?

Money is a logical resource, and attaining money is a logical process. When we do something meaningful, it can’t directly have to do with money. We don’t stop to help someone change a tire on the side of the road in the rain and then send them a bill for it and call it a good deed. However, just the absence of a money transaction does not make an action a good deed, and having money helps us do some good deeds that we couldn’t otherwise. For example, almost single-handedly, Bill and Melinda Gates have almost tacked the malaria epidemic in Africa that was claiming millions of lives each year. They were only able to do this because of their successful business ventures. We all might know people that are always working, people that work eighty or more hours a week, and have noticed that they don’t have time to enjoy their financial success.

Bill gates retired at 52, meanwhile most of the richest people in world, or rich people in general work well into their sixties or beyond; many don’t stop working till death knocks on their door. There are limits to both logic and meaning. Logic by itself when it goes beyond its bounds and encroaches on the realm of meaning, happens for example when Hilter did medical testing on prisoners of war. It logically makes sense to advance the science of benefit for the people you do like at the expense of the people you don’t like, but it is beyond meaningless. The times we push logic passed where it is meaningful into what is meaningless is usually not like Hilter, but meaningless none the less. I think Bill Gates is a good example of balancing logic and meaning, and I he is one of the people who have optimized the combination of both better than most anyone else.

Looking at the salaries of CEOs of large charities shows how there is a vast difference between how much good is done. This shows that meaning without logic is not very meaningful. It is very illogical to not use resources given to charity for the actual charitable cause. This is not merely unethical by the CEO for taking so much of the money, but illogical for anyone working for or donating to that charity.

Adding logic to what is meaningful only goes so far though. There are countless movies, books, and real like examples where a meaningful cause became too logical. Those movies usually have to do with some computer system build to protect people, where the computer learns that it has to control people in order to protect them. Star Wars Imperial force is not the only group to try and get rid of poverty and violence by bringing a strict and brutally enforced order, Hilter almost succeeded in doing that. That is why Time magazine label him Person of the Year in 1938.

Understanding the line between adding too much logic into what is meaningful probably doesn’t happen until we have a close friend or family member that is doing something self-destructive, and we consider how much we should get involved. I have a close friend that posted on social media, “Going to Bay area, looking for trouble.” I remember wanting to say something, but didn’t want him to accuse me of trying to be his parent, and then rebelling even more to prove a point. Well, he went, and he found trouble, and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital because of a stab wound to the chest. I’ve thought about it many times, what if I would have known and kidnapped him? What if instead of spending the day at a baseball game and at night cruising bars looking for a fight, that he spent the day and night with his hands and feet tied up?

As stupid as his actions sound, he wasn’t a gang-banger, just a hick that liked to get drunk and box each other. The problem was that everyone in his small town felt the same as him, but people in the bay area didn’t understand the game. It was a stupid game, and so I don’t blame them for no understanding. The question is not whether my friend’s actions were stupid or not, but that whether it would be meaningful to kidnap a friend to save their life?

How does this apply to depression and anxiety?

Meaning or value is something we can become aware of, and logic is something that we become more capable of using through imagination. There is a lot of meaning to be aware of, and so much false meaning we can contrive from or project onto things. Can’t we just filter out the illogical and hyper-logical from the world of meaning? Yes… but only once we realize that is what is happening, because our natural filtering process will filter out most of the false positive and retain all of the false negative. This means that it will see like there is a lot more negative things to be aware of compared to positive things, which depresses our motivation to see and interact with things because most seem negative.

The natural process of filtering is not some sub-conscious self-sabotaging drive, but a logical outcome of how assumptions are naturally challenged or tested. If we project positive meaning onto things then we will be more willing to do them, and therefore more likely to find that they are false. If we project negative meaning on things, likely we are not going to do it, and therefore not likely to find out that they are false. Awareness that is selectively challenges the positive false assumptions leads to depression. Awareness that selectively challenges negative false assumptions leads to some kind of manic psychosis.

We are fundamentally an awareness of meaning, and imagination of logic, and a will-power. If our imagination selectively challenges the positive false expectations, it leads to anxiety. If our imagination selectively challenges the negative false expectations, it leads to some kind of manic neurosis.

The way to balance out the natural pessimistic trend of experience, is to challenge all assumptions and expectation. We must do a proper post-mortem analysis of all of our actions, instead of some hasty generalized success or failure judgment. Nothing we do will be so good that it will be impossible to improve, and nothing will be so bad that they will be no part of it worth repeating. Most of our actions will have probably about half of the components worth repeating and half not worth repeating. As we formulate new ideas preserving the components worth repeating and excluding the components not worth repeating, after we try that idea out, will we find even more worth repeating. This process leads us to better and better actions and more and more accurate assumptions and expectations.

Success, especially if what is meant by it is perfection, is what promotes us selectively challenging our assumptions and expectations in order to feel successful. We have to realize that success in that context is an illusion, and that at some point we have to find a balance between what is logical and what is meaningful, even if that feels life failure when compared to other people who just pursue one or the other.

Optimizing meaning and logic is a process of trial and error, and it will be hard to not compare ourselves to others while we do it, but it is a choice better the difficulty of not comparing, and the difficulty of living with depression or anxiety.

Challenging our assumptions and expectations should be exciting, because we will benefit from them improving. Two factors I have seen making this process difficult even if we exclude comparison with others, is our idea of humility/pride, and selfishness/altruism. Somehow the ideas of humility and altruism has become distorted to mean that we shouldn’t be happy about anything we do, and shouldn’t do anything that benefits ourselves. This is wrong, we should be happy to see positive progress wherever it is, and promote positive progress wherever we can, including in ourselves. Our response to discovering in the post-mortem of our action that it was relatively selfish should not be to beat ourselves up for it, but to sort through what components made it selfish, and how those components could be replaced to make it not selfish. When we just beat ourselves up from an action, it makes us not want to repeat any part of it, and we are more likely to repeat the action, because we didn’t separate out the good components of the action from the bad, and just repeat the action when the conditions seem better instead of improve the action for when the conditions are the same again.

It is a common mentality in life to “find what works, and keep repeating it.” This gives the illusion of some reachable final destination, and once we feel like we have gotten there, when it becomes apparent that it wasn’t the final destination, we are tempted to blame something or someone else, rather than accept that we never should have stopped moving forward in the first place. Happiness in life is not something we can just sprint towards so we can enjoy more time being there, it is a journey where we slowly shed all of the falseness in our assumptions and expectations and can see things for what they really are, and do what really is worth doing. Every sad mistake we have done in our life we did expecting that it would make us happy. What an amazing think to be confident that doing what we think will make us happy really will. That confidence only comes from testing assumptions and expectations, and thoughtfully and meaningfully forming new ones.

There are a lot of erroneous assumptions and expectations in life that we have to challenge, and since each time we successfully challenge them we are finding in what ways we were wrong, it feels like failing, but it we make it a game it can be fun. Most of the erroneous assumptions and expectations are not our to own anyway, they are older than civilization, and were passed down to us, it is just a right of passage that each of us have to debunk them one by one.

In our defense, the more core assumption we are born with thought true and meaningful, it is very difficult to defend, and that is, “Love is always enough, and that we are always enough.” Two good assumptions to challenge are what love is, and what enough it. Understanding what love and enough are will help us know what to expect from them.