Analects

What’s making kids not alright? And some on how to make them alright. Good notes on social media and it’s value, not just harm. Also coping:

There’s coping by expressing what we’re feeling, and there’s coping by taming or bringing back under control our emotions … if we start on the expressing category, there’s talking about what we’re feeling and seeking social support … listen to music … make things … art … And then there’s the taming category. whether it’s going for a walk or taking a bath or finding a food that we love and enjoying it or getting with a TV show that we know we’re going to leave the end of the episode feeling better than we did when we started. And I think, if we can bring coping forward as the thing to focus on — the distress, that is a done deal.

See also social media might not be making us miserable.

Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs? Maybe because it makes us feel connected to others.

The Quest To Quantify Our Senses:

our new sensing machines more accurately capture and analyze the microtime and microspace of our breath, heartbeat, brainwaves, muscle tension, or reaction times. But they do this for another reason. Our sensing machines now conceive and create techniques that aim to fulfill that long sought-after dream of those forgotten 19th-century researchers like Fechner and Marey: to become one with what Fechner called the animated substance of the technological world itself.

Do feelings have a ‘hard problem’?

Author recaps the hard problem of consciousness:

There seems to be no need for consciousness. Physics wouldn’t care if we were all “zombies”. Why aren’t we?

I like to look at it this way:

1. We are alive.
2. We are conscious.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. But consciousness can’t “do” anything.
5. Huh?

Then makes the same claim about feelings:

Well, why do we have feelings? Consider this variant of our earlier puzzle.

1. We are alive.
2. We have feelings.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. We feel good when we do stuff that would help propagate the genes of someone in a hunter/gatherer band.
5. But feelings can’t “do” anything.
6. The hell?

Interesting, but I think this is a category error. Feelings are the natural extension of a nervous system and the equivalent in non-nervous animals.

Animals Trapped In Human Bodies. A profile on therians.

The problem of news from nowhere. See also my article:

politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning … In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair

Why progressives? The article suggests that conservatives: “care less about politics” and “conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them”. But one wonders if it’s simply that the solutions to conservative problems seem more tractable on the surface: a rejection of change, versus the welcoming of it.

Conspiracies are the price of a complex, liberal society:

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent.

Opinion piece, but some good points. See also political polarisation is a lie for a bit on this from me.

How to be a happy nihilist

Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression. Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout. The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters.

and

The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs

and

When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap? … when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee.

Is ‘feeling fat’ really a manifestation of underlying sadness?

those with eating disorders aren’t alone in describing changes in their experience of body size. But why take any of these reports seriously? Perhaps those with eating disorders, anaesthesia experiences, and Alice in Wonderland syndrome are equally guilty of misidentifying their true feelings

and

This research suggests that, when many eating disorder sufferers report feeling fat, they aren’t misidentifying their emotions, but describing their proprioceptive experience. Their body maps represent them as larger, which causes them to physically feel larger, which they report as feeling fat. It is no wonder then that the clinical mantra ‘fat is not a feeling’ sometimes falls on deaf ears.

and

For clinicians and loved ones who hope to combat the harmful effect that feeling fat has on sufferers of eating disorders, a first step should be taking their complaints seriously. By accepting that, in some cases, feeling fat is a description of physical misperception, we can try to understand the nature and effect of these unsettling bodily experiences, and help sufferers realise them for what they are: deeply misleading. This isn’t to say that every complaint of feeling fat is a reference to misperception. Associating sadness or anxiety with feeling fat does occur, and clinicians have success in guiding clients to identify their true emotions. However, it should be kept as a live possibility that ‘feeling fat’ is sometimes used to describe misleading proprioceptive experiences of body size.

How to function in an increasingly polarized society. It feels like perhaps a more efficient method of functioning would be to just step back a little from the froth, but failing that, you might like these suggestions.

On the problematic popularisation of ‘trauma’:

trauma books may not be all that helpful for the type of suffering that most people are experiencing right now. “The word trauma is very popular these days,” van der Kolk told me. It’s also uselessly vague—a swirl of psychiatric diagnoses, folk wisdom, and popular misconceptions.

On ‘romantic friendship’:

Murdoch’s own account of love. In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), she theorised that love is vision perfected. It is seeing the other person with clarity, as she really is, in all her particularity and detail. In Murdoch’s view, love is a willingness or a choice to see another person this way. But it is also more than this. Love is a desire – a desire to really see the other person and to be seen by them in return.

On the value of nurture. “Exploring how different brain states accompany different life stages, Gopnik also makes a case that caring for the vulnerable, rather than ivory-tower philosophising, puts us in touch with our deepest humanity.”

What the fuck is dissociation? More common than you think.

Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature.

Adjusting your attitude is easier than you think:

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.

Another nice way of saying it. See also emotion and the mind, interruption theory.

On prosocial flaking.

Quite often, I will make an agreement, and then find myself regretting it. I’ll commit to spending a certain amount of hours helping someone with their problem, or I’ll agree to take part in an outing or a party or a project, or I’ll trade some item for a certain amount of value in return, and then later find that my predictions about how I would feel were pretty far off, and I’m unhappy.

With suggestions on how to rectify in a very rationalist way. Amusingly overcomplicated, but also insightful.

Everything is better than death? I’m left highly unconvinced by this. Here is an extract:

There is a popular idea that some very large amount of suffering is worse than death. I don’t subscribe to it

I predict that most (all?) ethical theories that assume that some amount of suffering is worse than death - have internal inconsistencies. 

My prediction is based on the following assumption:

• permanent death is the only brain state that can’t be reversed, given sufficient tech and time

• The non-reversibility is the key. 

What we get wrong about emotions.

In the past decade, scientists have begun to understand precisely how emotions and rationality act together. The key insight is that before your rational mind processes any information, the information must be selected and evaluated. That’s where emotion plays a dominant role. Each emotion—fear, disgust, anger—causes certain sensory data, memories, knowledge, and beliefs to be emphasized, and others downplayed, in your thought processes.

In case you weren’t already convinced by on emotion, autopoiesis, predicting human behaviour, emotion and the mind, etc.

The Rising Tide of Global Sadness. The gist in the conclusion is enough:

We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing the highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

On the inability to comprehend the mass-shooting phenomenon. No answers, but that’s the point.

In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject. It will talk about awkward interactions and sexual confusion and learning to love yourself in the face of trauma, but it’s afraid to touch this thing that seems to sum up the entire experience of modernity … What we have instead of the mass-shooting novel is the mass-shooting essay. Mass-shooting essays, classically, are full of solutions. They work in a fairly simple way: you pluck out a single, overriding factor that causes these events, and then you suggest how it might be sensibly eliminated …

The shortcomings of these essays aren’t the fault of the essayists. Srinivasan and Yang have perfectly reasonable ideas about why these things happen—the problem is that these things are not reasonable. They are outside the remit of the essay, a form in which things are supposed to be broken down into comprehensible pieces and coherently analyzed. This might be why the tone of these essays is shifting. Hopelessness is seeping in. The political system is inadequate to respond to these murders, but so, it seems, is our ordinary sensemaking apparatus, the power of reason, language itself. The best recent mass-shooting essays have been Elizabeth Bruenig’s in the Atlantic, but they’re less essay than threnody: a wail of helpless grief, crying the last whole truth left: “It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.”

Not new, but the crisis of masculinity.

Ambition doesn’t just happen; it has to be fired. The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal. It is not instilling in many boys the nurturing and emotional skills that are so desperately important today. A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys as developmentally disabled is not instilling in them a sense of confidence and competence.

Probably not a central issue, but an interesting one. More interestingly and concisely explored by Sebastian Junger. Perhaps my time in the military biases me, but Junger’s point that the military is one of the last places one can go to ‘become a man’ experientially checks out (and implies many issues).

A simple question to change how you feel:

there is actually a much simpler way to change how you feel, as my colleagues and I, along with other researchers, have found. It starts with answering the question ‘How do you feel?’ … research shows that the mere act of answering this question actually changes the emotions you are currently feeling.

Words to describe the heart.

The “torment of a tight spot” (amhas) … The “conceit of self-loathing” (omana) … the … delight that flows from being free of regrets (pamojja)

and so on. Fun.

Research article: midlife crises are less spectacular and more depressing, now:

This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history.

Evidence take to support Jaques:

in midlife a human being is forced to come to terms, painfully, with the certainty of his or her own eventual mortality.

taking steps is easy, standing still is hard