I definitely agree with the attitude expressed in this thread that it's impossible to know what the actual cause is due to how lacking our knowledge is. There's such a large number of factors at play in terms of why someone might feel the way they do that the idea that someone can claim to know the answer, especially if that answer is based on psychology, is crazy to me. There's no way currently to truly isolate and study every variable of what shapes a person, nor do we know of every variable; everything we 'know' currently is just observation and theory. As for what I personally think of why I am the way I am, I suppose it's a mix of both. Maybe circumstances or genetics is what created my current mental state. I do hear that the way we feel is a "rational response to society/the state of life/something" and that's probably true to an extent, but I also wonder what the rational response really is considering there are people who seem to be fine with life how it is. So we must have different mental states, which means what's rational can change depending on the perspective, considering what's painful to me might not be to someone else. If only I knew what existence was like from a different perspective (although I think it would be impossible to know another existence in the same way I do my own and keep true knowledge of both even theoretically, it would just turn into a memory different than how it was). It's odd how we can accept that people have different tastes for things like food, as well as having different skill sets for different tasks, but if not everyone adapts to how life and society is then they're weak or something. That's also why I believe that there's no one ideal utopia or set of policies.
