This was wonderful to read! Thank you for the insight. It made me very happy
i'm so happy my words made you happy!!! ^^
feel 100% free to ask literally anything you'd like if any questions come up by the way; i want to help make things clear and also give space to any inquiries/challenges if anyone wants to express any as well :)
They just believe a switch will flip? I think that's just a bit ridiculous. I wish it were that way.
I think a lot of people portray feeling better as, y'know, you Do The Right Thing™ and you Feel Better™, like the flip of a switch, where Good Things Happen and Everything Is Better. And honestly sometimes when good things happen, it can make us feel better—but life is way more than happenstance events, it's also the general ebb and flow of things; it's the patterns we have across our days and weeks that can really hold our soul up.
Life is more than flipping of switches; there
is the real element of serendipity and "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", but that is merely one part of life; life is not merely what happens to us, but it is also the drives and curiosities we feel, it is an active relationship between what happens
inside of us, what happens inside other people, what occurs around us, what is within our reach, our current level of energy, the things we are aware of at any given moment, and so on and so forth, I could catalogue factors but I would not want to exhaust your attention, dear reader—life is more than trying to flip switches and turn lights on; it's also about how we wander about after sunset, walking around when it's dark out looking for something, and being blinded by lights in mornings too, and feeling the heat of mid day in the middle of a walk.
It is far more like ebb & flow than switches flipping. It's far more likes tides and cycles of days and nights and shades and sunrays than any fixed binary of "good" and "bad". We can experience multiple good and bad things at once, sometimes with each other, in tandem, in different selections; different handfuls from the possible flows our neurons can light in.
People should not be giving blind promises. They should be sitting with you and LISTENING first
before giving advice. I fully profress an agnosticism in such affairs. As David Foster Wallace said:
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.
and there totally are moments, minutes, perhaps even hours, maybe at some rough points even
days, where one's own body and mind mandate one to lay back and conserve energy, without the energy and nearby resource to strive forth in the manner one's dreams may theorize. Those moments are part of our life. And maybe we can understand those kinds of "low energy" moments as comparable to sleep; time our body takes to recharge or recover from either exhaustion or pain. I think in these moments, reminding ourselves of what we would
like to do if we had more energy—or in the case of absent direction, to try and find new things to do
later, once energy recovers—can seriously help make these moments not feel like lost time, but real
downtime, that adds clarity and ease to our more energized moments, by allowing us to have more readiness for them: in ways beyond just "having more energy".
We can plan the day after tomorrow when today feels exhausted and fucked. The reason why I say "plan the day after tomorrow" is because we are still trying to get through today, and we might not know what rhythm we will go into tomorrow with; so having that 2-day period of "relax today, try to gently make things more ready in the course of tomorrow, and do a few things day after tomorrow" can perhaps be an easier path ^^. Side note: there is a word for "day after tomorrow", it's called "
overmorrow". In case you wanted a specific word for it :3.
When people say "just get to tomorrow", they're giving a small piece of advice that
can have real use in context, but when it is isolated from that context, and presented alone, it can often feel confusing—and worse—invalidating.
You don't have to settle for feeling like every day will be bad and every tomorrow will be bad too; there
are things that can be done to change our days
.
Maybe we were not instructed on executive function, energy management, and other such things when we were younger, but it is
never too late to learn; for if we can cultivate these things, even over time, even piece by piece day by day, to the degree where we only have some executive function and planning capability after working on it piecemeal-style over a
few days here-and-there, that is still progress. It is the first step across the river. And by just making little steps, focusing on what is actually available and possible for us in this very moment in the course of our moments and hours and days, then this allows us to make further progress, by focusing on what is immediately possible ♥.
And that also involves recognizing what is
not immediately available too, and accepting that. It doesn't mean we have to be proud of our limitations at all; we may be unable to do something right now but be able to do it later; in a different state of body/mind, on a different day, in a different circumstance than our current day or week has going on right now.
Having a good life is not about checking boxes, but about having enough sources of good, sources of healing and processing, so much so that pain and fear have places to go and ways out of our lives; channels they can pass through, currents they can ebb and flow and be washed away in. Having good people to talk to is one of those refreshing currents; but outside of people, we have ourselves too—we have our own hobbies and interests; and even when we are not super functional, we can always reach into ourselves and try to remember the things we felt excited for or wanted to do, and pick back up on anywhere we may have left off there.
What
is the point? What
is the point of all this? Maybe there can be some fun in figuring that out too ♥. It's a lot more fun to explore what could be done, when we aren't held on, when we don't feel like our possibilities are exhausted. When we feel exhausted, our possibilities can feel exhausted, too.
I think that even with any past failures of ours, that there
are things we like doing more than others, things that feel more consequential and effective than others, things that make deeper effects upon us and people we love more than other things. It's all a spectrum. It's all subjective. It isn't always easy to figure out what The Right Thing™ to do is. I think what matters more is just figuring out something that is
good enough to do in this very moment, engaging ourselves with that, and trying to get some momentum going, the momentum of engagement. When we are engaged in a task we feel is genuinely interesting and has real effect (in any way we feel or imagine), then we will naturally want to have more energy to direct towards that task. And then we may think to ourselves "well if I am exhausted, I will not have energy for it; how can I have more energy?". In such a question we may find ourselves turning to pondering over our sleep habits, movement habits, food intake, water intake, the kinds of routines we have in our day and the effects of the other actions we do upon our mind and body, and countless other such things that have influences upon how we feel and the kind of energy we have that moment, hour, and day.
I think the past can be painful, it can have grief and regret, regret over missed opportunities and things we
wish we could have done, things we tried but wish we were successful at. It may very well be that many of those things we engaged in and wanted to succeed in are things that may actually be
intrinsically valuable to us personally. If that is the case, engaging these things again may bring up painful memories at first, but we can rediscover that enjoyment we had, if it is something we enjoy for its own sake. We can try exploring this for literally any and all things we may have enjoyed in the past. We can even try finding new things to do as well, if we feel our past is not useful with regards to things we can do now.
Now. Imagine you have a good amount of income provided to you for free; to where you would not have to worry about food, housing, transport, et cetera, and you can just live and chill. And imagine every day you wake up and go about your day and sleep with a great amount of energy, and perfect bodily health—psychologically freed on top of that—to where you truly are able to do what you like. What would you like to do with such a state?
Click this spoiler tag after deeply thinking about the above question; try to come up with at least three things to do :3.
Whichever thing(s) you may want to choose for that, ask yourself "do I want to do this for the experience of doing it, or for something that comes out of doing this?". If you want to do it "for its own sake", that is intrinsically motivated. If you want to do it for something the action causes or brings about, that is extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is good too :). But when you're in a state of struggling to find meaning in anything, making your personal sense of agency and capability rely on indirect effects of actions can cause you to end up withdrawing before anything comes out of it, which feels bad in a few ways. You feel the loss of having done something without effect, and it can make you feel less interested in future experiment as well. So pick something that is intrinsically motivating, something that may not be "productive" or "virtuous", but that does bring you a real spark of curiosity and interest, that drives you to do it, that drives you to engage in it more. Having that one stream of willing engagement in your life will seriously make things feel less pointless and hopeless. I won't say that it will wash away all feelings of pointlessness, but it can seriously help you feel you have at least one source of interesting and rich engagement, even amidst all other things that struggle to feel real or worthwhile at all. And once you have this one stream of activity in life, you can use that vantage to peer a bit further, and see if there are any other things you want to engage in as well, with your increased knowledge of what doing that thing is like for you, and with the increased energy and mobilization experienced from having active engagement in your life too.
All of this advice relates to what I told you about the vmPFC–DRN stuff above. Having those "activity streams" will stop your brain from releasing the gates of withdrawal.
I think it's okay to take breaks sometimes, but to me a break feels fulfilling when it feels like it is serving some purpose. A break is to recover and get more energy. But what's the point in having energy? Energy for
what? If we have energy without purpose, our brain senses that, and droops its shoulders and turns around, holding in the energy for next time, for whenever there is something clear to pour it into. People say we should live. Live for
what? We get to decide that.
We get to decide how we want to use our lives. We can look at all the options we have in life and pick any one that is within our reach; and more options can open up from doing previous things too. We should survey our options and see what is available, and choose something like this: where the possibility of even engaging in it lights us up a little inside. It's kind of like walking in a library and seeing a book we have heard a lot about, from an author we have personally heard so much of; a kind of recognition like that where our curiosity truly is dragged towards it in a harmonious and willing manner. Maybe it's not a book, but something else; maybe it's the idea of doing a specific thing for yourself or for others, or conferring some kind of benefit or craft to other people, or "the world" or "humanity". You can pick any thing you like :). You can even discard it later, and replace it with another thing you want more, too :Ɔ.
That's okay. You're allowed to explore, you're allowed to see what you like and don't live; what drives you on and what drives you off; what sustains and what peters out—you're
allowed to take your time to figure out those things ♥.
He who has a why to live for can bear any how.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
When we find something that is both intrinsically motivating and that leaves a result that we can observe or feel long after we've finished it, we find something that we will love to engage in. It may be difficult at times, but such a thing really does for us feel it has worth in doing, worth in following through with. And when we do these kinds of things more, naturally, we get better at it, just from the simple fact of having done it a bit more :3. We may not be super good at it at first, but we get better from experience; as Caesar said, "experientia docet" ("experience teaches").
And that reflects how our own brains work too.
Experience teaches. Our brains constantly update and learn from our current environments, trying to predict what may be possible next, trying to pull from what they see right now in the past, trying to understand things.
Feeling "hopeless" or like things are inescapable is not a sin, it's the result of us just trying our best in this current moment to figure things out under immense pressure with limited attention, knowledge, and resources. We are one of our greatest assets; our attention, our desires and drives, our pain, our pleasure, all of these are valuable instruments and compasses that can be used to slowly move in righter directions, even as we wander, too. It is okay to wander and figure things out; in fact this can help us chart out territories of functions and things too.
Feeling hopeless is a neurological output from a brain that has not experienced clear sensible feedback from its actions. When we don't experience clear feedback from our actions (not always our own fault, the modern world often does not give us this), and we are deprived of those clear action–effect feedback experiences again and again, day-in day-out, we can naturally feel like not only
most of our actions do not matter, but that
none of our actions matter; leading us to feel we are powerless to do anything to change what we feel in our everyday lives, short-term
and long-term.
And accepting that our own feelings are the results of our brain reading things, trying to figure things out, and trying to suggest a helpful way forward, does not necessarily mean that we have to go along with whatever we feel, nor dose it mean that we should deny and ignore all of our feelings. Because our feelings
are real. They
are useful information. They give us
imperfect information on unmet needs, and that is deeply valuable. We have good reasons for our bad feelings. This doesn't mean that we
have to react to them in XYZ way, but it
does mean that there is a very real layer of subjectivity when it comes to how we interpret their emotions and what they are trying to tell us, and what we think may actually resolve them.
Emotion → Interpretation → Motivation
We feel a desire. We try to understand where it is coming from. We try to figure out what might make it feel better. We do that thing.
Our brain pays attention to how that reaction goes. Did it feel better? Did it make the pain go away? If it did, it will likely think "yeah that's a good response" and remind you of it (often with emotion too) whenever you feel that same drive again.
If you feel hungry, and you eat a tuna sandwich, and it's tasty, your brain takes note. And the next time you feel hungry, you may find yourself desiring for a tuna sandwich
in particular. Because your brain pays attention to such things, and wants to figure things out so it can feel good.
Now let's say instead of a tuna sandwich we reach for a candy bar instead; and it is DELICIOUS,
buut it never makes us feel full, and we end up eating 3 candy bars and feeling exhausted and terrible, but full enough. We are probably going to lust after the candy bar again when hunger strikes.
So some pursuits can fulfill us (tuna sandwich) and others can excite our lust yet without filling us (candy bar). You could call those "unresolving pursuits" "proxies" for real fulfillment; like a food ad that can make us hungry without satisfying us. The worst part is that candy bars actually do create intense feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment (in the short term), but that these then turn into an unresolved feeling of either lingering hunger or just exhaustion, of not getting the substance we need.
We need to be careful about what kinds of actions we choose when we are seeking fulfillment or relaxation. We have to pick something that really does have at least the real possibility of ending up in fulfillment, of actually resolving our desire and impulse. Because our desires and impulses are not meant to rage forever without being relaxed or resolved in some way. They need to either be met or departed from; it's really stressful on the body and mind to have emotions forever firing without them actually pouring into anything, without them turning into at least
some kind of action—even if it is one that goes against the emotion but at least soothes it in some other way (like spending time in sunlight, washing your face, or listening to music when one feels overwhelmed/exhausted/twitchy). Our emotions are not inherently bad; they are sensitive chemical systems that interact with many things in our life—current sensory surroundings, internal biological states, actions, available relationships, et cetera—and there are many ways to reduce the sting of painful emotions, to not just merely "cope" but truly be in an active relationship with them, using them as information on what injures and pressures us, using them as data points on how to move towards a life where we are less stressed and depressed, where we actually feel security and agency in our own life, where we have quality connections with people we genuinely love and who genuinely care about us in turn, where we feel a sense of narrative from
new events in our lives shaking hands with things we learned and met before, and a rich variety of available pursuits and purposes to direct our energy towards, all while having an ebb and flow cycle we are genuinely content living within.
That kind of dream is not exactly my own life right now, but I
have felt the real benefits of having things to look forward to in my own life; a feeling of slowly growing and gaining stability and capability, that feeling of progress itself is a deeply healing and freedom-instilling thing for our lives. And we aren't always going to feel that way, not 100% of the time. We will have relapses and fallbacks, we will feel like at times we have good progress but then it gets interrupted, thwarted, or set back in some way—and that will hurt. But at least we will still have experienced the good of the rising tidal wave; and to have something good in our life in the first place is something that's worth tasting too. Better to have tasted and lost than to have never tasted at all.
I've felt the feelings of "pointlessness" and even inescapability as described in these words above in my own life too. That withdrawal state that our body seems to engage when it feels like there's no clear next goal, when the current state of awareness comes under an impression that there's naught to do, is one that is very real, and feels biological too. I think trying to take frequent breaks, with walking outside, drinking water, eating whenever we feel very hungry and it's been a good few hours since we last ate, or just taking a few minutes to breathe and walk around and let the mind wander about whatever before somehow stumbling into something important, all of this helps to keep us energized and mobilized, and make us feel less exhausted, and a to feel little bit better about this body and mind we're in.
Another really important thing I forgot to mention in the neuroscience explanation earlier. Maier & Seligman studied helplessness
from it being a pain response. The original 1967 experiment involved three groups of dogs. All groups were restrained to a harness, without an ability to jump out or anything. Group 1 and 2 each received electric shocks, but dogs in group 1 could press a button to turn off the shock, whereas group 2 could not. For group 1, the shock was actually inescapable in that environment, but for the other group, it was escapable. They did this shock like a lot of times, it was… (checks paper) 64 shocks. And after the shocking was done, they moved each group to a
new environment. This time, they could jump over a barrier to avoid the shock. Here is an
image of the second environment.
So now, for the dogs which were previously in an inescapable shock environment, the shock was now finally escapable, by jumping over a small barrier.
The dogs which were used to the shock being inescapable did not end up jumping over the barrier,
even though in this new environment, the real possibility actually existed to avoid the shock.
This is because experiencing the pain without available ways to soothe it or otherwise make it feel resolvable, can trigger the withdrawal state of "I am being subjected to pain; I don't think my actions are changing how the pain is happening, but at least I can endure it and save energy until it passes". A lot of this wiring occurred in older organisms where they didn't have advanced sensory perceptions, so basically all they could do was flail around and activate defensive responses, focusing on regeneration as opposed to advanced responses like checking for escape first or any such thing. Essentially, assuming agency is somewhat costly biologically; it takes energy and extra consideration, so, the way our brains have it wired is that helplessness is the
untriggered response, and feelings of agency and triggered whenever we have feedback from our environments that our actions matter and have real effects. Note that "environment" means a lot of things here—from your immediate surroundings, to what you do on your computer/devices, to how you feel about the level of change and influence you have upon the people in your relationships or whomever you meet, to even this forum if you come here often—to even the way you have plans organized or how your desk operates, how much connection you feel between what you intend to do and what gets done, all sorts of such things—ANYTHING where our actions could have different kinds of effects, is a potential "environment" for this circuitry to interact with.
Basically, continous pain, even when it comes in ebbs and flows—such pain that we feel we are unable to deal with or reduce in any way—can trigger the helplessness response. Personally, when I talk with people that I find trustworthy and reassuring (especially on a call; which is a chance I always treasure), and I happen to talk about what I feel and think, and when my pain feels seen and I receive ideas and notions that actually feel true and actually possible, that helps soothe me too; and the very kind of response I internally have to this, of "maybe things
can be soothed and perhaps even solved", that itself is a feeling, that itself is an event that rewires me a bit; because it is a
real experience of my pain being soothed and reduced, where available options (that I was not actively aware of before) are presented, that make me feel "even if I feel I don't have options
now, then I can find new options through talking to someone". Now, I'm not meaning to say that "talk to people and all your problems will instantly go away", but I mean to say that talking to a
proper, sensitive, thoughtful person, can really make pain feel more resolvable, more soothable, just through the direct experience of someone connecting with us in a tender and dignifying manner.
when we share the sentiments of those around us, we experience mutual pleasure in the correspondence of our feelings. If you and I both judge an action to be courageous, there is a satisfaction, a pleasure, in the very fact that we
agree that the action is courageous. But likewise, if we both judge an action to be cowardly, whilst we both experience displeasure whilst thinking about that act of cowardice, there is nonetheless a remaining psychological pleasure to be had in the fact that you and I, at least, agree in our overall negative judgement.
One result of this tendency to take pleasure in sharing the sentiments of others, Smith pointed out, was that having other people empathise with us can be a source of psychological relief. When you're feeling terrible, whilst another person may not be able to take away the reasons why you are feeling terrible, if they can make you feel that
they too know what it is like to feel terrible, and so they share your pain, then this correspondence inherently generates an independent mental pleasure for human beings. That pleasure may not, by itself, be enough to make you stop feeling terrible overall; it may not be enough to take away your pain. But it can certainly act as a balm, a soothing treatment for (psychological) suffering that can make your remaining pain easier to bear.
—
Suffering and Kindness, Paul Sager
You will see real life examples of this exact healing quality in many accounts of people's interactions here on the forum. Knowing that someone else feels what you feel, has gone through (or currently
is going through) something you yourself feel in your very own flesh and soulspace, is a truly touching thing. It makes us feel that "soothing of correspondence" Sager talks about above.
We need to tap into this quality, our capacity to soothe one another, and maybe what is best for the people we love most is not just being perfect all the time, but trying to be as human in our humanity as we can; to try and share in vulnerability whenever someone offers us the chance to be vulnerable, to open up in turn whenever someone opens up around us, to be there for each other, to acknowledge and express our own shared pains and desires and humanities, and to truly value this and regard it as enlightening for building more candid visions for our lives and for the lives of those we love, too.
I think that when we express care for someone who is in pain, when we
feel any expression of relaxation or touch of soothe felt by them, and even moreso when they explicitly express appreciation (or even imply it!!), then that is a very real case of us making an effect in life. Of us doing an act, and real feedback coming from it. That feeling of capability, of being able to be a good affect on people, that sense of agency and capacity of love and care truly is a life-giving thing. Our relation is life-sustaining. We can relate to others, for there are so many kinds of people in this world, that there are bound to be out there kinds of people, bundlefuls, whom share something touching with us, whom
we can touch as well.
Any kind of solution we provide to this issue of feeling pointless and struggling to have anything matter or mean anything in life
must not end up being totally nested within the individual and only me or only you. We should have some kind of personal purpose, yes, but that personal purpose is made even better if we can link it to something that can relate to other people, too. If you like drawing things, and find that to be a source of solace for you, then lean into that; and make that a source of personal richness. And then once you feel safe in that, feel free to reach outwards, and join hands with other people who find solace in that too; and then you can share solace in one another, as well; a double bond, both to humanity, as well as what you love to do,
for its own sake. (l'art pour l'art)
Energy, routine, ideas; these often come from inside the individual and xeir ideas, thoughts, feelings, recent days, et cetera; but they have the power to soak into that individual life, and spill over and colour the lives of others too. We are not "stuck in a body, stuck in a mind". The nature of our existence is that we inherently spill over into the lives of others. Even here. You find people who are able to find some solace in experiencing pain from similar things, many times even of similar life histories, even down to specific conditions as well. That matters. That is real.
And the healing and embrace and possibility felt from that goes beyond "getting good" or "removing the pain", but rediscovering one's own humanity, re
defining one's own humanity; transforming one's own personal value system, realizing that maybe we do have value beyond whatever systems or structures that were thrown onto us before, that maybe we DO get to influence what we value and love and think and do and feel. Not completely. There are tides and sways in the waters. But we
do still steer. Just because we don't have 100% control over every signal and cell in our body does not mean we still can choose some things, prefer others, and continue to exert a
real (not perceived) agency upon the matter of what is within our reach, what is inside our own minds, and what we do with our bodies, focus, words, and ideas. That is a choice that we should remind ourselves we have. We don't have 100% control over our bodies and focus, but perhaps we have more control than we thought :É”.
Maybe some of our more powerful drives and abilities are suppressed by pain and lack of specific direction and by social isolation in our very own lives. And if that is the case… that means change in those things will unlock feelings and real potential within us, potential that is described in words and ways that no other person in our life has worded it; potential freed from the infantilizing fantastic fantasies of "defining the generation" over everyone else, potential freed up, energy and words that can now be used to form our dreams however we like, in accordance with our
true desires and what we
actually would want to do given opportunity and time; and that may not sound like "I want to rule the country" or "change the world", it may sound like "I want to change
this in the life of people, as many people as I can, as deeply as I can".
Because even a small change, that affects our own self or other people, ripples outwards, because of how interconnected everything is. We influence the world just by continuing to exist in it. And we continue to exert influence over our very own life just by continuing to live it, too. We are trying to do what we feel would be best for us, trying to figure things out, trying to feel at peace. I think in such a key matter we must consider whatever is at hand, for I believe it is a matter worth considering, no matter where we are ♥.
And perhaps there may be such options that are less clear now, that can come into focus when we need them, such instrumental matters that may reveal themselves through us in pieces, through fiddling, through fucking around, such key and influential things that can open up apertures and gateways that we had not known coherently nor fluently before—and whenever we find such things out, may they continue to be revealed and reminded of, and may they make the good influence on our life that their possibility inspires and tastes within our own mind's eye. Let us continue to look, consider, and move towards what is possible and good. ♥
