Maybe I'm Too Critical Of Myself! Maybe I'm Too Hard On Myself! Maybe Just Maybe!
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1357105154326737
Maybe I Should Write Myself Something Like This! But Instead Of It Being Directed To My Body I'll Direct It To My Mind!
MY SOCIAL ANXIETY HAS COME BACK. I DON'T WANT TO BE AROUND ANYONE RIGHT NOW. I'M NERVOUS, SHAKY, SHY, JITTERY, AND INHIBITED RIGHT NOW. I REALLY DON'T WANT TO BE OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW, BUT I'M FORCING MYSELF TO BE OUTSIDE TO GET OVER IT (GET OVER MY ANXIETY). (I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SPEAK TO ANYONE RIGHT NOW BECAUSE THEY'LL SENSE MY NERVOUSNESS, NOR DO I WANT TO BE SEEN BECAUSE THEY'LL ALL LOOK AT ME!) IT'S PARALYZING!
P. D. Mangan Retweeted
"Being smart is a double-edged sword. Intelligent people appear to live longer, but many of the genes behind brilliance can also lead to autism, anxiety, and depression, according to two new massive genetic studies."
I'M A NERVOUS WRECK! I LACK CONFIDENCE. AND THIS IS MOSTLY DUE TO THE FACT THAT I'M A LOW STATUS MALE THAT'S BEEN OSTRACIZED (SHUNNED) BY THE GROUPS I WAS ONCE CONNECTED TO (i.e. FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND ACQUAINTANCES) BECAUSE OF THE RACIST, ATHEIST, EVOLUTIONIST THINGS I WRITE. MY DOPAMINE AND SEROTONIN LEVELS HAVE DROPPED AND WHEN THIS HAPPENS MY SOCIAL ANXIETY INCREASES! (TIME TO DRINK.)
http://veryayshun.blogspot.com/2014/08/why-is-speaking-in-group-setting-such.html
I'M NEUROTIC. I SCORE HIGH ON NEUROTICISM. THAT MEANS I EASILY BECOME ANXIOUS AND DEPRESSED. PEOPLE LIKE ME TEND NOT TO FUNCTIONAL WELL IN SOCIETY (SURVIVE) AND ATTRACT MATES (HAVE REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS). RELIGION AND BELIEF IN A GOD COULD PROBABLY HELP QUELL THIS ANXIETY, BUT SINCE I'M AN EVOLUTIONIST, ATHEIST I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD OR PRACTICE A RELIGION. DEVELOPING CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY COULD PROBABLY QUELL THIS DEPRESSION, BUT THE INDIVIDUALISTIC LIFESTYLES WE LEAD IN MODERN SOCIETY COUPLED WITH MY DISAGREEABLENESS (MY PESSIMISM AND CANTANKEROUSNESS) AND SOCIAL ANXIETY PREVENT THIS. (WHY GET A JOB WHEN THE WORK YOU DO WILL, FOR THE MOST PART, BE MEANINGLESS AND WON'T ALLOW YOU TO MAKE ENOUGH MONEY TO MOVE UP IN SOCIAL CLASS OR EVEN MAINTAIN YOUR POSITION IN THE SOCIAL CLASS YOU WERE RAISED IN AND THE LIFESTYLE YOU'VE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO? WHY DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP WHEN THE FEMALE YOU'RE DEVELOPING A RELATIONSHIP WITH IS ONLY DEVELOPING A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU BECAUSE SHE WANTS SEX, MONEY ($1), GOOD GENES, ATTENTION, AFFECTION, STATUS, A GOOD REPUTATION OR WHAT HAVE YOU FROM YOU? AND WILL EVENTUALLY LEAVE YOU? WHY HAVE CHILDREN WHEN THOSE CHILDREN WON'T HAVE THE GENETIC MAKEUP YOU WANT AND WILL EVENTUALLY REPRODUCE WITH MATES YOU WON'T WANT THEM TO MATE WITH? I HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR RIGHT NOW. I'LL ONLY HAVE SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR ONCE I GET TO HAWAII!MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN MY FATHER'S ADVICE* AND KILLED MYSELF! IT'S NOT TOO LATE. MAYBE I STILL CANN!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWO_O4ScAsg
I'M NEUROTIC. I SCORE HIGH ON NEUROTICISM. THAT MEANS I EASILY BECOME ANXIOUS AND DEPRESSED. PEOPLE LIKE ME TEND NOT TO FUNCTIONAL WELL IN SOCIETY (SURVIVE) AND ATTRACT MATES (HAVE REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS). RELIGION AND BELIEF IN A GOD COULD PROBABLY HELP QUELL THIS ANXIETY, BUT SINCE I'M AN EVOLUTIONIST, ATHEIST I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD OR PRACTICE A RELIGION. DEVELOPING CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY COULD PROBABLY QUELL THIS DEPRESSION, BUT THE INDIVIDUALISTIC LIFESTYLES WE LEAD IN MODERN SOCIETY COUPLED WITH MY DISAGREEABLENESS (MY PESSIMISM AND CANTANKEROUSNESS) AND SOCIAL ANXIETY PREVENT THIS. (WHY GET A JOB WHEN THE WORK YOU DO WILL, FOR THE MOST PART, BE MEANINGLESS AND WON'T ALLOW YOU TO MAKE ENOUGH MONEY TO MOVE UP IN SOCIAL CLASS OR EVEN MAINTAIN YOUR POSITION IN THE SOCIAL CLASS YOU WERE RAISED IN AND THE LIFESTYLE YOU'VE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO? WHY DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP WHEN THE FEMALE YOU'RE DEVELOPING A RELATIONSHIP WITH IS ONLY DEVELOPING A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU BECAUSE SHE WANTS SEX, MONEY ($1), GOOD GENES, ATTENTION, AFFECTION, STATUS, A GOOD REPUTATION OR WHAT HAVE YOU FROM YOU? AND WILL EVENTUALLY LEAVE YOU? WHY HAVE CHILDREN WHEN THOSE CHILDREN WON'T HAVE THE GENETIC MAKEUP YOU WANT AND WILL EVENTUALLY REPRODUCE WITH MATES YOU WON'T WANT THEM TO MATE WITH? I HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR RIGHT NOW. I'LL ONLY HAVE SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR ONCE I GET TO HAWAII!MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN MY FATHER'S ADVICE* AND KILLED MYSELF! IT'S NOT TOO LATE. MAYBE I STILL CANN!)
"The person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet." - Edwin Shneidman
*After I Told My Father That He Should Have Never Had ME (That I Wanted To Kill Myself) He Said "Yeah, I Shouldn't Have Had You...I Shouldn't Have JIZZED In Your Mother...I Should Have Just JIZZED In The Sheets [Streets]...Do You Know What JIZZ Is?"
Millionaire dies after arson verdict
"Suicide may be understood as exclusively a product of the healthily developed, mature human brain."
http://methalashun.blogspot.com/2014/05/dont-cry-for-me-argentina-aint-nobody.html
READ THE PASSAGE FROM The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? IT WILL EXPLAIN HOW RELIGION PROVIDES OPTIMISM AND MEANING.
Ask a four-year-old boy who is the toughest or smartest in his nursery school class and the answer you will probably get is "Me!" The status sociometer arrives from the factory with a default setting of alpha. Even after many years of use, it is still apt to register high. The tendency for people to overestimate themselves - in toughness, smartness, looks, honesty, niceness, driving ability, you name it - has been demonstrated again and again. The exceptions are people suffering from depression. But depressed people don't actually underestimate themselves: they estimate themselves pretty accurately, which turns out not to be such a good idea. (No Two Alike)
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1097180655090393090
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Overconfidence and self-deception help you achieve social goals you couldn’t get if you were honest about who you really are
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/being-suicidal-what-it-feels-like-to-want-to-kill-yourself/
The Passage Below Describes ME Somewhat Accurately. I Was Accustomed To Living A Certain Way (Having A Privileged Life For Most Of My Life) And I Set High Standards For Myself, But My Life (Over The Past 15 Years) Has Taken A Turn For The Worse And I Don't See Things Getting Better (I Don't See Myself Meeting Those High Expectations). In Fact, I Only See Things Getting Worse And This Leads To My Suicidal Thoughts!
"if I gave you a nice house and a Lamborghini, put a million dollars in your bank account, and provided you with a social network, then, a few months later, took everything away, you would be much worse off than if nothing had happened in the first place" amzn.to/2KxvZZR
Most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. Suicide rates are higher in nations with higher standards of living than in less prosperous nations; higher in US states with a better quality of life; higher in societies that endorse individual freedoms; higher in areas with better weather; in areas with seasonal change, they are higher during the warmer seasons; and they’re higher among college students that have better grades and parents with higher expectations.
Baumeister argues that such idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for personal happiness, thereby rendering people more emotionally fragile in response to unexpected setbacks. So, when things get a bit messy, such people, many of whom appear to have led mostly privileged lives, have a harder time coping with failures. “A large body of evidence,” writes the author, “is consistent with the view that suicide is preceded by events that fall short of high standards and expectations, whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” For example, simply being poor isn’t a risk factor for suicide. But going rather suddenly from relative prosperity to poverty has been strongly linked to suicide.
"Suicide and love of life are sides of the same coin. Without one, we would not have the other."
Higher IQ in youth is linked to higher rates of receiving a diagnosis of depression at 50.
Many mental health professionals promote the idea that depression and other emotional disorders stem in large measure from irrational thinking. Depressives, they claim, believe false ideas about themselves and others. They are self-deceived and out of touch with reality. Irrational, self-deceptive thinking is alleged to be a factor distinguishing depressed people from "normal" ones, but this psychiatric homily turns out to be badly mistaken.44 Scientific research leads to the opposite conclusion that depressives seem to have a better grasp of reality than the "normal" psychiatrists treating them. Lauren Alloy of Temple University in Philadelphia and Lyn Abramson of the University of Wisconsin designed an experiment in which one of the investigators secretly manipulated the outcome of a series of games. Both depressed and nondepressed subjects took part in these fixed games. Psychologists have long known that "normal" thinking involves an element of grandiosity: we tend to give ourselves credit when events work in our favor, but dish out the blame to others when they pan out to our disadvantage. True to form, the non-depressed subjects overestimated the degree to which they had personally influenced the outcome when the game was rigged so that they did well, and underestimated their own contribution to the outcome when they did poorly. Turning to the depressed subjects, Alloy and Abramson found that depressed individuals assessed both situations far more realistically. The rather startling conclusion is that depressives may suffer from a deficit in self-deception. Similar results were obtained by the distinguished behavioral psychologist Peter Lewinsohn, who found that depressed people are often able to judge others' impressions of them more accurately than non-depressed subjects are. In fact, these people's ability to make accurate interpersonal judgements degenerated as their depressive symptoms diminished in response to treatment.45 Others have found that high levels of self-deception are strongly correlated with conventional notions of mental health, and that subjects with so-called mental disorders evidence lower levels of self-deception than "normal" people.46 This research suggests (although, of course, does not conclusively prove) that "normality"--whatever that word means--may rest on a foundation of self-deception. Remove or undermine the foundation, and depression or other forms of emotional difficulty may emerge. If mental health depends upon a liberal dose of self-deception then perhaps, as the philosopher David Nyberg wryly remarks, "Self knowledge isn't all that it's cracked up to be."47 (Why We Lie)
https://x.com/robsica/status/1808618809575813600
"Those who are depressed need not be responding incorrectly to the facts as they see them—they may be perfectly attuned to the horrors of their situation."
The destructive Haitian earthquake of 2010 flattened the town of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, killing thousands and making more homeless. I watched on television as a journalist interviewed a man whose wife and children had been killed in the earthquake and his home destroyed. Not only had he survived that earthquake, he had also survived the ferocious hurricanes that swept the island in 2008 and 2009. From this he concluded that God had chosen to spare him: a delusion perhaps, but a useful one. He was full of hope and confidence for the future even while he stood among the ruins of his life. His belief was, as Julian Barnes might have put it, a "convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds."
This gives us an answer to a question that bedevils the subject of religion. People often say that religions somehow satisfy our longings to understand the universe, or how we got here. But this merely raises the question of why we have minds that want to know the answers to such questions. Our minds, as the above example shows, might want answers because they give us hope or direction, and illusory or not, that hope is in itself useful. Once we have come up with a belief like that of the Haitian man, we can set it running like a piece of computer software in our conscious minds, where it can intercept and disarm our worries and anxieties. This does not say why it is religious rather than some other form of belief that we acquire and make use of, but we have seen how our minds might be partial to constructing gods, and those gods might provide as useful an explanation for what happens in the world as anything else.
It is easy to adopt a supercilious tone about the Haitian man's views, but people like him in our past will probably have produced more children than those of us who disconsolately withdrew from life, and genes that granted a sunny disposition would have spread. The alternative of facing the stark truth head-on can, for many people, be debilitating. Psychologists have discovered that people susceptible to depression often have more accurate perceptions of the world than non-depressives. When they say they have no friends, nobody likes them, they are hopeless at their job, or have no future, they are often more right than not. No wonder they are depressed. (Wired For Culture)
“self-deceived individuals are happier...Lack of self-deception is, in fact, a sign of depression. Individuals who feel good about themselves, whether or not the facts merit this feeling, tend to achieve more.” ppe.mercatus.org/system/files/S
As Jerry @JerrySeinfeld riffs, most people fear public speaking even more than they fear death, so at a funeral they'd rather be the corpse than the eulogist.
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Lieberman, p. 39-40.
https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/1140001971421630464
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-friendship-doctor/201105/why-would-someone-have-no-friends
I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT AMADA'S TALKING ABOUT. I HAVE NO FRIENDS. FOR REAL.
https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/1140001971421630464
“why social anxiety is overwhelmingly common. Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. We constantly monitor how much others value us...Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1208855540513853442
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-friendship-doctor/201105/why-would-someone-have-no-friends
I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT AMADA'S TALKING ABOUT. I HAVE NO FRIENDS. FOR REAL.
