Joy is relative.
I believe what Viktor Frankl said was right that somehow humans tend to have what he called to be “The Hedonic Treadmill”. In which I would like to describe as an oscillating wave that people goes happy sometimes and then goes back down and goes back up again, resonating in a nice frequency. In physics we would call the middle of the wave as baseline and the length from the baseline to the top of the happiness is called amplitude.
Now some people have higher amplitude than others which can really be implied as some people have a relatively lower baseline from the peak of the amplitude than others. This is true when we take a look at people with addictions. Some drugs are able to elevate this amplitude to the point that when the top moves to the baseline, it will leave that person to be mentally devastated. These amplitudes are quite a subjective experience. When describing subjective experience and to explain “What makes beautiful experiences beautiful.” I would like to describe it as explaining the orange colour of a sunset to a blind person.
“The sunset is really beautiful ain’t it? Oh fuck I just remember you’re color blind!” Says Adam.
“I guess you can explain to me what it looks like though.” Dave replies.
“Uhh yeah, so it’s like yellow but it’s red.” Adam tries to explain with shaking hands.
“What the actual fuck?!” Adam strikes back.
It doesn’t matter how much you want to explain with scientific explanation, Dave will never understand how it feels like.
Science can say as much as he wants to to explain “Yeah so crack cocaine right, imagine happiness but 100x better”. That just doesn’t really add up does it?
It’s also quite the same when that one friend of yours, who is a non-alcoholic, asks you “So uhh what does alcohol taste like? Why do people like it?” In which you would try your best to explain “Uhh it makes the brain feel funny”. Like what the actual fuck is that? You will never be able to describe experiences.
With this same process of thinking, we are also will never be able to explain negative experiences.
Why some people have suicidal tendencies and would like to commit suicide. We are unable and will never be able to understand how they feel for certain. As it is their subjective experience. This is why psychoactive drugs that could increase the amplitude of the happiness waves are very dangerous. As long as you know that you can maintain a healthy baseline it is kinda okay. Well how do you know you are maintaining a healthy baseline?
Ah, biases. There was a course in my school in which the teacher asked me “How do you make decisions knowing that you are free from biases?” My answer was “Well to be aware that the decisions that you make are made by accounting the certain biases that could affect the decision.”
I personally think as of now. That shouldn’t be enough. There was a time where I used to call the suicide prevention hotline to some point I began to see the pattern on how they handle these. They would like to try to get me thinking to circle back on the times that I was quite relatively a functioning member of society. As if they would like to understand how these suicidal tendencies emerge as if i have fallen from having a relatively stable amplitude to the point that now the amplitude changes and I have fallen to a lower baseline that I couldn’t familiarize myself as I am now in an uncharted territories of depression. I answered him, “It’s almost as if everyone has their own meaning in life and is capable of creating meaning out of nothing in which I am unable to do so.” “That is very deep” the guy on the telephone replied and then asked again “So how do you think about it that way?”
In which I replied “I think I used to have a meaning in life, in which it has been stripped away. I disappointed the people that I loved the most. It’s fucking over in the most ironic way. I built meaning just to burn it myself. Now I am unfamiliar with myself as I can no longer rationalise the decision that I made and I no longer trust myself making any decision. Killing myself seems like a justified action as I will no longer bring unhappiness to the people that have known me. I’m a fraud, a liar, a despicable being. I just couldn’t wake up another day hating myself. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I want to kill myself so so badly. I began to see hallucinations of my dead body all over the place. Strange but familiar and doable ideas that began to materialise in front of my own very eyes. Dead body on the ceiling, Dead body on the floor. Dead body on the street. I couldn’t walk past the street without a single idea not to crash myself into the car. The only thing I have left is feeling bad for the people that would need to clean up my mess.”
The guy on the telephone kind of froze and started to climb up some words from his throat. I could hear he’s struggling. We sort of talked and I explained what really went down in the last week of November 2021 and I would like to keep it a secret for this audio. He sort of explained in this line “But hey, these feelings actually come from conscience. It may be true that you fucked up a lot and ruined the trust that have laid out to you but it’s important that you are able to see and feel bad about it, because it means that you still have conscience. Had you not had a conscience you can just not feel bad at all regardless of the consequences that you have brought.
That hits me like a truck. It made me feel human again.
I recovered I guess. I’ve come to like eating again. I can wake up from my bed knowing there are things to look forward to. The alien no longer feels alien. After this accident, I observe that I have begun to be exponentially more philosophical. When I was struggling my way out of my depression was to read books about depression and insanity. Deep down I believe, someone somewhere must’ve felt the same way that I am feeling. The intense hate towards oneself and the state of despair that life just suddenly becomes unbearable.
I began to formulate my own theory about the state of “normal” in which at that time my question was far more simple. “What really makes people not want to kill themselves? Does everyone have things to look forward to?” I somehow began to see the happines waves to be more apparent while my fucking baseline is going down the cliff. Yeah there are some times where I feel happy but that is just listening to music. I tried so hard thinking about what makes my past-self happy. And it feels so apparent, I used to have things that made me happy but now I didn’t.
My meaning in life was to create something of value that could last through time and I really really want to make my parents happy. The time I spent the most on the last three years was to work with the people on my startup. We built things together. We spent our time creating something of a technology that is inherently creating something of meaning out of something that is inherently meaningless. Microchips, electrodes, jumper wires, batteries, these electronic components are inherently meaningless. Then a group of people come together, binded with a shared value and belief. Working together to achieve and believe that they together can create something of meaning. It was the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. It’s so symbolic and in and out itself is so meaningful.
Then I quite accidentally burned it all. My parents were also involved. I fucking burned it all. We achieved great things together. Through a series of irrational decisions I quite accidentally burned it all. I killed the momentum of the startup altogether. We were talking to investors and I was the forefront of the startup and I couldn’t show up with all this mental pain of knowing that I was the creator of the startup from scratch just to burn it all down and was at the top of the mountain peak seeing everything burn under my feet.
I no longer have a foundation anymore. I embed the works that I created dictates my value as a person and also the realms of expectations of my parents.
I would like to pinpoint that the problem at the dependency of a certain thing that is relatively outside your control that you rely on the thing too much and when that thing is taken away from you or you are unable to access it. You will be in quite despair.
It’s also because the good things that used to happen to me and I can easily access to are no longer available. The good has stopped happening. Your condition right now feels so alien compared to how good you used to have it.
I still believe understanding and reasoning is kind of what makes me cope with the uncertainties of life and be able to escape the common pitfalls of depression. Because like– the thing with depression is really unpredictable. Same with people that just suddenly fell into despair and madness. It’s not like people would know that “Oh I think next week I’m going to be depressed and by the end of the month I would kill myself.” No, the thing with the baseline and how fast the line moves from the top of the amplitude to the baseline are quite unpredictable yet to some certain may be predictable.
The pitfall of insanity is often sometimes described as “The sudden awful realisation that one realised that there is no way coming out of this and doubt that one has been living a life of life up to this point.”
The crisis of insanity could also be something more relatively common where one just began to understand without information coming from outside rather than the inside. As I would like to quote one of Geroge Atwood case on how one realised that he has been living life knowing that he has no free will and lack of autonomy in his decisions.
Start Quote.
I scheduled a second appointment for a few days later, and he rose to leave. Just before going out the door, however, he turned and said:
Oh, there is just one thing—a question I wanted to ask. I have been thinking of tossing a coin later this evening. If it comes up heads, then I will live, for now. But if it turns up tails, I will kill myself. Do you think there is anything wrong with this idea?
I had a sensation of ice water flowing down my back as I listened to him speaking about this, because there was no doubt whatsoever that he was ready to end his life. I asked him how he could allow the outcome of a coin toss to determine whether his life continued. He said he did not care which way it came out, because his life had no value to him. Given that he was completely indifferent, it had seemed to be a good idea to let the random outcome of tossing a coin make the decision.
I told him that there had to be a reason why his life had no value to him, and we needed to understand what that was. We spoke for the full 2 hours, and it turned out that we were able to identify the source of his indifference. I will sum it up as follows: David did not care whether he lived or died because his life had never been his own in any case.
He had developed, from an extremely early age, as the brilliant, successful child his father and especially his mother wanted and needed him to be. They regarded him as a gift from God, someone whose extraordinary achievements made them proud and confirmed the value of their lives.
Similarly in his marriage, he was the faithful, devoted husband his wife expected, and he had also been the good stepfather her children looked to him to be. That is, until the rages appeared.
He and I were able to say that something within him had begun to fight against the reign of compliance that had dominated his existence theretofore, and we were able to say as well that the pathway of our work together would be one of helping him claim his own life for himself.
One could ask what might have happened to David at the beginning of this story if he had tossed his coin and it came up heads. I would answer that he would have gone for two out of three, then three out of five. He was deadly serious about suicide. I have looked at a number of similar cases where the deed was accomplished.
One reads about them now and then in the newspapers: A high school valedictorian, with everything to live for, hangs himself; a summa cum laude, voted most likely to succeed, jumps out a window.
These are people who have lived for others and their lives have no value for them. The only genuine thing they have done is finally to say no to continuing the compliance. In a life based entirely on lies, the only authentic action possible is suicide.
End Note.
There are some things that we can agree on after listening to these two cases that insanity and depression tends to be unpredictable. As much as we know about the baseline happiness hedonic setpoint. We wouldn’t be able to determine with certainty how we plot our feelings to the wave equation. And what influences the mind to lead to insanity could be something outwardly and also inwardly.
Can it really be implied that had Dave did not questioned the nature of his own decisions and free will he would not fall into insanity and suicidal tendencies? No. Because ultimately what David does as a person will materialise into what he sees and feels in his everyday life and he sees it as rather unfulfilling and that is not what he wished it to be.
He wished his reality to be something else that he is not currently seeing. By that assumption, we could imply that David knows what’s wrong in his life yet he doesn’t feel that he has control to change his life since the strings of obligations and consequences of taking the risk into shaping the life he truly wanted, he feels that he lack sense of control to become the creator of the life that he really wanted.
Good thing for David is that he was able to transform himself to create the life he truly wanted by doing one step at a time. He started by divorcing his wife, quitting his job and creating his own firm. As I quote, start quote
I worked with him for 19 years, and every aspect of that work centred around his establishing a sense of personal control over his situation, building a life that he could experience as belonging to no one except for himself.
His outer situation changed in the course of this work: He divorced his wife, quit his job, and became a highly successful independent contractor in information technologies. Inwardly, the transformation was also very profound.
Approximately 10 years into our process, he suffered through a long period of intense, almost debilitating spells of death anxiety.
David would awaken in the middle of the night, his heart pounding, with tremendous fears that he was having a fatal heart attack. It helped him for us to say that this fear of death was an emergent sign that his life had finally become something that was precious to him.
End quote.
So control is apparently a very important aspect of human life. As humans we would like to think that we have free will and the decisions that we make are made by our own true voices and not the voices outside of our head. The voices that are outside the head can be valuable to us and can be worthless to us.
But one thing for sure is that our own voices are invariably always valuable to us. The external voices can be helpful for us to understand more on what we really want. I just happen to have a character trait that is rebellious and was shaped by my environment growing up.
This made me remember that there’s this one time when I was in a national biology science olympiad that I was seated with a stranger while we were waiting for the announcement of who will excel to the next phase of the qualification. I heard him saying out of the blue “I really need to excel in this.” And I asked him why, in turn he replied “Because my parents would be very angry if I don’t.”
I was quite surprised hearing this because I personally didn’t really care about what parents thought of the outcome. I was just happy to learn biology and be able to access valuable training that taught me in more detail the mysteries of biology and life in general. There is a clashing difference of intentions that could result in the same outcome, which is to qualify. That I have a more autonomous decision on embarking on this competition while he does not.
He let himself the outcome of life and the value of the outcome of life be dictated by other people while I am completely free to value the outcome of life on my own. I don’t let the outcome of this competition dictate my worth as a person while he does. This scenario could be amplified by realising “If the series of outcomes of your life is invaluable to you, why make any more decisions in life at all?”
Insanity will give recency bias to this event by making you doubt that any more decisions that you make in life will be invaluable and cloud your judgement that this is no longer even worth trying.
This resemblance why what David proposes as a coin toss to lead to his suicide. The outcome of his coin toss is invaluable as much as the outcome of decisions that he has made in his life and has materialised in his life are equally invaluable to him.
What I would like to convey is that please stop seeing mental illness as something alien as much as it’s relatively uncommon. But try to resonate with people having these episodes to be a reaction to a very human experience with very human context.
If you are “normal” and have never experienced a cruel and depressive experience, it can’t be said for certain that you never will. You certainly don’t want to be perceived as alien by other people right? People fall into insanity and keep falling deeper into insanity because not only do they feel what they experience to be alien but also they feel that at least speaking for myself that there is no way out of this.
The human brain is somewhat fragile. It couldn’t lead itself back home where it has a healthy baseline happiness setpoint as the mind is ever-changing and there are just times where the uncharted territory feels too alien to even recognize that there is a way back home.
By reason and understanding I hope by learning from these cases and experiences helped us understand more about the human nature. I can’t give a certain advice that is definitely foolproof but we can take some grain of knowledge on what we can do to prevent the bad experiences from becoming.
Love yourself. Love what you’re doing. See the value of what you’re doing. And if necessary, take action to prove your life is worth living by making the decision that you know has value as it will make you feel that your life is valuable to you. And if everything burned down. Still believe in yourself as a human and believe that you can create something of meaning from nothing all over again.
Komm Süsser Tod Plays
I know, I know I’ve let you down
I’ve been a fool to myself
I thought that I could live for no one else
But now, through all the hurt and pain
It’s time for me to respect
The ones you love mean more than anything
So, with sadness in my heart
Feel the best thing I could do
Is end it all and leave forever
What’s done is done, it feels so bad
What once was happy now is sad
I’ll never love again
My world is ending
I wish that I could turn back time
‘Cause now the guilt is all mine
Can’t live without the trust from those you love
I know we can’t forget the past
You can’t forget love and pride
Because of that, it’s killing me inside