Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders
But what are you sacrificing in return for your “perseverance”?<p>Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek. Their mind has predicted the conclusion of their efforts, and the conclusion lies far below what they seek. Thus the mind desperately attempts to re-understand, re-configure, and re-model the world to achieve its goals.<p>But instead what is espoused by modern psychology and self-help is a kind of blind optimism or a horse blinders kind of approach to tending one’s mind. Most types of meditative studies also force this notion of blindness. Depression and anxiety and other “disorders” (whose classification from its onset is very unhelpful for its ideological integration into society as a valid problem to work through) most often happen to those who are sensitive, those who have surprisingly extensive models of the world, etc.<p>But it has become very fashionable in SV intelligentsia and the communities that drink the intelligence soup that trickles down from the SV community (like other cities of America or other America-directed tech communities) to treat the mind as a dumb system that did a poor job evolving to a modern environment (e.g. rationality movement). Instead of understanding the mind (and consequently the body) as a system and listening to whatever small traces your mind has left in its great attempt to solve really important problems for you, we just blind ourselves to faux goals that we may not even actually want.<p>Optimization for optimization’s sake is bad, but goal-seeking for goal-seeking’s sake may be a significantly worse and dangerous meme.