fantasize
I think Abrahamic religion is more like a lotto ticket than most of us would be willing to admit. Playing the lotto is not an investment, it is a form of entertainment. It allows you to fantasize about what you do with the winnings with a very faint hope of acquiring them. Abrahamic religion gives you a ticket to fantasize about heaven. I’m not going to lie, I have done it.
code
I think it’s a waste of hope to tell people to learn to code so they can get a good job. What they should be told is they should learn to code so they can express themselves better. Programming languages are modern-day paints. And just like conventional painters you may not make money but you will make art. In America we worship the dollar (even self-expression is put in terms of what products and media one consumes) so a narrative that truly puts other things front and center is seen as strange. But it is needed.
The Business to Business / Business to Consumer Psychology Divide
Dell sells laptops. They have business models that are a little tougher and the have consumer models that have more features for the price point. Whether you are a business to consumer client of Dell or a business to business client you are still getting a laptop. Just one optimized for different use cases.
Psychology is not like this at all. A business to business (b2b) psychologist will tell their client the opposite of what a business to consumer (b2c) psychologist will. A b2b psychologist might be hired by an advertising firm to create messages that make women insecure about their appearance in order to get them to buy the firm’s client’s products. A b2c psychologist will tell a paying client that their worth comes from something other than their physical appearance. The point is psychologists are saying opposite things depending who is on the payroll. They are hired guns, psychology might take advantage of science and truth but it itself is neither.
young
From an early age I always associated the concept of God with pitch black. I know this was the opposite of what you were supposed to associate God with.
Also when I was seven or eight I couldn’t think about people (or at least I wasn’t aware that I could hold someone in my mind in my inner monologue). I know this because my mom used to sing this 70’s song to me that went like, “baby baby baby do you love me / baby baby baby do you care / baby baby baby are you thinking of me”. And I could never answer yes to the third statement. Fast forward to age 16 and the exact opposite happened, people got stuck in my mind, particularly the girl I liked in high school. She was/is beautiful. Dork and nerd kryptonite. So much so that a fellow computer club member would chase her around the computer lab.
towers
Reaching out for God and finding nothing is worse than not doing so at all. It drains you. Just like how a cell phone eats through its battery when it is barely within range of towers.
dopamine
The new Robocop was enjoyable. One of the things they did to him, right before he was going to be shown to the public, was turn his dopamine down to zero, basically to zombify him.
I experienced the same thing, after my psychotic break they put me on antipsychotics that killed my dopamine reactions. At first I was on so much medication that eventually my inner monologue ground to a halt. I know this because like a lot of people I would think about things in the shower (wasting water in the process). But this particular shower I had nothing I wanted to think about so just cleaned myself and quit.
your life, a country
Repost (from entry way back on 2003)
Let’s imagine for a moment you have created a country. Would you make it a place where people would want to live. Would a free flow of immigration and emigration be allowed?
I believe a person’s life is somewhat like that country. Is it the responsibility of the people with vested interest in this particular person’s life to create an environment which injects in them the desire to live?
Everyone talks about prying guns from people’s hands and pumping out aspirin-filled stomachs. But often by the time it has gotten this far, they are already far-gone. I think in many ways the lust for suicide that may or may not preceed an unsuccessful or successful attempt is worse than the suicide act itself. The desire to not exist is perhaps the most anti-instinctual drive inside of man. Basically to get to this point, a losing battle has to be out of the person’s hands, a situation where one can neither fight nor flee. They bloodied their hands slapping at the panic button, because no one told them it was painted on the wall.
Starving people can hardly eat, and those who have gotten along without the desire to live for too long have trouble feeling connected to life long after fleeing whatever put their hope out.
Can’t Conceive
Just because you can’t conceive of something doesn’t mean it’s not true. Despite all our powers of intellect we can’t conceive of non-existence. It’s like how totally blind people don’t see black, they simply don’t see. And we can’t wrap our head around that.
People (especially religious people) like to romanticize suffering. So it’s incumbent on the person suffering to make others feel comfortable with his or her suffering by trying to justify the cloud by its silver lining. This is because we are uncomfortable with (and often can’t even put our head around) senseless evil and chaos so we ask those who suffer to do a kind of “damage control” of its worst elements for the rest of us.
read
One interesting thing about me is I have to read everything at least twice to comprehend it. In the early days of the internet back when we had slow modem connections some images would load progressively. So a JPEG would be blurry at first but on second load come into focus (Facebook pictures do this sometimes even today if you’re on a dodgy connection). This is the best analogy I could come up with.
mental illness poetry
Christianity (in your head)
is like a gun
powerful both in your service
and when turned on you
when you’re manic
you can keep God
on the right side of your delusions
when depressed
not so much
someone say something hurtful
(that didn’t hurt you at the time)
thought of it was a dull pencil
your mind will spin, sharpening it
to stab you later
God is a dumping ground
for people Christians are unable
or unwilling to help