Post #1945143

Occasional reminder that humans constantly sublimate, and rationalize, and lie to ourselves. Think about how people behave when they're anxious, but the anxiety isn't rooted in anything specific. Or when there are *too many* things making them anxious all at once. They cope by attaching the anxiety to something specific, even if it doesn't really belong there. Like how children worry about monsters under the bed. Or how adults blame their problems on murderous immigrants, or toxic contrails. Or how we sometimes tune out the world by focusing obsessively on some action that we *can* take, even if that action doesn't actually help. Or how we embrace, individually or collectively, pleasant but obviously delusional beliefs. Just to get the pain and confusion to make sense. It might sound bad when you talk about it out loud, but most of the time, for most people, it works out fine. The anxiety – the discomfort and the need to take action to fix it – originates in your hindbrain, where the only possible behaviors are simple ones. But sometimes none of those behaviors make sense. And usually, statistically, in the long run, generalized anxiety means functional collapse. Aka depression. Which is far more debilitating than the mere inappropriate phobias and delusional beliefs and compulsive superstitions we use to try and replace our depression. This isn't a humans-only trait BTW. Humans are extremely susceptible to it, what with all our extra prefrontal capacity and social signaling and the complex ontological mapping we do. But it's deeply rooted in vertebrate cognition. Pretty much any creature with a "layered" neural structure ends up with some version of it. And it works. Boy howdy does it work. So we do these things, even when our problems are structural. And it's okay that we do it, but it's dangerous when we do it collectively and with very little conscious examination of what we're doing. So... y'know... Don't beat yourself up. Just be aware that you do it. This post brought to you by the observation that The Ongoing Polycrisis (I'm wondering if I should call it the Polycatastrophe nowadays) has caused a lot of people to get panicky about routine annoyances rather than broad structural issues, both online and IRL.