The Freedom Trap

And other stories from difficult lives

The Antinomies

I. As to the nature of a free society.

II. As to the nature of a free individual.

I.

My sources tell me that early Puritan Massachusetts was something of a repressive society. Of course, they didn’t think of their society as repressive. All the other societies with their chaos and violence — that’s repressive. In Puritan Massachusetts, you could be as free from disorder, crime, and poverty as just about anywhere in all of human history. Whether this required a law against wasting time is unclear, but for an ordered society one must be careful in choosing which legs to kick out. Domestic abuse — from what we can tell — was rare, inequality was low, and the homeless were brought to their family or, if they didn’t have one, they were provided a housed family by the community to support them. Public education was universal and murder rates were half those elsewhere in the US at the time. Charity towards the poor was felt to be of such importance that once, in Salem (the place with the witch trials), a man was sent to the stocks for “being uncharitable to a poor man in distress.”

But this isn’t what we mean by freedom, and we probably wouldn’t say that these Puritans were free without heavily qualifying what we mean by “free.” Government — even local government — surveillance and coercion is not freeing; it is restrictive. This is the freedom of the MCU’s Loki (back when he was evil), with the only solace being that authority comes not from a distant dictator who matters little to you personally, but rather from the suffocating beliefs of each and every person you know. Freedom requires a lack of restriction on personal choices, the possibility to choose what one will. Constant surveillance and mountains of rules regulating community conduct is not freedom. No matter how little crime there is, if all uses of one’s time are subject to community approval, that is not freedom.

On the other hand, choices do not hang from nothing — they are a function, in part, of the world. We might have a fishing village where the lake is not the property of any individual fisherman, or really of anyone at all. There are a limited number of fish, and the population of the fish is a resource to the village as a whole. However, the population of fish is sensitive to overfishing, especially before or during breeding season. It can be difficult to minimize one’s fishing throughout that season, and there will be times when any individual is incentivized to continue fishing — it won’t make that much of a difference to the population as a whole in any case if one person fishes a bit more. However, if too many people defect from the generally advantageous position of minimizing fishing before and during breeding, then that is catastrophic to the village as a whole. Yet from an individual’s perspective, without any coercion or cost based on fishing before and during breeding, it may be in fact dangerous to not fish at those times — you could be left holding the bag when the population drops and you don’t have enough fish to last you the time it takes to find a new trade or village. Whether through centralized law or social sanction, some sort of coercion is necessary or else people will be coerced by the natural incentive structure of the situation.

By not allowing coercion, the entire landscape of choices is changed, such that the choice people want to make (i.e. “sustain the fishing village through responsible levels of fishing”) is not possible — they are not free to make it. Instead of seeing a possible action but having a law saying “if you do this, you will go to jail” or whatever, the lack of intentional coercive force makes it impossible to have that choice in the first place. A lack of explicit rules does not imply a lack of coercion; The Purge is not freedom.

So then freedom is the ability to make the choice we want to make — sometimes this requires explicit rules, sometimes it requires a lack of rules. Yet how is this different from power? The only way to be “free” might be to be an autocrat who can force the action of the world to align with their preferences — freedom for me but not for thee. Materially, this is naive — autocrats constantly fear for their lives and must busy themselves with the minutiae of governance and status (otherwise someone else will). Morally, it is repugnant — who has used freedom to mean an ideal for one person and one person only? Psychologically, it is questionable — even an autocrat which need not fear the mutiny of his guard, nor the usurping of his executive power could not legislate his way to admiration, security, love, and all the other things which require the honest and free assent of others (because if it is not a free assent, then it immediately loses its worth).

Perhaps through true omnipotence, you could sweep away all restrictions and have true freedom — perhaps. But we do not live in a world where omnipotence is a goal and we do not think of omnipotence when we ask for freedom.

“Those who are lacking in goodwill or who remain adolescent are never free under any society” — Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

II.

Now from the other direction.

The Romantic literary movement loved freedom. The deadened habits of modern, industrialized life destroyed the free vigor of explorative, aesthetized hedonism. The sinking of the mind into the conventional marked a death. Feeling one’s desires and acting on them was freedom.

In The Immoralist, a novel by noted pedophile French Romantic author André Gide, Michel is a stodge until he nearly dies from tuberculosis. Once he has felt a brush with death, he realizes he can feel other things, and becomes obsessed with his own desires and bodily pleasures. He becomes excited especially by the immoral: he is thrilled when a boy steals from him, becomes obsessed with the cruel workings of a farmer’s family, and delights in his attraction towards young Arab boys. All of this occurs as his wife lays dying of the very same illness which threatened him. He savors the struggle of life and sees death in the inauthenticity of the world around him.

It is not that he no longer feels his duties towards his wife. He just also feels like he could create something, become something, if he left her behind. He is torn between the two drives. Not only does Michel love the bodily pleasures, he also delights in the feeling of resistance within himself, the torturous tension of his position between duty and pleasure. He feels that it is driving him towards something, or more specifically towards some self.

It is, therefore, not quite so simple as to say that Michel is a hedonist. The classic critique of hedonic visions of freedom is that merely following one’s pleasures and excitements is not freedom: it is merely the art of serving one’s desires. To a first approximation, this is about how desires are passively felt, rather than chosen. Acting to serve such impositions, even if they give pleasure, is not freedom but being beholden to a fickle god. Desires do not justify themselves to us and in fact are not justifiable. They simply are, and they demand our attention.

This might be enough to disassociate hedonism from freedom, but consider as well that pleasure has an imperious quality which gives the classical hedonist critique its true teeth. The pursuit of pleasure has a speed limit. You can only get so much pleasure from any discrete change in circumstance before you return to base. This is known as the hedonic treadmill. As you gain more and more, you can up your speed on the treadmill, but the treadmill will adapt and you will, pleasure-wise, be about back where you started.

If you fear returning to base, you will need to devote more and more of your time and effort to finding that feeling of release, crowding out your other desires. It is not that you will want that feeling more. Rather, it will just get harder and more costly to find, and eventually you will find out exactly how much you did want it by counting all the precious things you fed as fuel so that your treadmill could run in place. Any addict will tell you that is not freedom. A desire becomes an addiction not when you want it more, but when you want it less — i.e., when you also want to stop. If you cannot refuse pleasure, you are not free.

This, though, is a very naive hedonism. Any more thoughtful version will have considered what a sustainably happy life is. The Romantics placed their bet on freedom, as found in the struggle of artistic creation. Michel must create a project out of himself. His freedom is his ability to make himself into something perfect, magnificent. He has eschewed principle, though, so we must wonder: what is it that he is perfecting himself towards? Thus, the dilemma:
1. It is some sort of ideal of beauty, and therefore an external standard which constrains him.
2. It is some sort of internal discovery of his own desirous perfection, and therefore entirely at the whims of his desires.

Michel has eaten of poor fruit: he believes that pleasure is bodily and morality intellectual. He does not note that he feels torn in his body between his scintillating thrills and his dutiful kindness, or that he fills with excited exuberance in his mind trying to discover what it is that pleases him. It is just as ideological to demand yourself to follow your most present and exciting pleasures as it is to reject them. The feelings of shame and guilt are just as bodily and grounded as those of pleasure and excitement.

A different hedonist might rebut that this is not hedonism but naivete, and that Michel’s narrow definition of his own desires is not real hedonism, but a failed Romantic project. A different hedonist might say that a real hedonist would incorporate those feelings into their analysis but reject the feelings’ abstract formalization. The problem with shame and guilt is that they are not contradictory to pleasure and excitement — they just happen later. So the process of incorporating shame and guilt (and honor and debasement and virtue and pride and…) into your decisionmaking is that of restraint. It is also guesswork: what will one feel shameful for? So one might construct theories of what is shame-producing.

It may even occur to you that shame is underdetermined. Just as one cannot expunge shame from oneself entirely, one also cannot be led by it. For as many times as one forthrightly feels shame, one is also confronted with the question: “should I feel ashamed?” Dishonest and categorical answers do not work here. Or if they do, it is only as a palliative. Once you believe in shame, the question arises: what is one to be shameful for? You might find that part of the answer is hedonism unchecked by concern for others. The book ends with his wife — the frail, dutiful, Catholic embodiment of his obligatory ties — dying. Perhaps Michel is then able to live a shameless life. I am less sure. One can attempt to expunge shame from one’s emotional life, but that is just as radical and fruitless a project as expunging pleasure.

So we come to the other side of the matter: the moralists who believe that freedom is the capacity to follow the dictates of morality. To be free is to be free from temptation and have the conditions necessary to bring about the morally good. The former can be either psychological (the ability to resist temptation) or material (a lack of temptations available). But this is not freedom in any normal sense, but rather service to something else — an idea, other people, the number of utils you can crank out of a global public health program. You may think it is more worthy than the whims of the hedonist, but by no means are you free to do as you will. More fundamentally, freedom is not so morally directional. We can talk about the freedom to do terrible deeds as well as the freedom to do great ones — both are freedoms.

When you start talking about “what freedom actually consists in” and “true freedom” and “Freedom,” you can forget what the actual word means. And that is the problem.

“I may have liberated myself, but what does it matter? This useless freedom tortures me.” — Andre Gide, The Immoralist

Resolution

A free society is unintelligible without some vision of the proper ends of society and the obstacles to those ends; a free individual is unintelligible without some vision of the proper ends of an individual and the obstacles to those ends.

Searching for the Negative

The incarcerated do not want freedom. They want to see their families, to spend time in the sun, to set their own schedule, to go to the movies, to make a craft, to eat a homecooked meal. Freedom is used as a byword for those desires because they can be grouped together by the common obstacle frustrating their realization: being incarcerated. Freedom is the state in which some specific obstacles to achieving something are absent, not an end itself. To be freed is to remove a constraint; it requires the constraint for it to be a coherent concept. Freedom is a negative concept — not in that it is bad, but in that it is defined by the absence of a thing. A simple proof: what does a restriction look like? What does a freedom look like? One of the things you imagined existed, and the other consisted in the first’s nonexistence.

A further complication is that a constraint only exists in the context of a goal. A mountain is an obstacle for one attempting to bypass it, but a necessity for one living on it. Without a goal for context, anything can be an obstacle. So freedom is twice removed from being an object of desire: it is (1) a negative concept of (2) a means to an object of desire. Without a further goal and obstacle, freedom is incomprehensible. Freedom ad hoc is an entirely legible concept, and a useful one; freedom per se (hereafter what I mean when I say “freedom”) is a chimera.

Thus: a free society is unintelligible without some vision of the proper ends of society and the obstacles to those ends; a free individual is unintelligible without some vision of the proper ends of an individual and the obstacles to those ends.¹ Taking freedom as an end in itself obscures the actual argument at play — the visions of a proper society or individual life and their respective obstacles. The Puritans believed that a good life was a virtuous, orderly, sacred one and that the main obstacles to that were poverty, vice, and disorder. The Romantics believed that a good life was a vigorous, artistic one and that the main obstacles to that were convention and moralism. We could describe each in the rhetoric of freedom because in neither case we determined that which it was freedom with respect to.

The Free Mind

Now, a sharp turn towards speculation. It is here that my epistemic status goes from “highly confident” to “speculative.”

It is not the incarcerated that want freedom, but those afflicted with malaise — the bored, the melancholic, the chronically little-less-than-fine. The reason they want freedom and not any determinable thing is because what they want is entirely unclear to them, and becomes not any determinable thing but the mental state of ‘getting’ per se. Since they cannot pinpoint a thing which ails them, their ailment becomes mentalized. Just as the mental state of the goal replaces the goal itself, so does the mere shadow of the means become the means itself — freedom becomes not a lack of an obstacle, but the manner in which one achieves one’s goal itself. Some might say they are searching for happiness, but for others the idea that one is a failed hedonist (what else is one to call someone whose frustrated goal is the mental state of achieving desires?) is almost farcical, or perhaps does not flatter their sense of importance or persecution. Instead, the shadow of the means becomes the end: they want freedom. Freedom, for which they perhaps mistake the feeling of release, becomes a goal rather than the inverse of an obstacle.

A freedom cut off from any particular conception of a goal — in fact becoming the goal — can see obstacles everywhere. Every choice is a constraint, due to the nature of decisions. Kierkegaardian angst is a famous expression of this. It is predicated on every decision closing off infinite possibilities — the freedom of all those options, lost. And if freedom is identified with a mental state of release, any number of possible obstacles abound. Anything between you and the feeling of release is an unconscionable abridging of your freedom, and it is a quick matter to fall deeply into the naive hedonist’s trap: upping the speed of the hedonic treadmill because you are so afraid of falling to the baseline — yet it is the baseline which requires changing, or at least adapting to. The notion of freedom might begin to flail randomly, striking beneficial and pernicious conditions alike. This is the freedom trap: taking freedom per se to be your goal.

Breaking away freedom from its natural partners (goals and obstacles) mentalized it and universalized it. Without its normal, physical parameters, its purview expanded to impossible horizons, demanding some vague sort of omnipotence or utopian lack of distress. As demands multiply, so do constraints, and what might have in another case been a fine life could become, under freedom, a sort of bondage. However, this is not an issue with freedom — other abstractions can stand in just as well. Success, worth, and control all come to mind easily. Each is bound by a task or context without which their demands multiply. I could have easily started this post with the antinomies of success (it would have been much less interesting). The demands of these abstractions multiply as they are decoupled from specific contexts and become identified with our minds or our selves. It is not “am I free to do that?” but instead “am I a free person?”

Once one is chasing a mental state, one is in dangerous territory.

A Minor Thing

I would like to make a proposition of sorts on an aspect of the relationship between happiness and thinking. I have no clinical experience and no formal training in psychology or the like. On the other hand, I do have over two decades of personal experience with happiness and thinking, so that is something. Anyway, here goes.

This is the most compelling piece of psychological research I have read recently. Don’t worry: it doesn’t read like research (i.e., pulling teeth). It is a writeup by a current psychology postdoc who, among other things, believes (and convinced me) that peer review shouldn’t exist. Anyway, here is the thesis:

You can read the article itself for the various other possible explanations and their thorough debunking, or you can take it that it is a fairly universal aspect of human cognition that when we think about how something could be different, we generally think about how it could be better. This is true even though it doesn’t seem to be more difficult to think about ways in which things could be worse or neutrally different — thinking about how they could be better is just the default. The authors are generally confused about this, give a gesture towards implications about happiness and a perfunctory evolutionary psychology sketch, and call it a day. I have a different thought.

The purpose of thinking is to act. I could easily back this up with one more evolutionary psychology just-so story about brains and survival, but that would be dishonest to my roots. The philosophical tradition of pragmatism holds, roughly, that beliefs are rules for action, and the truth of a belief is related chiefly to the consequences of acting under it. Beliefs exist fundamentally to support action. This is not to say that action is more important than belief, but rather that the distinction between action and belief is not clear — we do not do one thing called thinking and another thing called acting, but rather are constantly switching between thinking-in-order-to-act and acting-under-our-thinking (or acting-in-order-to-think, i.e. collecting information). In short, the thinking is fundamentally act-driven.

If the purpose of thinking is to act, then it is far more likely that we naturally drift towards thinking of the ways things could be better (clear bases for action) rather than the way things could be worse (don’t do that? I guess?). This theory of the finding also helps explain their secondary data. Openness to experience was the only measured personality trait of the Big Five which has a correlation with the “things could be better” effect. More openness to experience correlated with higher proportions of better-thinking rather than neutral- or worse-thinking. This makes sense if we make sure to connect thinking to action. Openness to experience is simply how curious² versus cautious one is — caution, generally considered, being apprehension guided by the ways things could go wrong and curiosity, generally considered, being interest guided by the ways things could be better. For someone who thinks mostly about how things could be better, change seems better than for someone who does that less so. Or from the other side, for someone who is disposed to think positively of change, they will be more interested in thinking of more positive outcomes.

When one is thinking about the world, thinking about the ways things could be better naturally becomes a path to action, and thinking about how things could be worse is gratitude practice — being thankful for something is simply considering that it could be worse. Neither seems pathological to any degree. It is possible, though, to take as the object of thought not something in the world but your own mental state itself.

In such a situation, we would expect very often that the natural next step would be to notice that your mental state could be better. Immediately, though, such thinking would be liable to make your mental state worse: comparison is, after all, the thief of joy. Yet this, of course, only exacerbates your worries. There are now so many more ways your mental state could be better — and so your mental state becomes worse. Your mental state is incredibly important to you, so you think really, really hard about how it could be better — which, of course, makes it that much worse. You’re trapped.

This chain of thinking does not seem to me to be by any means inevitable, but neither does it seem outlandish or unfeasible.

Headspace

This may not an altogether bad story for what rumination is, or perhaps anxiety disorders. From the same psychologist’s blog, here he describes his experience with clinical anxiety. While it is generally an incredible read that I highly recommend, I want to specifically bring attention to this thread:

I wanted to solve my bad feelings the way I had learned to solve everything in life, which is by being a diligent student and a good boy. But you can’t ace feeling good like it’s a math test, and trying only makes you feel worse. …

“What you’re describing sounds like anxiety.”

I immediately thought I had gotten a dud therapist. I didn’t have anxiety. Worrying that everyone at work thinks you’re a fraud, or that your eyes are too close together, or that somebody’s gonna kidnap your kids on the way to school—that’s anxiety. I was simply getting to the bottom of my most important problems by thinking about them a lot.

…

I wonder if this is the secret behind a lot of skull-poisons: you secretly think you’re not sick at all, and you believe that what you’re thinking about is actually extremely important. …

An uncomfortable truth: when you feel really bad, it’s easy to become boring and selfish. You get so obsessed with the tempest inside your head that you can’t focus on anything outside of it. …

I thought I needed to “work on myself” and “do some self-care." I thought I needed compassion and coddling. I didn’t: I needed a kick. The more I thought about other people, the less I thought about my own sadness, and the better I felt.

Some caveats: yes, I am grossly unqualified; yes, there is a colossal amount of variation in people’s mental health stories.³ I do not think I have cracked any code to some serious degree. I am, frankly, very scared that I am grossly misrepresenting experiences that is extremely significant for many people’s lives. However, I do believe this to be an important thread, and ideas are nice because they can be weighed and rejected with little to no cost. So out of respect to my own curiosity and a faith in my readers’ ability to weigh arguments themselves, I’ll push on.

For some reason, someone starts feeling bad. At first they do the normal things, looking around for things to do to make them happy. This doesn’t work. Then, a mental transposition happens: the concern becomes not the thing in front of them, but their own mental state. After all, why wouldn’t it? Nothing else has worked. Actions do not merely have their normal goals anymore, but also the overriding goal of fixing what has gone wrong with the mind. The experience goes from “that could be better” or “ooh, what if we did this?” → “done!” → “nice, I feel good about that” to “how do I fix my mind?” → “will this fix it? Please fix it” → “done!” → “well? Has it been fixed?” → “nope” → “drats” → spiral. Because of the nature of the problem (mental states and comparison), focusing on the problem does not alleviate it, but exacerbates it. Hence, a trap.

The Everything Trap

Here, I have pieces of a puzzle, but no order to set them down in. I do not think it is so simple to say one piece causes another, or that there is one path they move in. Rather, placing each piece molds the empty space slightly more in the shape of the others, such that another more naturally falls, rather than some other piece which would create a different puzzle. Any order I set them in might make it seem like that is the natural order, and that if other variations occur than that is what they are — variations. Rather, I see an equilibrium point — mental illness of some kind, perhaps an anxiety disorder is the best bet — and the forces which keep it from sliding around with every pitch of the table. Each addition locks in the others slightly more. Here are the pieces.

• Feeling bad for a long time is nigh-unbearable, especially if it seems like there is no point or no reason.

• Introspection can become chronic, as we have habits of thought as well as action.

• Fretting over our own mental states at some point inevitably worsens our mental states because we are predisposed — for good reason — to think about the ways it could be better rather than worse.

• Many of our ideals are abstracted versions of plain concepts which, without the limits inherent in concrete application, can become unreasonable and mask the actual issues at play. This can create an impossible and fruitless goal.

We can imagine all of these psychological factors at play simultaneously, and how they can perversely support one another to the detriment of the individual’s mental health. We can also see that all of these are perverse applications of important psychological functions.

• Feeling bad should be unbearable when there is no point, as it draws our attentions to problems and gives us an opportunity to make things better. However, feeling bad chronically is just misery.

• Feeling bad does not give instructions on how to feel good, and introspection is a necessary tool to understanding what we are missing. However, introspection can become an obsession and itself a detriment to one’s mental life.

• Thinking of ways things could be better is a wonderful expression of human ingenuity and our drive to act in order to change the world for the better. However, turning that in on ourselves makes us unable to separate our experience from a constant lecture on the ways our own mental state could be better, which is clearly immiserating.

• Concepts are important, and ideals can raise their importance to the near-sacred. However, they can become obsessive and unregulated when disconnected from the natural limits of discrete problems. In particular, if they become applied to our own minds, then their criteria of completion can become infinite.

They are all different traps, but the same trap. It is not a series, but a web. I can’t say much more than these platitudes, but I believe there is something here.

Action and Worth

All action has an end outside of the action, a goal which stretches forward beyond the immediate moment. The goal of an action is what supports the action and gives it worth. Feeling is not separate from this thinking-acting system, but a part of it as well.⁴

The issue with the aforementioned trap is that it centers the purpose of action onto you. And not just you as a long-term individual who might benefit from material changes, but you right now, right here, the you that is currently in pain and must find a way to escape it, whose mental state could be better in so many ways. Yet the narrowing of the concern only intensifies the obsession with one’s own mental state, which again only intensifies the thought that it could — must — be better.

In addition, narrowing focus to the immediate individual emotional consequences of your action forces the action to stand on its own. Not only must the action make itself worthy in the immediate moment it is done, but by the point labeled above, focus on a mental state is especially harsh. No wonder acting seems pointless: it can’t change the thing you care about so much because your very act of caring about it in all its narrowness undercuts its possible worth.

This is a perversion of the usual thinking-acting system. The proper goal of a human life is not freedom, but the freedom to serve something worthy.

Addendum: The Analogy to Illness and Possible Consequences

The point here is not to make people with mental illness seem self-absorbed or mistaken in such a way that they become unsympathetic. Rather, I want to emphasize the ways in which the mentally ill are not doing something qualitatively different than anyone else. It is an important mental skill, for example, to be able to reflect on your own mental state. That this can become pathological is not a personal failing, but actually, to my mind, further deepens the analogy between mental illness and physical illness.

Illness usually has a disease of some sort as well as an immune response. The immune response is what actually causes the symptoms as a defense. Our ‘immune system’ here is the brain, thinking about how to deal with the ‘germs’ (bad conditions) which have caused an ‘infection’ (painful feelings). Oftentimes, this is quick, so quick it doesn’t even rise to conscious thought: “painfully hot!” → move hand away. In an extended infection, the normal response is not enough; a new solution must be consciously discovered. Here again, sometimes we are lucky enough to discover the cause of the infection — “oh, I was feeling lonely and needed to meet new people” — and can fight it off ourselves, though it took more time and conscious effort to discover what was wrong with our mental state.

When our immune system does not itself have the resources to fight off an infection, the symptoms all remain, but without us becoming healthier. Our immune system may ratchet up the symptoms continually, trying to destroy the infection, but in many cases this is futile and merely worsens our lives. At this point, we ‘need medical help’ (there’s no analogy here; in both cases you just need medical help). We start ruminating constantly on our mental state, which further harms our mental state. Even once the (possibly forever mysterious to us) cause of the infection fades, we still might suffer under the symptoms of our immune system, since there is not really a higher organ than the brain to tell it when it can stop it with the scorched-earth happiness-seeking. Well, no higher organ except a different brain with a shiny degree and an authoritative notepad.

Two possible consequences of interest from this model. First, treatment for mental illness becomes very similar to treatment for physical illness, in an important respect: iatrogenic mental illness is possible. Iatrogenic illness is illness caused by medical treatment. Mental health treatment is sometimes assumed to be an unalloyed good — what could be wrong with having some time to regularly think about yourself and how you’re doing? See: above and possibly here, where a wellness program for children possibly made them worse off. Cf. Bad Therapy (book review/summary here). Second, one failure mode for some mental health treatment could be merely treating the symptoms (feeling bad, the attempts to not feel bad) without attempting to cure the underlying causes (bad situation/lack of immune system capacity to deal with the infection). Some people have immune system disorders and may need treatment their whole lives. For many, though, the goal should be to aid the immune system (like, say, antibiotics do) or give it new capacities (like, for instance, vaccines do). Palliatives will only work in concert with cures. Cf. here (and perhaps in a future links/summary analysis post).

1. Substantively, this conversation is entirely orthogonal to the metaphysical issue of free will, though it bears some family resemblances in its structure. A free will must be a free will with respect to what obstacle? The laws of nature? What is the proper end of a will that is being so thwarted?

2. Curious in the active, rather than simply intellectual, sense. Openness to experience may relate to intellectual curiosity, but it is defined first and foremost by interest in actual new and unusual experience.

3. Though this quality of being in-your-own-head is at least not solely a phenomenon of this story. While I was writing this post, I read something by Freddie de Boer, someone with far more experience dealing with mental health struggles from both a first- and second-person point of view. He said this: “Here’s what I suspect: mentally healthy people, if they still exist, aren’t healthy because of the constant presence of positive feelings of self. They are healthy because of the habitual absence of any feelings of self at all.”

Anxiety is particularly important as a mental illness because, from what I gather, there is some evidence that anxiety can function as a “gateway” mental illness, provoking the onset of other issues such as depression if not treated.

4. What acts as a worthwhile goal to us? One that we feel good about and whose worth we believe in and towards which we tend to act. This description is not so much tautological as it is that each of these shifts the others and the only equilibrium point is agreement.